Contemporary Western Civilization II: Primary Sources
Relevant Digital Humanities Projects
- David Hume Archive
A searchable archive of all David Hume's philosophical works, edited by Peter Millican (Oxford) and Henry Merivale (Leeds). The texts are checked against authoritative original editions, and presented visually as closely as possible to the original, though within a framework that also displays modern reference forms (both page numbers of the standard printed editions, and paragraph numbers). The site also contains editorial and bibliographical materials, including discussion of Hume's works, variants, a major Hume bibliography, and an archive of scholarly papers (which includes the main online resource for Professor Millican's own papers and discussions on Hume). - Interactive Map of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's CorrespondenceThis map allows you to visualize the network of Rousseau's correspondence, looking at specific dates and locations to see when and where his correspondents were located. The site also includes the complete digitized works of Rousseau as well as an image bank.
- The French Book Trade in Enlightenment EuropeThe French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe (FBTEE) project uses database technology to map the trade of the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel (STN), a celebrated Swiss publishing house that operated between 1769 and 1794. As the STN sold the works of other publishers alongside its own editions, their archives can be considered a representative source for studying the history of the book trade and dissemination of ideas in the late Enlightenment. It charts best-selling texts and authors; reading tastes across Europe; changing patterns of demand over time; and networks of exchange in the print-trade. The project tracks the movement of around 400,000 copies of 4,000 books across Europe. It details, where possible, the exact editions of these works, the routes by which they travelled and the locations of the clients that bought or sold them.
- Wealth of Nations Project at Harvard
A quantitative history of Adam Smith's 'An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,' visualized in broad strokes. Based on Keith Tribe's 'A Critical Bibliography of Adam Smith,' it shows the changing publication geography of Smith's book from its first edition in 1776 through 2001. - French Revolution Digital ArchiveThe French Revolution Digital Archive (FRDA) is a multi-year collaboration of the Stanford University Libraries and the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) to produce a digital version of the key research sources of the French Revolution and make them available to the international scholarly community. The archive is based around two main resources, the Archives parlementaires and a vast corpus of images first brought together in 1989 and known as the Images de la Revolution française. Also includes an amazing image gallery of 12,000 visual items including prints, illustrations, coins and medals.
- Transcribe Bentham
‘Many hands make light work. Many hands together make merry work‘, wrote the philosopher and reformer, Jeremy Bentham (1748 – 1832) in 1793. In this spirit, Transcribe Bentham, a double award-winning collaborative transcription initiative, is digitising and making available digital images of Bentham’s unpublished manuscripts through a platform known as the ‘Transcription Desk‘. There, you can access the material and—just as importantly—transcribe the material, to help the work of UCL’s Bentham Project, and further improve access to, and searchability of, this enormously important collection of historical and philosophical material. - The Shelley-Godwin Archive
The Shelley-Godwin Archive will provide the digitized manuscripts of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft, bringing together online for the first time ever the widely dispersed handwritten legacy of this uniquely gifted family of writers. The result of a partnership between the New York Public Library and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, in cooperation with Oxford’s Bodleian Library, the S-GA also includes key contributions from the Huntington Library, the British Library, and the Houghton Library. In total, these partner libraries contain over 90% of all known relevant manuscripts. - Darwin Correspondence Project
On this site you can read and search the full texts of more than 7,500 of Charles Darwin’s letters, and find information on 7,500 more. Available here are complete transcripts of all known letters Darwin wrote and received up to the year 1869.
More are being added all the time. - Nietzsche Source
Nietzsche Source is a web site devoted to the publication of scholarly content on the work and life of Friedrich Nietzsche, under the editorial and scholarly direction of Paolo D'Iorio. The website is managed by the Association HyperNietzsche, a non-profit organisation hosted at the École normale supérieure in Paris. The Association HyperNietzsche is a growing scholarly community of leading experts from different countries. It promotes research on Nietzsche through conferences and scientific events. - The Other Revolution, Haiti 1789-1804
A digital exhibition of materials relating to the Haitian Revolution from Brown University.
Diderot's Encyclopedia
The Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une Société de Gens de lettres was published under the direction of Diderot and d'Alembert, with 17 volumes of text and 11 volumes of plates between 1751 and 1772. Containing 74,000 articles written by more than 130 contributors, the Encyclopédie was a massive reference work for the arts and sciences, as well as a machine de guerre which served to propagate the ideas of the French Enlightenment. The impact of the Encyclopédie was enormous. Through its attempt to classify learning and to open all domains of human activity to its readers, the Encyclopédie gave expression to many of the most important intellectual and social developments of its time.
