Digital Resources
The American Historical Review, Volume 125, Issue 5, December 2020, Pages 2055–2056, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhaa522
Published: 29 December 2020
The Digital Resources section provides links to freely accessible online content, including archival collections of primary sources, interactive media, podcasts, visual and oral histories, and public history resources of all kinds. The sites identified here draw on the expertise of AHR staff, the Board of Editors, Indiana University History Librarian Scott Libson, and readers. Readers are encouraged to use the form available at historians.org/digital-primary-sources to submit their own favorite online digital resources that may be of broad interest to historians, scholars, and educators.
COMPARATIVE/WORLD/TRANSNATIONAL
VIRTUAL HILL MUSEUM AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY
https://www.vhmml.org/readingRoom/
“[Virtual Hill Museum and Manuscript Library] offers resources and tools for the study of manuscripts and currently features manuscript cultures from Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. The site houses high-resolution images of manuscripts, many of them digitized as part of HMML’s global mission to preserve and share important, endangered, and inaccessible manuscript collections through digital photography, archiving, and cataloging. It also contains descriptions of manuscripts from HMML’s legacy microfilm collection, with scans of some of these films.”
ASIA
KOREAN PHOTO PICTURE POSTCARDS
http://db.nichibun.ac.jp/pc1/en/category/chousen.html
“Photo picture postcards of Korea, published 1900–1940 (collection of Yamamoto Shunsuke, Kyoto; former researcher at the Koryo Museum of Art, Kyoto), are presented in digital format together with publication data and other details . . . They are classified under (I) landscapes; (II) scenes of everyday life; (III) Post Office–issued (kansei) postcards, commemorative postcards; (IV) postmarked postcards, postcard packets; (V) photograph/stereo-photograph cards; (VI) sightseeing guides, etc.; and (VII) donated postcards. Categories I to IV are now available. Postcards in V, VI, and VII, once organized by category, will be made available in stages.”
CANADA AND THE UNITED STATES
PEEL’S PRAIRIE PROVINCES
http://peel.library.ualberta.ca/index.html
“Peel’s Prairie Provinces is a resource dedicated to assisting scholars, students, and researchers of all types in their exploration of western Canadian history and the culture of the Canadian prairies. This website contains both an online bibliography of books, pamphlets, and other materials related to the development of the Prairies, as well as a searchable full-text collection of many of these items. As of Summer 2013, after 10 years’ worth of additions, Peel contains approximately 7,500 digitized books, over 66,000 newspaper issues (4.8 million articles!), 16,000 postcards, and 1,000 maps. These materials are extremely varied—rich in both text and images, providing an extraordinarily diverse picture of the Prairie experience. Many of the items date back to the earliest days of exploration in the region and include a vast range of material dealing with every aspect of the settlement and development of the Canadian West. Materials selected for Peel are highly diverse in regard to the cultural experiences that they reflect. Although English-language titles predominate the collection, Peel also contains a very substantial body of materials in French, Ukrainian, and numerous other languages.”
SOUNDING SPIRIT DIGITAL LIBRARY
https://library.soundingspirit.org/
“This Sounding Spirit pilot digital library features songbooks and hymnals published across the southern United States from 1850 to 1925. Spanning holdings from four partner archives, the digital library’s twenty-two books include words-only hymnals, gospel songbooks, spiritual collections, and shape-note tunebooks, demonstrating the wide variety of form, content, and presentation in southern vernacular sacred songbooks. These songbooks employ competing notation systems and vary in musical style from dispersed harmony fuging tunes and plain tunes of the shape-note repertoire, to antiphonal gospel, to classically inspired arrangements of African American spirituals, to words-only hymns in Muskokee sung in unison, to tunes in oral tradition shared among southern black and white congregations. Organized into collections that highlight texts’ associated places, populations, genres, and denominational affiliations, the digital library allows for rich engagement with songbooks and hymnals seminal in their respective eras, but historically underrepresented in both archival holdings and scholarship. These works and collections illustrate the primacy of songbooks to the dynamic encounters among white, black, and native communities navigating modernizing forces across the US South and beyond.”
1921 TULSA RACE MASSACRE CENTENNIAL COMMISSION
“The projects of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission will educate Oklahomans and Americans about the Race Massacre and its impact on the state and Nation; remember its victims and survivors; and create an environment conducive to fostering sustainable entrepreneurship and heritage tourism within the Greenwood District specifically, and North Tulsa generally.” The website features a curriculum complete with lesson plans, activities, and bibliographies for teachers and students, as well as other resources to plan educational visits to Tulsa’s Greenwood District.
NEWSPAPER NAVIGATOR
https://news-navigator.labs.loc.gov/search
“This application enables you to search and explore historic newspaper photographs. You can search by keyword over the photos’ captions (extracted from the OCR of each newspaper page), as well as search by visual similarity. The visual similarity search capability retrieves relevant photos by empowering you to train a machine learning algorithm by selecting photos that you are interested in. The application contains 1.56 million photos from the Newspaper Navigator dataset, consisting of all extracted photos in the dataset published between 1900 and 1963 with confidence scores above 90%. Advertisements are considered a separate category in the Newspaper Navigator dataset, but you may still find some advertisements using this application.”
INDEPENDENT VOICES
https://voices.revealdigital.org/
“Independent Voices is an open access digital collection of alternative press newspapers, magazines and journals, drawn from the special collections of participating libraries. These periodicals were produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century.”
EUROPE: EARLY MODERN AND MODERN
POST-REFORMATION DIGITAL LIBRARY
“The Post-Reformation Digital Library (PRDL) is a select database that organizes the vast array of publicly available digital sources on the development of theology and philosophy during the early modern era (late 15th–18th c.). The PRDL spans collections from major research libraries, independent scholarly initiatives, and corporate documentation projects. With the proliferation of sources scattered across various digital libraries, it can be difficult for the individual scholar to find or keep track of all the new content that is appearing daily. The PRDL is a response to the challenge of curation arising from this situation, and is a collaborative effort to organize this content for scholars of early modern theology and philosophy. The PRDL does not directly host digital copies of sources, but rather assembles links to publicly available sources from permanent collections.”
MIDDLE EAST AND NORTHERN AFRICA
ORIENTAL MANUSCRIPT RESOURCE (OMAR)
http://omar.ub.uni-freiburg.de/
“OMAR was built at the University of Freiburg (Germany), in cooperation with the Information Technology Center of the University of Tübingen (Germany). The database contains images of approx. 2,500 Arabic manuscripts (in full text, 134,000 images) from Mauritania together with the corresponding bibliographical metadata. The scans were taken from microfilms, stored at the University of Freiburg, whose originals are preserved at the IMRS (Institut Mauritanien de Recherche Scientifique) in Nouakchott (Mauritania). The microfilms were made by Rainer Oßwald, Ulrich Rebstock and Tobias Mayer during several research trips in Mauritania between 1979 and 1997.”
SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA
BORNO AND OLD KANEMBU ISLAMIC MANUSCRIPTS
https://digital.soas.ac.uk/okim
“The digital collection of Borno and Old Kanembu manuscripts provides an online access to one of the earliest written sub-Saharan languages in manuscript form. Old Kanembu, written in Arabic script, was a language of Qurʾanic interpretation in the ancient Borno Sultanate. It has survived in marginal and interlinear annotations in the early Qurʾan manuscripts dating from the 17th to 19th centuries and in various other religious texts dating from the 19th century to the 1980s.”
