Primary Sources/World History: Asia

From the website: "The immediate objective of the Afghanistan Digital Library is to retrieve and restore the first sixty years of Afghanistan’s published cultural heritage. The project is collecting, cataloging, digitizing, and making available over the Internet as many Afghan publications from the period 1871–1930 as it is possible to identify and locate. "

From Duke University, this digital collection provides access to 750 photographs of every-day life in the Soviet Union (1919-1921 and 1930) from the papers of Robert L. Eichelberger and Frank Whitson Fetter.

This site, from Columbia University, provides access to primary source material from antiquity to the present.

This site was designed to enable users to find fully digitized manuscripts currently available on the web. You can browse the Catalogue by the Location of an archive or library, the shelfmark of an item, by the author of a text (where that information is available), or by the language of a text (again, where available).

This collection includes mass education materials published in Hong Kong and in Mainland China, particularly Shanghai, in the years 1947-1954. These cartoon books, pamphlets, postcards and magazines, on topics such as foreign threats to Chinese security.

This collection, from the University of Wisconsin, includes historical images that present a visual archive of 20th century East Asian cultural heritage. Currently, the collection consists of images that document early 20th century China including the the Sino-Japanese Conflict (1937-1945), a visual history of Buddhist practices and temples in China, and other images of daily life in both rural and urban China.

From George Washington Unviersity's National Security Archive, this collection provides access to primary source documents related to the Gulf of Tonkin Incident.

Created by the history department at Indiana's Hanover College, this resource provides access to historical texts than span the time period between antiquity to the 20th century.

From the website: "Washington, D.C. – This briefing book contains material from the National Security Archive's project on U.S. policy toward South Asia, which is documenting nuclear developments in India and Pakistan from the 1950s to the present. The Archive is collecting U.S. government records that illustrate American policies and perspectives. Information is being collected from the National Archives and the presidential libraries, and through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and Mandatory Review requests, used to obtain the declassification of now- secret materials."

This site, from Fordham University, is a collection of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts presented cleanly (without advertising or excessive layout) for educational use.

From the website: "Jews have lived in Iraq for thousands of years, but when coalition forces entered Baghdad in May 2003 only very few remained. A U.S. Army team searching for weapons of mass destruction in the flooded basement of the Mukhabarat, the headquarters of Saddam Hussein’s intelligence services, discovered over 2,700 Jewish books and tens of thousands of documents. The remarkable survival of this written record of Iraqi Jewish life provides an unexpected opportunity to better understand this community."

From the website: "Through the Islamic Heritage Project (IHP), Harvard University has cataloged, conserved, and digitized hundreds of Islamic manuscripts, maps, and published texts from Harvard’s renowned library and museum collections"

From the website: "JACAR is a digital database testifying to Japan's historical relations in Asia as well as elsewhere. This site provides access to official documents of the Japanese Cabinet, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as the Army and Navy."

This project, from UC Berkeley, ) is a rapidly expanding database made up of historical texts dating back more than 1200 years. The original version of every paragraph in every text is cross-tagged with its English translation, making it possible for any researcher to see, on the same screen, both the original and English translation of any word or phrase appearing in any JHTI text.

From Tufts University, the Perseus Project features digital collections of materials in the humanities. Topics are wide-ranging and include the classics and the English Renaissance. The classics collection contains primary and secondary texts and more.

From the website: "Princeton University Library is recataloging and initially digitizing 200 of its approximately 9,500 volumes of Islamic manuscripts from Robert Garrett and other sources. These 200 will be the core of the Princeton Digital Library of Islamic Manuscripts."

This repository is centered around 17 incidents in Soviet history - ranging from the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Each event covered features a brief abstract and links to primary sources.

This collection contains approximately 5000 photographs taken by Sidney D. Gamble between the years 1908-1932. Gamble, a sociologist, traveled to China a number of times country to collect data for social-economic surveys and to photograph urban and rural areas.

This collection, from the University of Wisconsin, provides access to digitized images, photographs and slides pertaining to SouthEast Asia.

Patricia Buckley Ebrey of the University of Washington. has created this "visual sourcebook" for student to understand Chinese history, culture and society.

This site provides access a variety of material related to the history of Western medicine in China. Resources include primary source materials, digitized photographs, periodicals and more.

The WDL makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from all countries and cultures.