Webography on the Age of the Second 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:
- Chinese Civil War (1927–50)
- Spanish Civil War (1936–39)
- Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45)
- Second World War (1939–45)
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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 Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its allies and collaborators. Holocaust is a word of Greek origin meaning "sacrifice by fire." The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were "racially superior" and that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community. During the era of the...
The website includes 42 often interactive maps that explain the conflict — how it started, why the Allies won, and how it has shaped the modern world. World War II was a great tragedy, claiming 60 million lives and throwing millions more into turmoil. Yet the war also spurred rapid technological development, hastened the end of colonialism, and laid the foundation for institutions like the United Nations and the European Union.
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...
The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA) is an educational non-profit dedicated to promoting social activism and the defense of human rights. ALBA’s work is inspired by the American volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who fought fascism in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Drawing on the ALBA collections in New York University’s Tamiment Library, the items in the ALBA Digital Library represent four collections that are historically...
Rather commonplace in modern usage, stamps served a number of purposes well before the twentieth century. Aside from their use by postal services to indicate the payment of postage fees, stamps have been used for tax collection, food rationing, publicity, and other purposes. Often printed in color and with a wide variety of styles, designs, and artwork, these small forms of media were utilized extensively during the Spanish Civil War. 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 Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (ARMH, Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory) is a Spanish organization that collects oral and written testimonies about the White Terror of Francisco Franco and excavates and identifies their bodies that were often dumped in mass graves. The ARMH arose as a result of the exhumation of a mass grave containing the remains of 13 civilian Republicans murdered by a...
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...
La Biblioteca Digital Hispánica (BDH), or Hispanica Digital Library is a project of the National Library of Spain, and provides free access to digitized documents and books dating to the 15th century. It also includes manuscripts, drawings, engravings, pamphlets, posters, photographs, maps, atlases, music scores, historic newspapers and magazines and audio recordings. Its goals are disseminating cultural heritage, preserving it, and...
The British Diplomatic Oral History Programme provides users access to a collection of oral-history interviews of British Diplomats collected since 1995 through a project approved by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The interviews are offered as downloadable text transcripts of the recordings, and represent a range of experiences, postings, conflicts and issues. The site also offers access to a range of documents held by the...
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....
Throughout the Spanish Civil War, both sides of the conflict used propaganda in various forms to justify their political and social programs and to garner support for their side of the conflict. While the Nationalist government chose radio its main means of propaganda, organizations in Republican Spain, relied primarily on print and visual media for their war propaganda. The exhibit on this website focuses on the printed ephemera of the...
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."
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,...
Centropa is a nonprofit historical institute dedicated to Jewish family and individual stories from Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans. The site's content includes photographs, thematic exhibitions, recipes, and other materials. Perhaps most important are the interviews collected primarily in Vienna of individuals from across the region who survived the Second World War and settled in the city. The site has English, German, and...
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.
Densho is a Seattle, WA–based group dedicated to preserving the history and testimonies of the more than 120,000 Japanese Americans who were removed from their homes and detained during World War II. A collaboration with several organizations and archives, this digital archive grants users access to a range of browseable collections, many of which represent the materials donated by a single family or, in another instance, the pages of a...
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...
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,...
Developed by the National Library of the Netherlands, Memory of the Netherlands is an image library where users can view online the collections of over 100 Dutch museums, archives and libraries. Materials include photographs, sculptures, paintings, bronzes, ceramics, modern art, drawings , stamps, posters and newspaper clippings, as well as video and audio clips. The site is searchable and browseable by various collections, including those...
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...
The Donovan Nuremberg Trials collection consists of nearly 150 bound volumes of Nuremberg trial transcripts and documents from the personal archives of General William J. Donovan (1883-1959). The Donovan papers contain both original statements from the defendants in German and typed translations in English prepared by the Allies.
Digitized collection of historic photographs, advertisements, interviews, texts, maps etc.
The Eisenhower Presidential Library, Museum, and Boyhood Home is located in Abilene, KS, and serves as a site for research in collections running to more than 20 million pages of documents and 300,000 photos. Important documents relating to the military career and presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-1961) can be accessed through an online archive, which is arranged chronologically and thematically by events, which include World War I,...
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...
A joint initiative of the Library and the Department of History and Civilization of the European University Institute (Florence), European History Primary Sources is an index of digital archives and other repositories offering access to primary sources on European history as a whole, and on individual European countries. The database is browseable by country, language, period, period, and type of source.
