Webography on the Age of First World War
This webography provides a list of online primary sources, educational resources and online encyclopedias associated with some of the major conflicts during the relevant period. The most important wars included for this period are:
The most important wars for this period include:
- First World War (1914–18)
- Russian Civil War (1917–22)
- Irish War of Independence and Civil War (1919–23)
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If there is one document that can be regarded as the “foundation deed” for the First World War, it is the Imperial Manifesto “To My Peoples!” of 28 July 1914. This announcement was printed in countless variations throughout the Empire, often in various scripts, but also in versions as ornaments with decorative frames. Above all, it was announced in the nine official national languages – German, Czech, Polish, Ukrainian, Slovene, Croatian,...
The first "trench papers" developed mostly on the initiative of soldiers without official control. They started as self-written poetry, jokes and satires, written on slips of paper which were simply hung up somewhere. A little later, duplicated papers appeared in small batches, which, at just a few pennies, found a ready market. The papers provided a diversion from the often monotonous everyday life at the front and were at the same time a...
Created by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), this website provides students, teachers and the general public with access to foundational documents of American history. Periods include major wars from the American Revolution to the Cold War and Beyond. Documents are arranged chronologically in a browseable form, and can be read as a digitized image of the original and as transcribed text.
The International Encyclopedia of the First World War is a full-scale English-language reference for WWI. International and collaborative, the site strives to offer multiple perspectives by combining the efforts of over 1,000 authors, editors, and partner institutions from 50 countries. Seeking to offer an all-encompassing vision of the war, the site offers materials about not only the major belligerent powers of Europe, but those actions...
These forty maps with explaining comments, provided by three senior correspondents working for the online newspaper Vox, explain the conflict of World War I—why it started, how the Allies won, and why the world has never been the same.
Based in the Department of Geography at the University of Portsmouth (UK), the website A Vision of Britain through Time combines data from historical surveys of the island. Created by the Great Britain Historical GIS Project, the project has received support from the Office of National Statistics, the National Archives, the British Library, English Heritage, the Environment Agency and many academic institutions. In addition to the...
ALEX is the digital reading room of the Austrian National Library for Laws. Here, historical Austrian legal and legal texts can be browsed, read and searched online. Our goal is to create easy access to the historical Austrian legal gazettes, regardless of time and place. The historical Austrian legal gazettes not only document the state norm emissions of past times, but are also an excellent source for questions about history, politics,...
ANNO is the digital newspaper and magazine reading room of the Austrian National Library. Here you can leaf through, search for and read online in historical Austrian newspapers and magazines.
The Digital Collections of the State Library of Bavaria encompass manuscripts, reference works, and periodicals, with an emphasis on local and regional Bavarian history, national German history as well as collections on Eastern Europe and musicology. Other collections, organized by type, include photographs and rare printed materials. A few remarkable and rare items are listed separately. Holdings are searchable by author, title, and keyword...
Established at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, the Betty H. Carter Women Veterans Historical Project aims to document women's service in the military and related services—including the Red Cross and other civilian organizations—beginning with World War I. The digital collections include a wide range of primary source material, including photographs, letters, diaries, scrapbooks, oral histories, as well as physical artifacts...
A digital library of printed primary and secondary sources for the history of Britain and Ireland, British History Online concentrates on the years between 1300 and 1800. Aimed at students, teachers, and researchers globally, it provides searchable, annotated, full-text digital versions of sources across the whole range of potential subjects, including women and war. The library also provides handy subject guides and aides for citation....
A media company with a century-long history, British Pathé has made available a large archive of footage, such as newsreels, comprising some 85,000 films, as well as stills, all dating from the years between 1896 and 1976. Among other newsworthy subjects, the archive includes film of major events, historical figures, and related issues. The entire archive is available to view online for free via the British Pathé website and YouTube channel....
Created by the United States Military Academy West Point, this collection provides downloadable digitizations of several dozen maps examining both large-scale movements of major campaigns during World War I and their details on all fronts, including Eastern, Western, and beyond.
Created by the University of Victoria (BC), Canada's Siberian Expedition aims to raise public awareness of the Canadian Expeditionary Force to Siberia which, at the close of World War I, sent more than 4,000 soldiers from Canada's West Coast to Vladivostok, on Russia's Pacific coast, in a failed bid to aid an Allied strategy to defeat the revolutionary state established in 1917 by the Bolsheviks. Presented in English, French, and Russian, the...
