Find eBooks -- Collections & Major Texts

The Library subscribes to well over 500,000 electronic books in many subjects. Most are available in large collections which can be searched through the publisher's interface; all are individually cataloged in JOSIAH (search for titles below). In addition to the collections to which the Library subscribes, several publically available e-book collections are listed.

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14 entries found for: Historical Texts

ACLS Humanities Ebook Project
A collection of full text scholarly works in history, archaeology, area studies and related fields, published between 1880 and the present. Some titles are available in XML and some can be Print-On-Demand for a fee.

American Civil War: Letters and Diaries
Ongoing; this database knits together more than 1,000 sources of diaries, letters, and memoirs to provide fast access to thousands of views on almost every aspect of the war, including what was happening at home. The writings of politicians, generals, slaves, landowners, farmers, seaman, wives, and even spies are included. The letters and diaries are by the famous and the unknown, giving not only both the Northern and Southern perspectives, but those of foreign observers also.

ARTFL (American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language)
Over 2,600 texts (mostly scholarly editions) ranging from classic works of French literature to various kinds of non-fiction prose and technical writing. The powerful search and retrieval engine, PhiloLogic3, enables scholars to perform textual analysis, and to limit and extend both the searches and search results from various points of view.

Brill's New Pauly
Brill's New Pauly is an English translation (with revisions) of the German Der Neue Pauly which itself is the latest revision of the great multi-volume encyclopedia of the ancient world, known familiarly as Pauly-Wissowa. This resource in print was known as the Realencyclopädie der Classischen Altertumswissenschaft begun by August Pauly in 1839, with an expanded edition by Georg Wissowa published between 1890 and 1980. The New Pauly is still in progress, but includes access to the German edition, which was completed in 2003. The online version, like the print edition, includes two sections: Antiquity and the Classical Tradition.

Early American Imprints, Series I. Evans (1639-1800) Digital Edition
Ongoing; based on the renowned American Bibliography by Charles Evans and enhanced by Roger Bristol's Supplement to Evans' American Bibliography, this resource serves as the foundation for research on every aspect of 17th and 18th century American life. Upon completion, Evans Digital will consist of over 36,000 works and 2,400,000 images.

Early American Imprints, Series II (1801-1819): Shaw-Shoemaker, Digital Edition.
Ongoing, Shaw-Shoemaker covers every aspect of American life during the early decades of the United States. Early American Imprints, Series II (1801-1819) provides full-text access to the 36,000 American books, pamphlets and broadsides published in the first nineteen years of the nineteenth century. The continuation of Readex's Early American Imprints: Series I, this rich primary source database, based on the authoritative bibliography by Ralph R. Shaw and Richard H. Shoemaker and now supplemented by thousands of new items, thoroughly chronicles the people, ideas and events behind the early political, social, cultural and geographic growth of the United States.

Early English Books Online (EEBO)
From the first book published in English through the age of Spenser and Shakespeare, this collection now contains about 100,000 of over 125,000 titles listed in Pollard & Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640) and Wing's Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700) and their revised editions, as well as the Thomason Tracts (1640-1661) collection and the Early English Books Tract Supplement. Subjects include English literature, history, philosophy, linguistics, theology, music, fine arts, education, mathematics, and science.

Gerritsen Collection - Women's History Online
This collection is considered to be the greatest single source for the study of women's history in the world, with materials spanning four centuries and 15 languages. The broad scope of Gerritsen Online allows scholars to trace the evolution of feminism within a single country, as well as the impact of one country's movement on those of the others. Gerritsen Online consists of two segments: the Periodical Series and the Monograph Language Series.

Gutenberg-e
The Gutenberg-e books represent distinguished and innovative historical scholarship delivered with creative and thoughtful use of digital technology. These books have undergone rigorous academic review by historians brought together by the American Historical Association and produced through a close collaboration between the authors and the electronic publishing staff at Columbia University Press. The digital monographs are enhanced by documentation, hyperlinks to supplementary literature, images, music, video, and links to related web sites. [This resource is publicly available.]

Making of America
A digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. The collection currently contains approximately 8,500 books and 50,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints. [This resource is publicly available.]

Monumenta Germaniae Historica Online
Monumenta Germaniae Historica Online is a corpus of historical works, charters, legal texts, letters, political texts, and literature from the European Middle Ages. Contains approximately 800 texts published so far in the Monumenta series. The online texts are prepared by "Traditio Litterarum Occidentalium" under the direction of Prof. Paul Tombeur. This resource is part of Brepols Latin Complete and may be cross-searched via the Cross-Database Search Tool.

North American Women's Letters and Diaries
Colonial-1950; ongoing. When complete, the collection will include approximately 150,000 pages of published letters and diaries from individuals writing from Colonial times to 1950, plus 7,000 pages of previously unpublished materials. Includes materials from more than 1,000 sources, including journal articles, pamphlets, newsletters, monographs, and conference proceedings.

Parker Library on the Web
Provides access to the Parker Library's remarkable collection of 559 manuscripts spanning the sixth to the sixteenth centuries; a fully-tagged version of M. R. James' well-known catalogue (A DescriptiveCatalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Corpus Christi College Cambridge, Cambridge UniversityPress, 1912) updated and expanded by a project team at work since 2005; and bibliographic entries for more than 6,000 secondary works and more than 18,000 citations linking those works to individual manuscripts. The site also offers access to digital copies of some editions and secondary works.

Women Writers Online
1400-1850; full text collection of writing by women in English with currently about 200 texts and growing. Includes a wide range of subjects and genres, and all texts are transcribed in full, including front and back matter.


Deep Searching of eBooks with InfoGate

In addition to using Josiah for known items (author/title) and for LC Subject Heading searching, there are other ways to search deeply into some subscribed ebooks and many free ebooks: Google Book, Internet Archive, and Project Gutenberg searching and linking can be performed within these options.

  1. Enhanced searching of full text (chapters, indexes, and Table-of-Contents) -- use subject QuickSets and general QuickSet.

    QuickSets are found at: http://sfx.brown.edu:8331/V?func=quick-1

    Good for very specific searching, and discovering detailed portions of larger general works. Searches across aggregated full-text services (e.g. Early English Books, engineering handbooks, etc).

    Not as good for general subject discovery ... see Josiah for controlled vocabulary and broad subject headings ... and to discover LC call number ranges for browsing the physical book stacks.

  2. Seamless federated searching of Josiah and fulltext ebooks
    The QuickSets above offer one-stop searching of both Josiah and deep fulltext searching. This allows for both keywords within online texts and controlled subject headings within library subject catalogs. The less sophisticated search interface does not offer the best of either service, but it provides a good compromise for starting research. This will often lead researchers to more powerful native mode searching in various platforms.