This collection, presented by the New York Public Library Digital Collections, offers users access to a partial set of photographs that accompanied albums created by the studio of Adolf Hitler's personal photographer and published annually between 1939 and 1942. Cataloguing events of wartime history, the photographs portray a view of Nazi Germany as its leaders wanted it to be seen, including commemorating victory. All images have been...
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.
Between 1939 and 1944, photographers working for the U.S. Farm Security Administration and later the Office of War Information created approximately 1,600 color photographs depicting life in the United States, including Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. The pictures focus on rural areas and farm labor, as well as aspects of World War II mobilization, including factories, railroads, aviation training, and women working. Fewer in number than...
This special exhibit has been created in collaboration with the US Holocaust Memorial and Museum (Washington, DC) to tell the story of some 2,100 Polish Jews who successfully fled through the Soviet Union to Japan, Shanghai, and beyond before the Holocaust began in 1941. It offers users access to testimonies, photographs, and artifacts, which are browseable and searchable. Owing to the particiaption of Dutch and Japanese diplomats in these...
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...
In existence since 1981, the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies has preserved film of interviews with Holocaust survivors and witnesses in New Haven, CT since 1979, and the originals have been deposited at the Yale University Libraries. Since then, the collection has grown to more than 4,000 testimonies comprising over 10,000 hours of footage, all compiled by more than 35 projects across North America, South America, Europe, and Israel....
Presidential Libraries are not libraries in the usual sense. They are archives and museums, bringing together in one place the documents and artifacts of a President and his administration and presenting them to the public for study and discussion without regard for political considerations or affiliations.
The first Presidential Library, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum hosts a virtual research room and...
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 Calvin College (Grand Rapids, MI) and created by Randall Bytwerk, an emeritus professor of communications, this site offers users access to propaganda materials, as well as manuals for how to create it, published in Germany during the Nazi period and the period of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). Materials are organized chronologically and thematically. Materials are translated into English text, making this a useful...
Witnesses Stories is a repository of first-person narratives about the Second World War created by the Netherlands Ministry of Health Heritage Program for the War. Addressing a broad range of topics, these interviews have been preserved digitally so as to be accessible at Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS), a partner institute of the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. The website offers context and...
The Northwestern University Libraries (Evanston, IL) is a federal repository library and therefore holds a range of US Government Information publications, but also materials from the State of Illinois, the City of Chicago, and the United Nations. Although few of these documents are available online, the site does include digitized collections of World War II–era posters, League of Nations documents, and more.
The Harry S. Truman Library, the first Presidential Library to be created under the provisions of the 1955 Presidential Libraries Act, was established to preserve the papers, books, and other historical materials relating to former President Harry S. Truman (1984-1972) and to make them available to the people in a place suitable for exhibit and research. The core of the Library's research holdings and the principal reason for its existence is...
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...
Comprised of materials from the Southern Methodist University (Dallas, TX) Libraries' Government Information Resources department, this site offers users access to 343 information pamphlets, governmnet reports, speeches, propaganda materials, and other documents produced by the US Government Printing Office during World War II. Users can search or browse materials according to a range of categories including issues related to women and guides...
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...
Jointly funded by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington, DC) and the Centre de documentation juive contemporaine (Paris) and hosted by the Andover–Harvard Theological Library, this site provides users with access to the records of the Unitarian Service Committee, established in 1939 and responsible for efforts to aid victims of World War II in Europe by providing food, clothing, medical care, and support for immigration to the US. The...
This site provides access to the records held by the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA, College Park, MD) on assets looted during the Holocaust and subsequently located, recovered, and returned. The primary stimulus for recent interest in these issues came only in the 1990s with the discovery of Swiss bank accounts and gold looted by the Nazis, but it has expanded to include cultural artifacts, art, and other monetary...
An official online publication of the Holy See, this site provides users with digital texts of a variety of documents related to the activities of individual popes. Users can browse a chronological listing, which leads, where relevant, to a page with categorized documents on a range of issues. A separate archive page takes users to collections of historical documents, including those...
Created with support from the Russian Federation's Federal Agency for Press and Mass Communication, this site offers readers a selection of first-person narratives collected and interviews taken in recent years about everyday experiences of World War II in the Soviet Union. It includes not only male soldiers, but also women combat soldiers, as well as nurses and other noncombat personnel.
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...
This interactive timeline with a changing global map on World War II from the prewar to the postwar period is provided by the American Battle Monuments Commission. The site has a strong focus on the United States' involvement in the conflict and central battles of the US Armed Forces.