Privately run, the Canadian Great War Project is a database of materials on individual soldiers of the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF), which fought on many fronts, in particular the Western Front in France and Belgium, during World War I. It also includes extensive statistics, reference information, and many other related materials. The database contains over 150,000 individual soldiers, and its available to the public.
The Canadian War Museum's online exhibits feature modules on Canada's involvement in major wars from 1812 and the Boer War to both World Wars, as well as the country's membership in NATO. Each exhibit features photos and objects with text descriptions, as well as essays on subjects ranging from life on the front lines to the home front. The site also features a full-scale French–language version.
Created by McGill University Library Digital Collections, the Canadian War Poster Collection offers digitizations of 250 Canadian posters from World War I and World War II, drawn from the university's special collections. Typically designed to aid recruiting and financing campaigns, the posters reached mass audiences, but today are of interest to students, teachers, and researchers. The site includes an extensive introduction providing...
Major artists recorded the important contribution made by Canadians in both world wars. Like the soldiers they depicted, artists saw comrades and brothers die. They marched over corpses, suffered through deafening bombardments and endured inhumane conditions. The paintings in this exhibition are their legacy, a first-hand account of "how it was."
Created by the archival authority of France's Ardèche department for the centennial of World War I, Centenaire 1914–18 is a site offering digitized holdings of the departmental archives related to the war. The collection features interactive 3D maps of military medical training from 1915, documents concerning military recruitment, full-text versions of local press coverage of the war, lists of men from the Ardèche who received...
The Center for Jewish History Digital Collections is a searchable online database featuring digital facsimiles of items from the library, archive and museum collections of the five partner institutions of the Center for Jewish History: The American Jewish Historical Society, the American Sephardi Federation, the Leo Baeck Institute, the Yeshiva University Museum and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Numbering in the tens of thousands,...
CIRCE, an acronym in Italian for Computerized Catalogue of European Cultural Periodicals, denotes a project to digitize twentieth-century periodicals from Europe's cultural sphere and make them publicly accessible. It includes indexes and full texts of periodicals in Italian and other periodicals. Continuing to expand, CIRCE also organizes seminars and publications. Created with the aid of both the government of Trento and the University of...
Offering users access to thousands of oral history interviews, the Memory of the Nation is a project supported by the federal government of Germany and a range of private foundations. Interviews are browseable, but also divided into subject collections and chronological categories. Most relevant, perhaps, are those collections on the Holocaust and on various aspects of the Cold War–era division of the country. All site pages and materials are...
The site, “Decolonization Resource Collection: North Africa and the Middle East”, created by the American National History Center, provides a useful collection of central primary and secondary sources for learning and teaching. The focus is, however, is not on Algeria, but on the whole of North Africa and the Middle East.
This site created by the archival authority of the Ain department provides access to photographs shot by French infantrymen (poilus) in World War I. It is a small but thoughtful collection, thematically subdivided into prewar and mobilization, the front, the homefront, and the postwar period, each introduced by a brief essay. Another section introduces the individual photographers. All site pages and texts are in French.
The Digital Collections created by the Royal Danish Library provides users with access to Danish works of all kinds, including books, periodicals, maps, music, and other primary sources. Other materials include manuscripts and photographs on a range of subjects. Holdings are presented in thematic collections and are also searchable. Although predominately in Danish, the site allows searches for English key words and for English–language...
As part of its website, the German Historical Museum (Berlin) offers users a collection database that includes an extensive inventory of objects, printed material, film, etc., relating to many periods of modern German history. Entries are searchable by title, keyword, and other criteria. Site is in both English and German, although the majority of holdings are in German. The collection also includes a lot of material on the history of...
Using materials from the Bavarian War Archive, this project, created by the German branch of the genealogy website Ancestry, is a digitization of the military rolls of the Bavarian units of the German Army during the First World War. The rolls contain a wealth of information recorded about individual soldiers and officers of each branch of the military, and are searchable by given name, family name, and date of birth. Full access to the...