The ARTFL Encyclopédie database contains 21.7 million words, 254,000 unique forms, 18,000 pages of text, 17 volumes of articles, and 11 volumes of plate legends.
For a full description of the latest version of the ARTFL Encyclopédie, see the Editor's Introduction or the Version française de l'introduction.
Mapping the Republic of Letters
Mapping the Republic of Letters
Before email, faculty meetings, international colloquia, and professional associations, the world of scholarship relied on its own networks: networks of correspondence that stretched across countries and continents; the social networks created by scientific academies; and the physical networks brought about by travel. These networks were the lifelines of learning, from the age of Erasmus to the age of Franklin. They facilitated the dissemination-and the criticism-of ideas, the spread of political news, as well as the circulation of people and objects.
But what did these networks actually look like? Were they as extensive as we are led to believe? How did they evolve over time? Mapping the Republic of Letters, a project of Stanford University (in collaboration with international partners), seeks to answer these and other questions through the development of sophisticated, interactive visualization tools. It also aims to create a repository for metadata on early-modern scholarship, and guidelines for future data capture.
Primary Source Databases
- Making of the modern world . This link opens in a new windowProvides full-text and full-page-image access to books from the 1450-1850 period (and 1851-1914 in Part II) , and pre-1906 serials. It focuses on economics interpreted in the widest sense, including political science, history, sociology, and special collections on banking, finance, transportation and manufacturing.
- Electronic Enlightenment / University of Oxford Humanities Division. This link opens in a new windowSearchable and browseable database offering extensive access to the web of correspondence between the greatest thinkers and writers of the long eighteenth century and their families and friends, bankers and booksellers, patrons and publishers. Coverage includes letters and documents, document sources such as manuscripts and early printed editions, scholarly annotations, and links to biographies, dictionaries, encyclopedias, newspapers, and other online resources.
- Seventeenth and eighteenth century Burney newspapers collection This link opens in a new window
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Searchable full-text access to the British Library's collection of the newspapers, pamphlets, and books gathered by Reverend Charles Burney (1757-1817)--the largest and most comprehensive collection of early English news media. More than twelve hundred titles and almost one million pages are included. - Gale. Primary sources This link opens in a new window
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Provides an interactive research environment that allows researchers to cross-search Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) and Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO) and to discover and analyze content in new ways. - Past masters . This link opens in a new window
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Several searchable full-text collections of writings by key philosophers and thinkers from ancient times to the present, including Anselm, Aristotle, Augustine, Bentham, Berkeley, Calvin, Descartes, John Dewey, Hegel, Hobbes, Hume, Leibniz, Locke, Luther, Mill, Nietzche, Peirce, Plato, Ricardo, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Thomas Aquinas, Wittgenstein and many others. - Founders early access . This link opens in a new windowThe Rotunda Founders Early Access project makes available for the first time thousands of unpublished documents from our nation's founders in a free online resource. Collected over many years by the Founders documentary editions, these letters and other papers penned by important figures such as James Madison, John Adams, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson offer Americans of all ages and interests a wider view of the early Republic.
- Slavery & anti-slavery : a transnational archive. This link opens in a new window
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Slavery and Anti-Slavery includes documents from the United States and Europe, as well as other parts of the world. In addition to newspaper collections and books published in the antebellum era, Slavery and Anti-Slavery contains documents from several archives originally available only on microfilm. - Gerritsen Women's History Collection of Aletta H. Jacobs This link opens in a new window
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"In the late 1800's, Dutch physician and feminist Aletta Jacobs and her husband C.V. Gerritsen began collecting books, pamphlets and periodicals reflecting the evolution of a feminist consciousness and the movement for women's rights. By the time their successors finished their work in 1945, the Gerritsen Collection was the greatest single source for the study of women's history in the world, with more than 4,700 books, pamphlets and journals spanning four centuries and 15 languages"--Publisher's description (ProQuest, 23 August 2022).Covers years 1543-1945, bulk is 1880-1920, with monographs and serials from the U.S., the U.K., Canada, New Zealand, and continental Europe. The collection is especially rich in women's journals, scholarly medical and sociological studies, and housekeeping and advice manuals. - Black studies center . This link opens in a new window
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Black Studies Center combines three invaluable resources for research and teaching in Black Studies: Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience, International Index of Black Periodicals (IIBP), and The Chicago Defender. This fully cross-searchable gateway to Black Studies includes scholarly essays, recent periodicals, historical newspaper articles, and much more. - Social and cultural history : letters and diaries online. This link opens in a new window
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Database of English language letters, diaries, autobiographies, oral histories, and other personal narratives providing insight into history dating from the 1550s to the present. Documents included in the index and ful-text collections are indexed for subjects, historical events, personal events, places, and dates.