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...
OmniAtlas provides interactive timelines with accompanying maps portraying World War II. The timelines and maps show the main events of the conflict on a global scale with a short description of each event.
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...
This collection contains interviews from two oral history projects, the Living Memory of the Jewish Community and the Holocaust Survivors' Centre Interviews. Between 1987 and 2000, the Living Memory of the Jewish Community gathered 186 audio life story interviews with Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and their children. The Holocaust Survivors' Centre Interviews was a National Life Stories collaborative project with the Jewish Care Holocaust...
Created by the University of Michigan Library, the Joseph A. Labadie Collection offers users access to digitized images of twentieth-century political posters from a range of countries. Containing over 2,000 images, the collection contains visual materials on a range of social movements and causes, including anti-colonialism, communism, environmentalism, labor, pacifism, socialism, women, gender, and student movements. Collections are...
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...
A project of the Parri Emilia-Romagna Historical Institute, this digital library provides users with access to materials digitized for preservation related to twentieth-century Italian history. Collections include books, manuscripts, photos, posters, sound and video, and are searchable and browseable. All site pages are in Italian, while materials are primarily Italian with other European languages represented.
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...
Created by the University of Minnesota Libraries, this archive provides users with access to digitized images of the Manzanar Free Press, a newspaper published by Americans of Japanese descent interned at the Manzanar War Relocation Center in California, which operated between 1942 and 1945. Editions are browseable by chronology and searchable by keyword. Each entry contains searchable metadata related to publication dates. It appears that...
The Marchand Archive is an ever-expanding collection of document-based lesson plans (Documentary Source Problems) and more than 8,600 images (Image Archive). This site brings together the original Adventures in Roland Marchand's File Cabinet launched in 1999 and the Marchand Image Archive launched in 2001. With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the original Marchand image collection has been expanded to include images...
The Marchand Archive is a collection of more than 15,000 images and a growing number of document-based lesson plans from the collection of Roland Marchand, a scholar and author who cofounded the History Project at the University of California at Davis to improve history education, kindergarten through university. This site brings together the original Adventures in Roland Marchand’s File Cabinet (1999) and the Marchand Image Collection (2001...
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...
Developed by the German History in Documents and Images Institution, these maps provide a comprehensive collection of original historical materials documenting German history during the Second World War. The maps comprise of Germany's territorial expansion from 1935-1939, the administrative structure under National Socialism in 1941, Europe at the beginning of December 1941, concentration and extermination camps and major "euthanasia" centers...
The War Sources Network (NOB) is a project to improve digital access to Dutch collections of materials on World War II by facilitating the collaboration of some 400 institutions with relevant collections. It aims to make the hundreds of thousands of photos and millions of documents digitized more useful and discoverable by providing integrated search and browsing. All materials and site pages are in Dutch.
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...
NIOD’s archives and collections about war, the Second World War in the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies, the Holocaust and other genocides in the 20th and 21st century are accessible for all interested parties.
Throughout the Spanish Civil War, both sides employed diverse forms of propaganda designed to promote the war effort. In a divided Spain, the spread of propaganda through government and non-government channels reached a fever pitch. Targeted media sought to mobilize not only soldiers, but also factory workers, political adherents, women and children of the so-called "rearguard," and foreigners. In each case the motive was the same: solidarity...
Created by the Harvard Law School Library, this site offers users access to documents of the International Military Tribunal, which tried military and political leaders of Nazi Germany, as well as the twelve trials of war criminals conducted by the United States Nuremberg Military Tribunals. Users can browse or search a range of documents including trial transcripts, briefs, evidence files, and photographs. Designed to preserve the fragile...
A collaborative project of the Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the War Resouces Network, and several other partners, the World War II Platform is a repository of Dutch resources relating to the war. Materials are organized into special collections exploring the experiences of prisoners, homosexuality under occupation, hostages, material culture,...
Oorlogsbronnen.nl is the starting point for anyone who wants to know more about the Second World War in the Netherlands. The history of the war is hidden in millions of original photographs, objects, letters, administrations, diaries, posters, newspaper reports, film footage, etc. These 'silent witnesses' come from the scattered collections of hundreds of archive institutions, museums, memorial centers and libraries at home and abroad. On...
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...
Created by the New York Public Library, this digital collection of photographs from Poland during World War II includes collections of images of prewar Poland in 1939, of Polish military and political figures, of the underground and the government in exile in London, and of Jewish children. Images are browseable by theme and fully searchable, with English langauge metadata.
