HIST 461:Voyagers, Sojourners, and Border-Crossers in Asia (Gordanier): Find Primary Sources

Portal to resources from U.S. libraries, archives, and museums. Browse by place, time, subject, or contributing partner.

An initiative of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University, Asia for Educators (AFE) is designed to serve faculty and students in world history, culture, geography, art, and literature.

The e-Asia project (2000–2011) was funded by the University of Oregon Libraries through the generosity of Nissho Iwai under the leadership of Robert Felsing, East Asian Bibliographer. By building a collection of digitized e-books and a database of full text web resources, e-Asia strove to contribute to the research and scholarship of East Asia.

Possible collections of interest include Japanese Works or the Royal Asiatic Society.

Click on the tile for "Chinese Maps, Manuscripts and Printed Books" for digital collections. (Some English materials available.)

The East Asia Image Collection (EAIC) is an open-access archive of digitized photographs, negatives, postcards, rare books and slides under the general editorship of Paul D. Barclay, Associate Professor of History at Lafayette College, in partnership with staff at Digital Scholarship Services and Special Collections & College Archives. The EAIC documents the history of imperial Japan (1868-1945), its Asian empire (1895-1945) and occupied Japan (1947-52). Images of Taiwan 台湾, Japan 日本, China 中国, Korea 朝鮮, Manchuria 満洲国, and Indonesia are included.

This digitized collection of selected maps, courtesy of the University of Alabama, includes historical maps of Asia from 1650 to after 1920.

Children and Youth in History is designed to teach about the important roles of young people throughout history by providing access to information about the lived experiences of children and youth from multiple perspectives as well as changing notions about childhood and adolescence in past cultures and civilizations. Includes photographs, posters, charts, and translated texts of songs, stories, and more.

The Digital Archive contains once-secret documents from governments all across the globe, uncovering new sources and providing fresh insights into the history of international relations and diplomacy.

By developing a collection of digital books and a database of web resources in textual and visual mode, the Asian Digital Library (BNA) aims to contribute to research and the dissemination of knowledge on East Asia. The objective of BNA is to provide documentation that is often scarce and difficult to access, mostly in very remote libraries. On the other hand, through OCR processing, BNA strives to provide part of the available documents as searchable full text.

Visualizing Cultures was launched at MIT in 2002 to explore the potential of the Web for developing innovative image-driven scholarship and learning. The VC mission is to use new technology and hitherto inaccessible visual materials to reconstruct the past as people of the time visualized the world (or imagined it to be). Topical units to date focus on Japan in the modern world and early-modern China.

The “Frog in a Well” project and its blogs are named after an old Chinese proverb (井底之蛙), variations of which can also be found in the Japanese and Korean languages. The story originally appears in the writings of Zhuangzi, one of the founders of the Daoist religion (In the Burton Watson translation of his Basic Writings the story can be found in Section 17 “Autumn Floods” on pages 107-8).

Possible collections of interest include the Fairbank and Reischauer Lantern Slide Collection and the Harvard-Yenching Library digital maps