European History

Interface in English or other, major European languages. Content in multiple languages.
Europe-wide unified search of digitized collections. Images, audio, texts, and more. Funded by the EU. Covers more than 1,000 years of history. Strongest for 1500 to 2000.
Open Access.

Interface in English. Content in English or other languages.
Digitized collections from the Library of Congress, includes manuscripts, books, photos, maps, audio recordings, and more. Strongest between the 17th and 21st centuries. Content dating back to B.C.E.
Open Access.

Search over 16 million records of museum objects, archives and library materials including more than 5.1 million online images, audio & videos and blog posts.

Over 70,000 images of original manuscript and printed documents on colonial history, politics, culture and society from libraries/archives around the world.

Digital facsimiles of over one hundred treasures not previously available in digital form. The RCS collections contain stunning visual records – art-work, photographs, maps and artefacts, as well as illustrated manuscripts and printed sources relating to the Commonwealth and Britain’s former colonial territories. [Cambridge University]

On-line materials focused on the French colonial empires from the 17th to the 20th centuries.

An open access collection of pre-twentieth-century Caribbean texts, maps, and images. Texts include travel narratives, novels, poetry, natural histories, and diaries that have not been brought together before as a single collection focused on the Caribbean. [Northeastern University]

Includes digitized records for multiple series and documents published in and about the French colonies, including:
Budget général de l'Afrique occidentale française (1906-1958)
Le Transafricain. Revue mensuelle. Organe officiel du Comité interdépartemental Algéro-Constantinois du "Transafricain" (1929-1934)
As well as thousands of other documents and images.

French National Library's digitization of the "Colonial Annuals" from Marcel Ruedel published between 1900-1949.

Interface in English; Collections in French and/or English.
Includes court minutes, tribunal records, correspondence, and more. "The original material is located at the Archives Nationales du Bénin [National Archives of Benin], Porto-Novo, Republic of Benin."
Open Access.

Interface in English; Content in French and/or English.
"The aim of this project is to digitise all the court records relating to slavery in the Beninese national archives...resulting in 71,224 images that cover a time span of 1900 - 1960. The collection contains 58 series, within these series, 487 files were digitised."
Open Access.

The Picture Collection of the German Colonial Society (DKG, 1887-1936) in the University Library for Frankfurt am Main includes more than 50,000 images. Includes thousands of images from eastern and southern African spaces including Namibia and Tanzania.

Includes more than 1,200 titles, mostly in German and French, on German colonization in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Das Bundesarchiv verwahrt eine Vielzahl authentischer Quellen zur deutschen Kolonialzeit (1884-1918), die einen differenzierten Blick auf das damalige Geschehen erlauben. Includes digitized images, posters, postcards, and other documents.

The German Digital Library contains millions of digitized records pertaining to German history. This is a search for an online subset relating to "Africa" ("Afrika" in German).

Cooperative digital library for resources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean. dLOC provides access to digitized versions of Caribbean cultural, historical and research materials currently held in archives, libraries, and private collections.

This Library of Congress web site presents an eclectic collection of pamphlets, course catalogs, speeches, annual reports and other items published from 1822 through 1909 primarily by African-American authors. 800+ items.

Contains more than 200 unpublished and published works and ephemera united by its focus on the struggle of Africans and African Americans through the Middle Passage to the Civil Rights movement.

This free website is currently down (Dec 2023). These images were selected from a wide range of sources, most of them dating from the period of slavery. The growing collection currently has over 1,200 images. Includes facsimiles of illustrations, paintings, maps, architecture/technology, as well as some 3D site images.

This digital memorial raises questions about the largest slave trades in history and offers access to the documentation available to answer them. European colonizers turned to Africa for enslaved laborers to build the cities and extract the resources of the Americas. They forced millions of mostly unnamed Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas, and from one part of the Americas to another. Analyze these slave trades and view interactive maps, timelines, and animations to see the dispersal in action. [Emory Libraries]

This journal, a log book of the daily activities of the 232-ton slave ship Mary, documents in detail a voyage undertaken by ship owner and slave trader Cyprian Sterry. Individual voyages listed in the database Slave Voyages.

The Trans-Atlantic and Intra-American slave trade databases are the culmination of several decades of independent and collaborative research by scholars drawing upon data in libraries and archives around the Atlantic world. The new SlaveVoyages website itself is the product of three years of development by a multi-disciplinary team of historians, librarians, curriculum specialists, cartographers, computer programmers, and web designers, in consultation with scholars of the slave trade from universities in Europe, Africa, South America, and North America. The National Endowment for the Humanities was the principal sponsor of this work carried out originally at Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, the University of California at Irvine, and the University of California at Santa Cruz. The Hutchins Center of Harvard University has also provided support. The website is currently hosted at Rice University.