Hosted by the National Archives and Records Administration, this site is an online version of an extensive exhibit at the National Archives Building in Washington, DC, from May 1994 to February 1995. Its emphasis is on posters used to persuade, and includes related primary source material from official manuals and other sources on the US Government's strategy to mobilize public support for the war effort, including popular songs and sayings...
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...
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...
The Royal Airforce Museum of the United Kingdom offers visitors to its website a range of online collections on themes related to the Battle of Britain, the wartime service of women, the Polish Air Force in Britain, and the experiences of flyers of African descent in the Caribbean. Other exhibits consider longer term themes, including the service of women in the RAF.
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...
Presented by the Rutgers University Libraries (New Jersey), the Rutgers Oral History Archives provides users access to more than 1,200 oral-history interviews and annotated transcripts. The transcripts, some 30,000 pages worth, are text-searchable, as well as browseable by conflict, military branch and unit, and other categories.
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 significance of the Spanish Civil War as major event in Spanish and European history is well-known. Beyond the implications of the civil war in terms of Spain's own history, the war is viewed, retrospectively, as a prelude to the larger ideological conflicts between fascism, communism, and democracy that eventually consumed all of Europe in World War II. The Spanish Civil War is also remembered as a testing ground for new techniques and...
This website offers users access to thirteen interviews of survivors of the Sobibor death camp, a significant percentage of the fifty total survivors out of more than 170,000 of the camp's victims, 34,000 of whom were from the Netherlands. Created by the Netherlands Institute for War, Genocide, and Holocaust Studies, the emphasis here is on Dutch escapee-survivors and their lives, the degrading conditions in the camp, escape, and lives after...
This digital collection provides users with access to 120 posters from the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) in the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Both Nationalist and Republican sides are represented, although the latter posters are more numerous, including those related to trade unions, Catalonian nationalists, and various internationalist groups. The collection is both browseable and searchable by various keywords.
From 1924-1953, Joseph Stalin (1878--1953) ruled the largest country in the world, the Soviet Union, with an iron fist. He attempted to twist and contort the USSR into a modern communist country using authoritarian methods.
The Stalin Digital Archive provides unprecedented access to historically significant content and robust online capabilities for research and teaching. The result of years of collaboration between the Russian State...
This website by the United States Holocaust memorial and twelve other international public institutions like the Memorial Ausschwitz-Birkenau, the Anne-Frank House, Amsterdam the Imperial War Museum London, and the Polish History Museum presents 70 stories of the Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, the persecution and murder of 6 million Jewish people and 5...
In this oral history website Brookyn College students narrate two historical episodes: their experiences of working on farms during World War II, and the events surrounding the suspension of the Vanguard, the student newspaper in a postwar McCarthy era climate. The edited testimony is accompanied by audio excerpts. These case studies add another dimension to our understanding of life on the American homefront during World War II and the...
Coming of Age during the Holocaust, Coming of Age Now is an interactive curriculum based around twelve stories of young people who survived the Holocaust and one woman who grew up in the Mandate of Palestine during the same period. The stories are pitched at middle-school students and their educators, but can also be used by families educating their children at home or by other adults working with young people independently or in...
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.
The American Soldier in World War II is a project to make available to scholars and to the public a remarkable collection of written reflections on war and military service by American soldiers who served during the Second World War. In its efforts to mobilize, train, equip, and lead the largest fighting force in the nation's history, the US War Department created an in-house Research Branch staffed and advised by the country's leading social...
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...
Offering users access to more than 25,000 pages of documents dating from the years between 1944 and 1949, this collection concentrates on the investigation and prosecution of the war crimes of Nazi commanders and personnel in concentration camps. Among the materials are correspondence, legal documents, trial transcripts, interrogation reports, exhibit materials, clemency processes, photographs, newspaper clippings, and more. The materials...
Created by scholars at Birkbeck, University of London with support from the Arts & Humanities Research Council, this site offers users a range of essays, documents, and resources on the Nazi concentration camps. Delving into the history of the camps before the Holocaust, the project seeks to discover the origins of the wartime practice of the Final Solution through the examination of three themes: regime policies and the links between...
The Map as History, provided by a team of French historians, is committed to innovate the way of learning about 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. The Fifteen maps on the Second World War, provided in English and French, start with Hitler's...