The Digital Forum Mittel- und Ost Europa pursues the goal of digitizing historical printed works, including newspapers and magazines, of multiethnic cultural landscapes of Eastern Europe, especially those with a large proportion of a German or German-speaking population. Numerous public and private partner institutions in Europe, Israel and the USA cooperated in the implementation
Created by the Leo Baeck institute of New York and Berlin, DigiBaeck is a site providing users access to digital collections about German–speaking Jews in the modern world. Total digitized holdings exceed 3.5 million pages, and include archival materials, memoirs, manuscripts, books and periodicals. They also include art, photos, and sound recordings. The site provides basic and advanced search functions, as well as browsing by the type of...
Hosted by Ball State University (Muncie, IN), the Digital Media Repository (DMR) Military History Resources digital archive is dedicated to providing access to materials related to armed conflicts ranging from the French Revolution and US Civil War to the World Wars and Cold War-era conflicts. Resources include oral histories, films, photos, manuscripts, and other materials drawn both from the library in Muncie, Indiana, as well as...
Provided by the Federal Archives of Germany, this archive contains some 200,000 of some 11 million photographs, posters, and other images from the larger collections, which date from the 1860s to the present, including the periods of World War I (1914–18), the Weimar Republic (1919–1933), the Nazi period (1933–1945), and the Federal Republic of Germany (1945/49–present). Images are organized according to chronological divisions, as well as by...
Funded by Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Digital Public Library of America has developed from ideas that have been percolating since the 1990s. The site launched in 2013, and aims to link collections of museums, libraries, and other repositories across the United States to make them available to teachers, students,...
A project of the State Library of Berlin, the Digitized Collections provide access to thematic collections of imaged materials on a range of issues including the military and the First World War, as well as politics, economics, theology, art, and more. The World War I collection includes field unit and hospital newspapers and other materials from the front. All site materials and search functions are in German only.
This site offers users access to select digitized collections from the University of Warwick (UK) Library. Individual collections are devoted to a range of relevant topics including the First World War, the Russian Revolution and Britain, the Spanish Civil War, the period of Irish Independence, as well as collections on British society. Collections are browseable and, in some cases, searchable by various keywords and subjects. All materials...
Digitized collection of historic photographs, advertisements, interviews, texts, maps etc.
Hosted by the Harold B. Lee Library of Brigham Young University, EuroDocs represents a clearinghouse of links to sources hosted at other sites and by other institutions. Links connect to European primary historical documents that are transcribed, reproduced in facsimile, or translated. In addition, links direct users to videos, sound files, maps, photographs, databases, and other sources, which encompass a broad sweep of historical...
Since February 2013, the European Film Gateway gives access to around 3,000 historic films related to the First World War. European film archives contributing to the European Film Gateway digitised considerable parts of their WWI collections in the scope of the EU-funded project EFG1914. In time for the centenary of World War One in 2014, all films digitised in the project were searchable through the European Film Gateway. The films...
Hosted by Oxford University but uniting libraries, archives, and organizations from across Europe with aid from the EU, Europeana 1914–1918 serves as a clearing house for resources on the Great War. It is designed to provide a multisided perspective and facilitate the collection and preservation of additional materials (nearly 200,000 to date). Users can browse according to source type (diaries, photographs), as well as subjects (...
A collection of famous speeches held by influential leaders of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, among those JFK talking about the Cuban Missile Crisis and Dr. Martin Luther King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech. Transcriptions of the speeches are provided as well.
This website allows students to explore the global impact of the First World War through an interactive map, which highlights key events and figures in countries from Aden to Zanzibar. Drawn directly from records at The British National Archives, the map goes beyond the trenches of the Western Front and shows how the war affected different parts of the world. The First World War: A Global View is part of the ...
This website allows students to explore the global impact of the First World War through an interactive map, which highlights key events and figures in countries from Aden to Zanzibar. Drawn directly from records at The British National Archives, the map goes beyond the trenches of the Western Front and shows how the war affected different parts of the world. The First World War: A Global View is part of the...
The purpose of this website is to provide a summary overview of the First World War. Created by enthusiasts for a general readership, this site provides users with overviews of major figures and events, maps, and digital text versions of documents. It also contains sections on various other aspects of the war, including art and literature, weaponry, photoessays on monuments and battlefields, and other resources.
The Foreign Relations of the United States series presents the official documentary historical record of major U.S. foreign policy decisions and significant diplomatic activity. Increasingly, the volumes are available as downloadable ebooks. Foreign Relations volumes are ordered chronologically and thematically, and are full-text searchable. They contain documents from presidential libraries, Departments of State and Defense, National...
