Primary Sources for History

This collection explores the cultural and trading relationships that emerged between America, China and the Pacific region between the 18th and early 20th centuries. Content includes manuscripts, rare printed sources, visual images, objects and maps.

This collection includes English-language primary sources relating to China and the West, 1793-1980. Manuscripts cover events from the earliest English embassy to the birth and early years of the People’s Republic. Key documents relating to the Chinese Maritime Customs service – from Robert Hart to Frederick Maze – are included, as well as original reports of the Amherst and Macartney embassies, letters relating to the first Opium War, survivors’ descriptions of the Boxer War, collected diaries and personal photographs of the Bowra family, and sources describing the lives and work of missionaries in China from 1869-1970.

Historical collection of India Office Records from the British Library, London. Containing royal charters, correspondence, trading diaries, minutes of council meetings, and reports of expeditions, among other document types. This resource charts the history of British trade and rule in the Indian subcontinent and beyond.

FBIS Daily Reports issued by the U.S. Government. Translations of broadcasts, news agency transmissions, newspapers, periodicals, and government statements from nations around the world.

Historical primary source of visual, manuscript, and printed materials documenting the trade of major commodities around the world from the 16th century to the present day. Commodities are chocolate, coffee, cotton, fur, opium, oil, porcelain, silver/gold, spices, sugar, tea, timber, tobacco, wheat, and wine/spirits.

Provides access to the investigations made by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) during the massive immigration wave at the turn of the 20th century. The files cover Asian immigration, especially Japanese and Chinese migration, to California, Hawaii, and other states; Mexican immigration to the U.S. from 1906-1930; and European immigration. There are also extensive files on the INS's regulation of prostitution and white slavery and on suppression of radical aliens.

This collection of manuscripts focuses on journeys to central Asia and the Far East, including accounts of travel to Mongolia, Persia, India, China and South-East Asia. The travel texts inlcude the books of Marco Polo and ‘Sir John Mandeville,’ as well as John of Plano Carpini and Odoric of Pordenone.

A global digitization and publishing program focusing on primary source collections of the nineteenth century. Includes a variety of material types: monographs, newspapers, pamphlets, manuscripts, ephemera, maps, statistics, and more. Collections include Asia and the West; British Politics & Society; British Theatre, Music, and Literature; Children's Literature and Childhood; Europe and Africa: Colonialism and Culture; European Literature, 1790-1840: The Corvey Collection; Maps and Travel Literature; Photography; Religion, Reform, and Society; Science, Technology, and Medicine; And Women and Transnational Networks.

This collection of films from the communist world reveals war, history, current affairs, culture and society as seen through the socialist lens. It spans most of the twentieth century and covers countries such as the USSR, Vietnam, China, Korea, much of Eastern Europe, the GDR, Britain and Cuba.

A collection that showcases the literary imagination and linguistic inventiveness of Asian writers as they negotiate their varied cultural identities. It comprises English-language fiction, short fiction, and poems written from the end of the colonial era to the present and gives rich insights to scholars of literature, anthropology, linguistics, postcolonial theory and criticism, history, politics, and culture.

South Asia Commons provides online access to documents ranging from 1700 through to 1953. The database covers the Indian subcontinent and contains both serial and non-serial materials, including reports, rare books, and journal runs from noteworthy, rare publications. The documents offer a range of knowledge production in colonial and early post-colonial India in fields such as culture & society, industry & economy, science, technology & medicine, urban planning & administration, and politics & law. Most of the material is in English, about 30% of the documents are in vernacular languages, including Bengali and Sanskrit.

A collection of thousands of video testimonies of survivors and witnesses of genocide. The interviews have been conducted in 65 countries and 43 languages. Initially a repository of Holocaust testimony, the Visual History Archive has expanded to include testimonies from the Armenian Genocide that coincided with World War I, the 1937 Nanjing Massacre in China, the Cambodian Genocide of 1975-1979, the Guatemalan Genocide of 1978-1983, the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and the ongoing conflicts in the Central African Republic and South Sudan, and anti-Rohingya mass violence. It also includes testimonies about contemporary acts of violence against Jews.