This website provides users with information on the place of music in the war in the Netherlands and its colonial posessions, the former Dutch East Indies, Surinam, and the Dutch Antilles. Created in collaboration with the Netherlands Music Institute, the site offers users access to documents, music, photos, and biographies of individual musicians and composers, all of which shed light on several key themes: musical life during the war years...
Created by the Mandeville Special Collections Library of the University of California–San Diego, this site provides users with digitized images of over 600 pencil, crayon, ink, and watercolor drawings made during the Spanish Civil War by Spanish school children, both in Spain and in refugee centers in France. Originally published as a book under this title in 1939, the drawings are organized according to the place of their creation, and...
The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its allies and collaborators. The Nazis came to power in Germany in January 1933. They believed that the Germans belonged to a race that was "superior" to all others. They claimed that the Jews belonged to a race that was "inferior" and a threat to the so-called German racial community. This excellent timeline by the United...
PBS and Florentine Films have partnered with the Veterans History Project in a massive effort to capture the stories of men and women who experienced the Second World War first-hand. The website for the PBS documentary series The War, directed by Ken Burns and Lyn Novick, which is the result of this cooperation, provides an informative timeline for the Second World War.
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.
The searchable and browseable Italian database "Tuscany in the Twentieth Century: Portal of Contemporary History" provides users with access to a range of over 1,200 leaflets, newspaper articals, graphic materila and images related to Italy's twentieth-century political , social and military history, with a particular emphasis on the resistance against Italien Fascism before and during the Second World War and the partisan struggle against...
This website by the Library of the University of Warwick provides not only an ilustrated timeline of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), but also more than 4,000 documents from its archive collections on the conflict – fully searchable by keyword. The focus is on the situation of ordinary Spanish people during the civil war, the role of workers and the labor movement inside Spain and the support of international labor organization, especially...
A database of international humanitarian law treaties provided by the International Committee of the Red Cross, this site provides users access to full texts of the treaties, as well as commentaries and other materials. All materials are sorted into thematic collections. Highlights include full texts of the Geneva Conventions, as well as contemporary and modern commentary. All materials are available in English.
Assembled by the Howard–Tilton Memorial Library, the Tulane University Digital Library is a source of digitized and digital holdings for teachers, researchers, and the public. Strengths of the collections include music, especially jazz, as well as Latin America, the local history of New Orleans and Louisiana. Drawn from a range of collections and centers at Tulane University, the library provides a search feature, as well as thematic...
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...
The University of South Florida Library's Special Collections Department has provided access to a digital library of various thematic collections of materials which are browsable and searchable according to several criteria. Of particular interest are collections of primary sources on the Spanish Civil War (1936–38), an archive of oral histories on the topic, and a collection of materials on the Holocaust, World War II, and genocide in...
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...
The Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive makes available to the public the results of a program underway since 1981 to interview Holocaust survivors. Created by Sidney Bolkosky, a professor of history at the University of Michigan–Dearborn and hosted by the university's libraries, the interviews are available on the site as short sound files embedded with texts, all of which are in English. Users can browse the...
Voices of the Holocaust Project provides a digital archive of restored, transcribed, and translated interviews with Holocaust survivors conducted in 1946 by David P. Boder, a psychology professor from Chicago's Illinois Institute of Technology. Hosted by the Institute, the site aims to reach students, researchers, historians, and the general public. The testimonies were collected in displaced persons camps in France, Switzerland, Italy, and...
The Digital Archive contains once-secret documents from governments all across the globe, uncovering sources and providing insights into the history of international relations and diplomacy. The Digital Archive focuses on the interrelated histories of the Cold War, ...
The World Memory Project is changing lives by building the world’s largest online resource for information about victims of the Holocaust and Nazi regime. Millions of documents containing details about victims of the Holocaust and Nazi persecution during World War II still exist today. Through the World Memory Project, you can help make these victims' records searchable online and restore the identities of people the Nazis tried to erase 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...
Created by the Library of Congress, the Yanker Poster Collection is a grouping of posters, propaganda, and handbills on a range of social and poltical issues dating from the years between 1927 and 1980, a gift by collector Gary Yanker. Most are from the US, including environmental, antiwar, and women's rights activism, but more than 50 other countries. The collection includes an introductory essay, select bibliography, and other aids, while...
The New York Public Library's Digital Yizkor Book Viewer allows users to browse page-by-page through a collection of 650 out of the 730 complete Holocaust memorial books in the library. Most books are in Yiddish or Hebrew, but there are a small number of English translations. Users can search, but the primary means of accessing the books is an alphabetical list of the place names for communities commemorated.