Created by the Austrian National Library, Women on the Move 1948–1938; Biographies, Association Profiles, Documents is a project offering biographies and documents on the women who shaped the history of the Habsburg monarchy of Austria–Hungary and then, after 1918, interwar Austria, as well as profiles of the organizations these women founded. Resources are divided into collections defined by organization, individuals, publications...
A project of the National Archive of the Netherlands (Nationaal Archief), gehetna.nl offers users access to millions of photographs, government documents, private letters and historical maps. In addition to sources on everyday life, the archive also contains unique documents from Dutch history dating back centuries. Searchable and offering full-text resources, the site also provides commentary and essays. Although primarily in Dutch, the site...
The Genocide Studies Program at Yale University's MacMillan Center concentrates on interdisciplinary, comparative, and policy-oriented research into genocide and provides training to those in regions affected by modern genocides. Its historical research concentrates on the Holocaust, the genocides in Bosnia and Darfur, and on colonial and indigenous genocides. Resources available on the website include audio and video, bibliographies,...
Initiated by the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, German History in Documents and Images (GHDI) provides primary sources on German history dating back to the early-modern period. The collection is divided into thematic sections, each curated by scholars, framed by introductory essays, and accompanied by primary sources (including English–language sources), as well as maps and images. Subjects include government and...
Hosted by the World Digital Library and provided by the Library of Congress, this digitized version of Germany and Its Colonies includes more than 1,000 illustrations and depicts both European possessions (Alsace–Lorraine, conquered from France in 1870–71), and the overseas colonies it acquired after unification and lost after World War I: Togo, Cameroon, German South-West Africa (present-day Namibia), German East Africa (present-day...
Created by the INA (National Audiovisual Institute) of France, Histoire et Conflits (History and Conflicts) is a repository of French audiovisual sources on major conflicts of the twentieth century, including the World Wars, the French-Indochina War, conflicts in the Middle East, the Algerian War of Independence and other Cold War–era conflicts and revolutions. A public cultural organization charged with preserving and maintaining...
Since 2016, the German Research Foundation (DFG) has been funding a specialist information service (FID) for the subject of history, which is managed by the Bavarian State Library and the German Museum in Munich - the latter responsible for the history of technology, natural sciences and the environment. In close dialogue with historians, "historicum.net - Fachinformationsdienst Geschichtswwissenschaft" is building a digital range of...
The website FES-Netz-Quelle of the library of the German Friedrich Ebert-Stiftung focuses on right-wing extremism in the interwar period, from the early 1920s to the mid 1930s. It provides important texts from the right-wing movement to make them accessible for historical analysis, which are chronologically arranged on this website. The selection illustrates the holdings of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung library. Any use of these...
During World War II, the U.S. Command and General Staff College's primary mission was to train large numbers of captains and majors to be staff officers in battalions, brigades, divisions, and corps. To that end, the Army provided copies of documents produced by field units to the College. This archive, the Combined Arms Research Library, provides users with searchable and browseable access to operations orders, after-action reports,...
A partially government-funded set of five museums across the United Kingdom that relies on donations, the Imperial War Museums offer digital collections arranged according to type of source: books, art, documents, films, exhibitions, and more. The collections are keyword searchable, and aim to be comprehensive about twentieth- and twenty-first century conflicts involving Britain, the Commonwealth, and other former imperial posessions...
The International Encyclopedia of the First World War, an English-language virtual reference work on the First World War, has created a vibrant, informative interactive timeline illustrating key events of the First World War with primary documents and artistic depictions of battles, treaties, and life on the home front.
Omniatlas is a free historical atlas which shows step-by-step historical maps covering major world and regional events. On this site you can discover free maps, articles, and timelines for education, reference, and teacher resources.
OmniAtlas provides interactive timelines with accompanying maps portraying World War I. The timelines and maps show the main events of the conflict on a global scale...
In partnership with the Library of Congress and UNESCO, the World Digital Library has compiled dozens of primary documents and photographs to create an illustrated, interactive timeline of the First World War. Propaganda posters, Arab language newspapers, military publications, and photographs taken within and of the actual conflicts throughout multiple battle sites combine in a timeline to create a realistic and compelling learning tool for...
