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The English Emblem Book Project of the Penn State University Libraries in Pennsylvania, USA, has digitized older form of texts, the emblem books, for the 16th to the 19th centuries. "An emblem book is a collection of images with adjoining text. In an emblem there is a dialog or tension between image and word. Emblems are frequently allegorical in theme. Emblem books are a form of text not altogether familiar to us today. An emblem book represents a particular kind of reading. Unlike today, the eye is not intended to move rapidly from page to page. The emblem is meant to arrest the sense, to lead into the text, to the richness of its associations. An emblem is something like a riddle, a "hieroglyph" in the Renaissance vocabulary -- what many readers considered to be a form of natural language."

As an endless source of discoveries, virtualmuseum.ca is a unique interactive space that brings together Canadian museum collections and riches in a variety of thought-provoking and instructive contents. It's your window on current museum news and your reference guide to plan your next outing. Enter your Canadian museum space

"The Aboriginal language of Sydney is one of many Indigenous languages spoken in Australia. Almost destroyed in the whirlwind of colonisation, it was documented by William Dawes, an officer of the First Fleet of 1787-88"

"The Memoro Project is a non profit online initiative dedicated to collecting and divulgating short video recordings of spontaneous interviews with people born before 1940. An editorial staff identifies and authenticates the material uploaded by the volunteers involved in the project. The Memoro Project was created by Memoro S.r.l. with the financial support of the Province of Cuneo, Italy. [...]"

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) electronic reading room of the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) offers several primary source collections for the study of Central and Eastern Europe during and after the Cold War period. The FOIA Electronic Reading Room web site was established by the CIA "to provide the public with an overview of access to CIA information, including electronic access to previously released documents." Direct web access to the following collections is now possible: # The Soviet and Warsaw Pact Military Journals is a PDF collection of "sensitive Soviet and Warsaw Pact military journals from 1961 to 1984 providing a view into Warsaw Pact military strategy". # Preparing for Martial Law: Through the Eyes of Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski is "a captivating collection of over 75 documents concerning the planning and implementation martial law in Poland from mid-1980 to late 1981. The collection release coincided with a CIA symposium honouring Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski, a member of the Polish Army General Staff and the source of the documents."

"The Open Society Archives (OSA) at the Central European University in Budapest is an archival laboratory. While actively collecting, preserving, and making openly accessible documents related to recent history and human rights, they continue to experiment with new ways to contextualize primary sources, developing innovative tools to explore, represent, or bridge traditional archival collections in a digital environment."

The BBC archives offers free access to themed collections of radio and TV programmes, documents and photographs. These are thematic selections of primary sources from an archive which began over 70 years ago.

"WikiArc is intended as an online toolkit for professionals, students and other people interested in the fields of archaeology, classical antiquity, palaeoanthropology, forensic anthropology, cultural heritage studies, and Quaternary sciences."

The Andrew Blake (1757-1827) Archive in North Carlolina, USA, is "not a physical repository of Blake's collected works, nor is it a clearinghouse through which users can obtain reproductions of those works. [...]" It is "an online hypermedia environment that allows its users to access high-quality electronic reproductions of a growing portion of Blake's work.

Saw the link  to these come through on an email and so added it to the group. Does anyone teach the Afghan War or contemporary events to their classes? 

The Kennan Institute and National Public Radio in the USA has established an online audio archive of Soviet and Russian history. "The archive consists of recordings dating back to the earliest years of the Soviet state. Included are the voices and speeches of key political figures, including Lenin, Kerensky, Kirov, Beria, Stalin, Gorbachev, and others. Among the recorded interviews are Anna Larina (Bukharin's widow); Valentin Berezhkov, Stalin's wartime interpreter; Yelena Bonner, Sakharov's widow; and Lev Pevsner, a survivor of the Leningrad Blockade. There is also on-the-scene recorded sound of many events in Soviet history, including: the Russian and American armies meeting at the Elbe; Stalin's funeral; the August 1991 coup against Gorbachev. [...] The material comes from Soviet and Russian sources, the NPR archives, the archives of the BBC, and individual donors. Some of the material is in Russian, some in English. "

Parallel Archive (PA), an "invented" archive repository accessible for everybody wishing to upload primary sources, is developed by the Open Society Archives (OSA) at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. PA is, "at once a personal scholarly workspace, a collaborative research environment, and a digital repository".

The Internet Archive BookServer, A Future for Books, distributed lending & vending on the internet is an Open Web for Books project for worldwide distribution of e-books. BookServer with more than 1,5 millions books is, today, one of the biggest digital libraries offering and sharing free access to digital books both in PDF and ePub format, the latest recommended by the International Digital Publishing Forum a free and open e-book standard with extension ".epub".

This interesting series from the British Museum has an accompanying podcast easily downloadable on iTunes. 

Our new National Curriculum takes a world history approach, which is a new direction for history in my State. This is an interesting argument for big-picture, as opposed to civilisational or thematic, approaches to conceptualising history. 

The Royal Historical Society bibliography is an authoritative guide to what has been written about British and Irish history from the Roman period to the present day. The Bibliography is hosted by the Institute of Historical Research, which is part of the University of London.

This is a description of a book that has great quotes and information about the Gallipoli landing. It is great because if you use a book, then you are using a wider range of sources, rather than just the internet.

This website has a lot of information and sources from a book (25th April 1915 - The Inevitable Tragedy by Denis Winter). It also gives information about the landing in Gallipoli.

A brief description of the landing - An excerpt from Denis Winter's book, 25 April 1915 - The Inevitable Tragedy,University of Queensland Press, 1994.

Hey, this site is really good because it talks about the mateship and the experiances are still happening and is still real. Unfortunatly, this site is not an account or a quote from WW1 but an army man's experience in the war in Timor in 2000 and Afghanistan in 2008. However, this will be a great site to reference to about how the spirit is still relivant and embody today. Anna

World War One. It was one of the first ever major amphibious operations in modern warfare and used aircraft (as well as an aircraft carrier), aerial reconnaissance, landing craft, radio communications, artificial harbours and submarines. Its lessons were far reaching, and were remembered long after the event in such campaigns as the Normandy Landings in 1944 and the Falklands Conflict of 1982.