Webography on the Cold War and Wars of Decolonization
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:
- Cold War (1946–91)
- Arab-Israeli Conflicts (1947–)
- War of Indonesian Independence (1945–49)
- Korean War (1950–53)
- African Wars for Independence (1952–)
- Algerian War (1954–62)
- Indochina Wars (1946–79)
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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.
Former contributing editor to The Atlantic and Vanity Fair columnist, Christopher Hitchens compiled this useful chronology of the key events of the Algerian War for The Atlantic’s November 2006 edition. It gives readers a brief, but thorough overview of the conflict, along with explanations accompanying each event.
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...
This online collection of maps of Algeria published by Maps of the World provides a good overview of the geography of Algeria today. It also includes a brief overview of Algeria’s history, helping students position the country within its larger global context, both for contemporary studies as well as the country’s twentieth-century conflict.
The BBC News published this timeline of key events in the Algerian War in April 2019 as part of its series of country profiles. The timeline comes with a brief explanation of each event in relation to corresponding developments in the conflict.
Multimedia resources for K-12 classroom instruction and teacher professional development. As part of its mission to advance excellent teaching in American schools, Annenberg Learner funds and distributes educational video programs – with coordinated online and print materials – for the professional development of K-12 teachers. Many programs are also intended for students in the classroom and viewers at home, with videos that...
Established in Beirut in 1997, the Arab Image Foundation is a non-profit organization that has acquired and preserved some 600,000 photographs from the Middle East, North Africa and the Arab diaspora. This site offers users access to the results of an ongoing effort to digitize these collections funded by the Violet Jabara Charitable Trust, the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture and the Ford Foundation. The collections can be searched and browsed...
This timeline of the Vietnam War is provided by Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) as part of its Battlefield: Vietnam series. Along with this informative timeline, PBS also provides other resources for more information about the Vietnam War.
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...
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...
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...
Under the jurisdiction of the Libary of Congress, the Congressional Research Service conducts research for and provides analysis to Congress on a range of policy issue. Many of these reports are confidential, but the CRS does not publicize even those that are not. This independent site, created by the Federation of American Scientists, provides access to as much of this material as is possible as a public service. The site includes thematic...
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.
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...
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...
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.
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.
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.
Conceived as an interdisciplinary documentary platform, this website is dedicated to expanding knowledge on the phenomena of wars and their relation to gender, using the Vietnamese experience as a guiding example. The objective of the site is to offer visitors a rich and varied textual, iconographic, audiovisual documentation online, on the more general theme of women and war.
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...
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,...
The majority of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library collection is made up of presidential and White House staff papers from 1974-1977. Papers from Betty Ford, additional pre- and post-presidential papers, research interviews and papers, as well as various Federal records are also included in the collection. In total, there are 3,500 hours of audio, 25 million pages of documents, 3,500 hours of motion picture film, 450,000 photographs, and...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
OmniAtlas provides interactive timelines with accompanying maps portraying wars in Indochina. The timelines and maps show the main events of the conflicts with a short description of each event.
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...
The National Archives has a wealth of records and information documenting the U.S. experience in the Vietnam conflict. These include photographs, textual and electronic records, audiovisual recordings, exhibits, educational resources, articles, blog posts, lectures, and events, as well as an interactive timeline that documents the key events of the Vietnam War.
This site contains an archive of publications by the International Atomic Energy Agency dating back to 1958. These scientific and technical publications include international safety standards, technical guides, conference proceedings and scientific reports, as well as the general interest IAEA Bulletin, factsheets and topical booklets. All materials and site pages are available in English.
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 holdings of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library & Museum include collections of documents from the president's staff, as well as thematic collections of photographs and documents on the Camp David Accords and other major events, as well as sections containing speeches, a diary, photographs, and more. The site includes finding aids for on-site collections, bibliographic materials, and other materials useful to researchers....
The digital collections of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library include personal papers relating to the Kennedy campaign and presidency (1961-1963), sound recordings, and other files from the White House; the papers of Joseph Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and others; later oral-history interviews conducted with administration officials; and a collection of materials related to Ernest Hemingway. Other collections include thematic (Cuban...
L’Ancien d’Algérie (The Algerian Veteran) is a publication for French veterans of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962) published by the FNACA (Fédération Nationale des Anciens Combattants en Algérie, Maroc et Tunisie / National Federation of Veterans in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia), an antiwar veterans’ association at its founding. This online archive provides users full access to historical issues of the periodical, which...