This site provides access to reports on issues arranged thematically and geographically, all prepared by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which concentrates on providing aid to those suffering from, among other crises, armed conflicts. These include archived materials, a digital library, databases, annual reports, and other materials dating back through the twentieth century. The archives are of special potential interest, as...
The International Institute of Social History collections comprise archive, library and audio-visual material with a thematic emphasis on social and emancipatory movements. The Institute holds over 4,000 archives, more than 1,000,000 printed volumes, and an equivalent number of audio-visual items including posters. In addition, the site has handy collection guides to a range of topics both thematic (anarchism and anti-apartheid movements) and...
The Digital Newspaper Library is an initiative promoted by Braidense National Library, the public library of Milan, which aims to publish in digital format materials related to the history and culture of Italy from the eighteenth century to the twentieth. The Library comprises some 1.5 million pages, which can be downloaded in the open-source DejaVu format, amassed since 1995. The website and materials are searchable, as well as browsable by...
"The Mission of the Centenary" is a rich and diverse collection of French primary sources concerning the First World War, assembled by a public commission charged with presenting the the anniversary to the public. Created in 2012 by the French government and under the supervision of the Secretary of State for Veterans and Memory, its mission is to facilitate commemorations of the war, which it does in partnership with a broad range of museums...
Although the League of Nations, founded in 1920 in Geneva ceased to exist in 1946, its archives and historical collections survive as invaluable resources for historical research. This digital archive, created at Indiana University includes the League of Nations Overview of Photo Collections with photos of: Personalities (e.g. Woodrow Wilson, Haile Selassie), Assemblies, Councils, Delegations, Commissions, Conferences, the Secretariat, the...
Provided by Leiden University (Netherlands), the University Library's Digital Special Collections archive offers users access to visual and textual sources including maps, photos, books, and manuscripts, as well as an editorial apparatus and digital exhibitions on specific themes. The collections' search feature allows for English language searches, although many of the items in the collection are presented primarily in Dutch.
LeMO - Lebendiges Museum Online is the most important German online portal on German history developed by the Stiftung Deutsches Historisches Museum, the Stiftung Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland and the Bundesarchiv. Maps, images and other media including videos, documents, objects, biographies of important individuals, and eyewitness reports are together with explanatory texts organized along an interactive...
Sponsored by the British Imperial War Museums (IWM), in collaboration with a genealogical website, Findmypast, this website aims to engage the public in researching the personal stories of nearly eight million men and women who ‘‘made a contribution to’’ the First World War. As of December 2016, some 7,667,398 names had been uploaded as base information by the creators of the website...
The official site of the National Archives of the United Kingdom housed at Kew, this site provides users with a range of finding aids and guides to the archive's holdings, as well as a searchable and browseable database of online holdings. These holdings include guides and online databases for numerous relevant categories: including both world wars, various service branches, and more. The site includes a section of materials for teachers and...
A public organization that includes corporate partnerships, the National Army Museum strives to be a source for both education and the general public. It includes materials and exhibits in Great Britain's military history, with its collections concentrated on the centuries from the English Civil War onward. In addition, it is expansive enough to include Britain's imperial and colonial possessions. In contrast to the Imperial War Museum, the...
A site created by the National Library of Israel, this Digital Library provides users with access to a range of online collections, primarily but not exclusively related to the history of the State of Israel and, prior to that, to Palestine. They include extensive records of Jewish press, but also collections of maps, manuscripts, advertisements and other ephemeral materials, and other subjects relating to the twentieth century, as well as...
The online collections of the National Library of Serbia, this site presents a range of books, periodicals, manuscripts, and other sources, accessible through an English language browsing and searching feature. Of greatest, perhaps, is a large digital collection on the First World War, which contains maps, a digital exhibition, and related materials.
Created by the New York Public Library, this site features photographs and images related to a range of subjects, the most relevant of which are the American Civil War (1861-1865) and First World War (1914-1918), as well as a rich collection of Russian Civil War (1918-1922) posters. The images are fully text searchable, but also divided into subject collections, each accompanied by a brief introductory essay, which includes bibliographic...
