Resources for Central European history and historians
Below are listed a number of resources that will likely to be of general interest to scholars and teachers of Central European history. Additional resources may be available to CEHS members via the member portal.
The information provided below while extensive, does not pretend to be exhaustive. All links were tested prior to posting, but it is possible that some have subsequently become invalid. If you would like to report an invalid link or request that an additional resource be added to this page, please contact CEHS using the contact form.
Professional associations and research institutes
- Association for Slavic, East European, & Eurasian Studies (ASEEES)
- Austrian Studies Association
- Balkan History Association
- Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies (BIAAS) The Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies (BIAAS) support projects that “promote an understanding of the historic relationship between the United States and Austria.”
- Center for Austrian Studies
- Czechoslovak Studies Association (CSA)
- German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD)
- German Historical Institute, Washington D.C.
- German Historical Institute, Warsaw
- German Studies Association
- German Studies Canada/Études Allemandes Canada
- Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies (at the University of Alberta
Online teaching resources
- Black Central Europe provides over 1,000 years of black history in the German-speaking lands.
- EGO – European History Online: A bilingual (German and English) site developed by the Leibniz Institute for European History in Mainz and Trier University that offers a “transcultural history” of Europe that transcends “national, disciplinary and methodological boundaries” while also focusing attention on such areas as Central Europe, Eastern Europe and the Balkan peninsula.
- EHRI Online Course in Holocaust Studies
- German Heritage in Letters: A crowd-sourced digital collection of German-language correspondence currently held in private hands, by archives, by special collection libraries, museums, and other institutions.
- German History in Documents and Images (GHDI) is a comprehensive collection of primary source materials developed by the German Historical Institute, Washington DC, documenting Germany’s political, social, and cultural history from 1500 to the present.
- German History Intersections is a source-based digital project led by the German Historical Institute, Washington DC, that examines German history from 1500 to the present from the perspective of three topics — migration, knowledge and education, and Germaness — rather than traditional chronologies.
- German History Maps I. The Essential List, 1500-1870: A list of 25 map clusters one might consider essential for teaching German history for the period 1500 to 1870.
- German History Maps II. The Essential List, 1870-1945: A list of 25 map clusters, ordered roughly chronologically, that one might consider essential for teaching German history for the period 1870 to 1945.
- The German Studies Collaboratory is a repository of online resources with links to international library and archive collections, maps, images, sound and text documents for use in research and in the classroom.
- Historiana offers free historical content, ready to use learning activities, and innovative digital tools made by and for history educators across Europe.
- LeMO – Lebendiges Museum Online: The online learning portal of the German Historical Museum (Berlin). Contains documents, images, objects, testimony, film clips etc.
- Making the History of 1989. The Fall of Communism in Eastern Europe: Hosted by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University.
- The New Fascism Syllabus: A crowd-sourced collection of writings on the history of fascist, populist, and authoritarian movements and governments during the 20th and 21st centuries.
- The Wiener Holocaust Library: Digital Holocaust Resources
Archives and digitized sources
- Austrian Newspapers Online (ANNO): major online archive of historic Austrian newspapers
- Das Bundesarchiv: website of the German Federal Archive
- CZoernig: The Central European Historical Data Hub. This data hub contains a range of datasets and GIS shapefiles pertaining to the economic and social history of Central and Eastern Europe.
- The Digital Picture Archives of the German Federal Archives holds approximately 12 million still pictures, aerial photographs and posters from modern German history. First photographs date from the 1860ties.
- DRQEdit: Deutschsprachige Rechtsquellen in digitaler Edition. Juristische Literatur des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts
- European Holocaust Research Infrastructure enables online access to information about Holocaust sources, no matter where they are located.
- Národní archiv – National Archives Czech Republic
- Online Archive of the Arolsen Archivesthe world’s most comprehensive archive on victims of National Socialist persecution
- Österreichisches Staatsarchiv: website of the Austrian state archives
- Ústav pro českou literaturu contains digitized copies of important Czech newspapers and journals, including Literární noviny, Rudé právo, Světozor, and Zlatá Praha
Libraries and catalogs
- Deutsche Nationalbibliothek: the German national depository library
- Gemeinsamer Verbundkatalog: another “meta catalog” of library catalogs, mostly in northern Germany
- Jahresberichte fur deutsche Geschichte: bibliographic database of works of German history
- KVK: The KVK is an extremely useful “meta-catalog” that allows for simultaneous searching of several library catalogs, among them the union catalogs for Bavaria, North Rhine-Westphalia and Southwest Germany. The list of covered catalogs keeps growing; it now includes Austrian and Swiss libraries, as well as an increasing number of other national catalogs.
- ZEFYS: The Berlin Staatsbibliothek’s portal for free, public access to its digitized collections of historical newspapers (to c. 1945)