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 official website of the LBJ Presidential Library, this site offers researchers access to finding aids and digital materials relating to Johnson's presidency (1963–69). The Library houses 45 million pages of historical documents, 650,000 photos and 5,000 hours of recordings from President Johnson's political career, including about 643 hours of his recorded telephone conversations. Accessible records include a collection of oral histories...
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...
This map of the Battle of Algiers (1956–57 ) shows the Muslim quarters, the European quarters, and attacks by the the Algerian National Liberation Front (Front de Libération Nationale, FLN), as well as French counterattacks during the Algerian War.
Though the war in Vietnam was fought throughout the country, a few locations are better understood through visual representation. This interactive map was created by the Pritzker Military Museum and Library to help students explore crucial elements of the Vietnam War, and uses propaganda posters, aerial and ground photos, and primary documents to illustrate events in addition to a map showing the events’ geographical locations.
Created by the Margaret Thatcher Foundation, this website is dedicated to the recording the political activities and spreading the ideas of the former British Prime Minister. Documents are browseable and searchable through a multi-term advanced search function. The site also offers users a searchable and browseable archive of more than 7,000 speeches and interviews given by Thatcher dating to the early years of her political career.
The National Archives has a wealth of records and information documenting the U.S. experience in the Vietnam conflict. These include photographs, textual and electronic records, audiovisual recordings, exhibits, educational resources, articles, blog posts, lectures, and events. Users can explore records, information, articles and resources organized by four subject area: “Diplomacy,” “In Country,” “The War at Home,” and “Post-Conflict Events...
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...
Founded in 1985 by journalists and scholars to check rising government secrecy, the National Security Archive combines a unique range of functions: investigative journalism center, research institute on international affairs, library and archive of declassified U.S. documents ("the world's largest nongovernmental collection" according to the Los Angeles Times), leading non-profit user of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, public interest...
This official site of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization offers users access to a broad range of official policy documents, helpful references, and other materials. Of particular interest to those interested in the Cold War, its digital archive offers users access to the policy documents, committee reports, analysis reports, and related documents organized primarily according to the...
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...
The Parallel History Project on Cooperative Security (PHP, the former Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact), provides new scholarly perspectives on contemporary international history by collecting, publishing, and interpreting formerly secret governmental documents.In response to the declassification of NATO records and the growing availability of documents from archives in Eastern and Central Europe, PHP as a cooperative...
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...
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,...
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...
Richard Nixon’s Presidency (1969-1974) is one of the most exhaustively documented administrations in American history. The Nixon Presidential Materials Collection in the Richard Nixon Presidential Library contains approximately 46 million pages of documents, 3,700 hours of recorded Presidential conversations known as the “White House Tapes”, 4,000 separate recordings of broadcast video, nearly 4,500 audio recordings, 300,000 still photographs...
The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library is the repository of presidential records for President Reagan's administration (1981-1989). The Library’s holdings include over 60 million pages of documents, over 1.6 million photographs, a half million feet of motion picture film, tens of thousands of audio and video tape, and over 40,000 artifacts. There is a permanent exhibit covering the President's life, as well as memorabilia such as Air Force ...
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.
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...
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...
The private site, “teachwar: Algerian Revolution, 1954,” provides some central primary sources from the Algerian Revolution in 1954, which started the war of liberations against colonial France.
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 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol are the key legal documents that form the basis the work of the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR). With 149 State parties to either or both, they define the term ‘refugee’ and outline the rights of refugees, as well as the legal obligations of States to protect them. The core principle is non-refoulement, which asserts that a refugee should not be returned to a country where they face serious threats...
Vincent Hiribarren, senior lecturer in modern African history at King’s College London, created this illustrated, interactive timeline for students learning about the Algerian War. The key events of the conflict are labeled within an animated chronology, and many descriptions include an accompanying visual with most descriptions presented in French.
Participants speak about the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings. They comment on various audio excerpts from the hearings and respond to viewer comments and questions. The Army–McCarthy hearings were held by the United States Senate's Subcommittee on Investigations in April–June 1954 to investigate conflicting accusations between the United States Army and U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy. The Army accused Chief Committee Counsel Roy Cohn of pressuring...
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...
This PBS website complements the ten-part, 18-hour documentary series by Ken Burns from 2017, which tells the story of one of the most consequential, divisive, and controversial events in American history. Visceral and immersive, the series explores the human dimensions of the war through revelatory testimony of nearly 80 witnesses from all sides of the conflict, and includes rarely seen video footage, photographs taken by prominent...