Of the 250,000 of eligible age in 1914, nearly 100,000 New Zealand men served overseas. New Zealand forces were involved in the conflict from the capture of Samoa in 1914 to the end of the fighting on Armistice Day in 1918. WWI had a seismic impact on New Xealand, reshaping the country's perception of itself and its place in the world. This website produced by the History Group of the New Zealand Ministry for Culture and Heritage provide...
This site presents selections from the New-York Historical Society Museum and Library’s holdings, featuring highlights from the collections of paintings, drawings, photographs, manuscripts, broadsides, maps, and other materials that reveal the depth and breadth of over two centuries of collecting. The N-YHS Digital Collections site is expanding as the library and museum continue to digitize their primary source materials relating to the...
A digital collection created by the Library of Congress, this website offers users access to high-resolution images of World War I–era New York newspapers, which used rotogravure, a new printing process with improved quality of the illustrations they could recreate on inexpensive newsprint. The era's newspapers had vivid pictoral sections that, although the newspapers as a whole were long ago microfilmed for preservation, were unable to be...
The archives of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, this site contains a photo archive and exhibitions on a range of topics ranging from its origins during World War I through World War II and to the present. The collections are searchable by name and full text, and also allow the search of photograph collections. The collections are extensive, comprising some 2.6 million digitized pages, 67,000 images, and a database of some...
Financed by France's National Agency of Research and created by the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, the Georges Chevrier Center and the French National Archives, Paprik@2f is a project designed to expand study of Communist movments both in France and internationally during the period from 1917 to 1947. It offers researchers and the public access to archival materials, news on events, publications, archival guides, and digital humanities...
Created by McMaster University Libraries (Hamilton, ON), this interactive, thematic website Peace and War in the 20th Century presents two parallel curated collections, "Waging Peace" and "Waging War" to audiences, especially students and teachers. Built around case studies, the collections present materials from the university library's archives about various thematic aspects of the topic, ranging from nuclear disarmament and women...
This collection of ten digitized serials was created by Polo Library of the University of Pisa. It provides access to full digital images of the publications, organized chronologically. Users can also perform full-text searches on individual publications or the whole collection. The date ranges of most periodicals relate to the wars for Italian independence of the mid-nineteenth century, although some also continue into the era of World War I...
Created by the Institute of Contemporary History of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities of Nova University of Lisbon to mark the centenary of the outbreak of war, the Portugal 1914 portal is a public history initiative to both educate and facilitate commemoration. Drawing materials from archives, libraries, universities, museums, schools, and municipalieis, as well as contributions by experts and the general public, the program is...
Composed of materials drawn from the Princeton University Libraries, the Digital Library features thematic collections on a range of historical events and eras, including the civil war in Guatemala, the Chinese Revolution, the American Revolution, and more. Showcasing distinctive holdings of the library, the collections have been fashioned to serve the needs of research and teaching at Princeton. Materials include sheet music, photographs,...
This project, created by the Brown University Library Center for Digital Scholarship, offers users access to thousands of prints, drawings, and watercolors from the Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection. Concentrating on the period from the 17th century to World War II, it has a particular emphasis on illustrations of military uniforms and dress, as well as portraits, photographs, posters, and other materials. All are accessible both via a...
This site has been created by the International Committee of the Red Cross to provide access to its archive of information about prisoners of war and civilian detainees during the First World War. Belligerent powers registered such detainees with the ICRC, meaning that the archive contains the name of some 5 million of the estimated 10 million such individuals. In addition to the database searchable by name, the site includes collections of...
An online version of an exhibition held in 1992, soon after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the sudden opening of its previously secret archives, this site offers images of both that historical moment, and of documents then unearthed about the more distant past. Culled from the archives and organized into collections on subjects ranging from terror to repression, the small selection of documents is presented both as digitizations of...
A project supported by, among others, the Max Weber Foundation, the German Historical Institute–Moscow, the Russian Federal Archive Agency, and the Ministry of Defense and its Central Archive, this project grew beginning in 2011 from an initiative by the Russian Presidential Administration to make public documents from Nazi Germany captured at the end of World War II by the Soviet Union. The site provides researchers access to selections from...
This website is a multi-media archive of primary materials designed to introduce students and the general public to the richness and contradictions of Soviet history. It provides a cross-section of Soviet life in seventeen different years, following the title of a beloved television spy serial from the seventies. Each module covers politics, society, culture and economics, so that users might experience a given time through the words, sounds...
This Sheet Music Collection contains over 1700 unique titles published primarily from 1851 to 1970, most of them during World War I. Among them are a number of compositions by Irving Berlin, including Let’s All Be Americans Now, They Were All Out of Step But Jim, I’ve Got My Captain Working For Me Now and Good-Bye France. Also included in the collection are older titles that experienced a revival in popularity at the outbreak of the First...
The official newspaper for the American Expeditionary Force in France, Stars and Stripes was published from February 1918 to June 1919, and is accessible to users in this online collection created by the Serial and Government Publications Division of the Library of Congress. The collection includes the complete seventy-one-week run of the newspaper's World War I edition. Designed to create a sense of unity and provide an...
A project of the Technical University of Darmstadt, the Digital Resources of the library and archives provide users with access to manuscripts and rare books, as well as maps, musical scores, and other materials for the entire modern period. Other sources include local newspapers from Hesse, as well as photographs and other visual sources. The project's portal is available in English, but search and materials are primarily in German.
Created by the French academic association "Collectif de recherche international et de débat sur la guerre de 1914-1918" (Collective for International Research and Debate on the First World War), this site (in English: Testimonies of 1914-1918: Dictionary and Guide for Witnesses of the Great War) provides access to French first-person narratives of World War I that have been collected, indexed, and analyzed. Each testimony is presented with...
Created by the National Archives of the United Kingdom, the Cabinet Papers provides the public, students, teachers, and researchers with comprehensive access to government reports dating from 1915 to the end of the twentieth century, as they open after a mandatory 20 year wait. The documents relate to a range of government issues, including war, peace, society, economy, and more, and are organized into collections based on these and other...
The Canadian Letters and Images Project, supported by Vancouver Island University, the Canadian War Museum, and the Governor General of Canada, is an online archive featuring Canadians' war correspondence. Ranging from pre-1914 wars, including the American Civil War, it has individual collections on all major twentieth-century wars. Its emphasis is on the everyday and on the rank-and-file, as opposed to military or civilian leaders. Providing...
The George Washington University’s Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project (ERPP) publishes online and print archives of Eleanor Roosevelt’s extensive writings. The collection includes political pieces, speeches, newspaper columns and transcripts from radio and television. In addition to...
In 2016. the European War Collection at Princeton University consisted of 1,755 books and pamphlets relating to the European War. The University Library actively added books and pamphlets, publishing three listings of the collection — two in 1918: European War Collection: Alphabetical Author List and European War Classed List ], and one in 1920: Princeton University Library Classified List VI, pp. 3585-3608. During the 1920s and later, the...
The Map as History, provided by a team of French historians, is committed to innovate the learning about advanced history. The team uses a series of animated maps to bring history to life, often focusing on a single region to illustrate developments over time. They also create timelines to further clarify and contextualize historical progress. To date, they have published over 230 animated maps. The varied series permits users to...
Hosted by Oxford University, the First World War Poetry Digital Archive provides users with access to some 7,000 texts, images, audio clips, and videos for use by teachers, students, and researchers. It concentrates on primary sources relating to the era's well-known poets, including Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Graves, Vera Brittain, and Edward Thomas. The site also provides links to materials at the Imperial War Museum and an...
Created by the National World War I Museum and Memorial (Kansas City), these online collections are searchable and browseable. Still growing, they represent only a part of the museum's collections. In addition to extensive numbers of photographs, the materials include letters, posters, songs, and other materials related to the United States' involvement in the war. The museum and its collections have been in operation since 1920, but recently...
Created by the Toronto Public Library, this digital archive provides users with access to a small collection of historical photos, images, maps, manuscripts, and books related to both World Wars and other conflicts. Materials are browseable by type, subject, and language, and are fully accessible in downloadable form. All finding aids are in English and French, and most materials are in English.
Created by the Libraries of the University of Minnesota, this digital archive provides users with reproductions of the newspaper Trench and Camp, a publication for Camp Upton (Long Island, NY) during World War I published by the National War Work Council of the YMCA. The newspaper covers many aspects of local life at the camp and national news supplied by a central editoral office. The archive is both fully searchable and browseable...
A project of—among others—the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, the Welcome Library, and the Women's Library, the UK Web Archive (UKWA) is designed as a resource for the public, teachers, students, researchers, and more. It aims to provide a record of UK based websites for preservation, a record that begins with 2004, when archiving began. The larger project is based at the National Library of Scotland, the National Library...
Created by the Library of Congress and the American Folklife Center, the Veterans History Project is an initiative to collect, store, and offer access to individual American veterans' accounts of their wartime experiences. Users can search interviews by name, service location, unit, rank, interviewer, keywords and notes. Searches can be limited according to branch, gender, type of material, and war, ranging from World War I to the Iraq and...
Veterans’ associations formed an influential social movement during the interwar period. They provided the platform for former soldiers to commemorate the war and their fallen comrades and to discuss their post-war problems. The associations merged the voices of the soldiers who joined them and, as a group, acquired political and social influence, which they used to promote ex-servicemen’s interests and needs. This article aims to reconsider...
Provided by the New York Public Library's Digital Collections service, this digital collection compiles a few short pieces of sheet music (most are 2-8 pages) consisting primarily of songs devoted to specific wars or having a theme of wars, soldiers and related topics. It also includes songs whose lyrics may have no connection to wars but whose cover reflects engagement with the topic.
The Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library houses Woodrow Wilson materials from during and immediately after his lifetime, memoirs of those who worked with him, and governmental volumes concerning World War I. The library boasts the third largest collection of Woodrow Wilson Papers. Wilson's official papers are located at The Library of Congress. Princeton University also maintains a large collection of Wilson papers from his tenure as Professor...
The mission of the Pritzker Military Museum & Library is to acquire and maintain an accessible collection of materials and to develop appropriate programs focusing on the citizen soldier in the preservation of democracy. They provide an interactive website on World War I, which combines maps with comments, documents and brief videos.
Private and military archive photos of a German officer during WWI at the Eastern front. Part 1 Part 2
This website allows access to over 1500 models and 3600 archival photos of vehicles, including airplanes, tanks, submarines, zeppelins, and ambulances, from World War I. The database contains over 340 subject types spanning 120 manufacturers. The photographs are subdivided in galleries according to country and model type.
Created by the Rare Book Collection department of the Libraries of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, this website provides users with access to images of cards on themes related to the First World War gathered from Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Russia, and the U.S. The materials are searchable, as well as browseable by title, subject, name, place, and series title.
Created by the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, this collection gives users access to nearly 2,000 posters from the World War I era. The posters relate primarily but not exclusively to the war, and were collected from the United States mainly, but also from Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, and Russia. Continuing to grow, the collection includes both text and graphic...
The World War I digital sheet music collection is drawn from the Sheet Music Collection at the John Hay Library. It is composed of over 1,800 titles that relate in some way to the events of World War I, and the impact of that war on American society. There are patriotic songs, songs relating to specific military units, romantic songs of love and loss, comic songs, and songs that look to the war’s end. The World War I sheet music provides a...
The Library of Congress has created a streamlined, navigable timeline with entries documenting all of the key events of the First World War. Illustrated with contemporary artwork and publications, this timeline allows students to scroll through a concise, coherent chronology of one of the most complicated, yet crucial conflicts of the twentieth century.
Created by the Ball State University Libraries (Muncie, IN) Archives and Special Collections department, this site offers users access to the World War I posters from the Elisabeth Ball Collection. Containing over 1,500 posters selected from the larger collection, the searchable and browseable collection contains posters from Italy, France, Belgium, England, Australia, Germany, the United States, and other countries collected by Elisabeth...
Created by the British Libary, this collection on the Great War includes a collection of some 500 primary sources drawn not only from Britain, but also across Europe, including documents, images, and objects. Topics include everything from poetry to propaganda, and include scholarly essays by leading experts.
This digitized collection in The British Library is supported by over 500 historical sources from across Europe. This resource examines key themes in the history of World War One. Explore a wealth of original source material, over 50 newly-commissioned articles written by historians, teachers' notes and more to discover how war affected people on different sides of the conflict. This collection includes World War One historical sources from...
Connected to the Württemberg State Library (Stuttgart), the Library of Contemporary History contains nearly 400,000 volumes. Online users can access collections of posters dating primarily between 1914 and 1970, as well as a collection of World War I-era leaflets. A full catalog of the collections is available, while only part of the whole quantity of individual records is available by browsing. Although German is the site's primary language...