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Michigan State University

Eighteenth-Century Studies: Online Resources: 1. Multidisciplinary

This is a guide to both free web sites and electronic primary resources we have purchased or subscribe to on/about the long 18th century. Last updated 06-05-2023

Multidisciplinary

*Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) Public Access Texts via Text Creation Partnership Project at University of Michigan.
  Some texts from ECCO available to the public.

ESTC Eighteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue

The 'English Short Title Catalogue' (ESTC) is an international project established at the British Library in 1977. Its aim is to create a machine-readable bibliography of books, serials, pamphlets and other ephemeral material printed in English-speaking countries from 1473 to 1800, based on the collections of over 2,000 institutions world-wide.
In 2006, the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) lists over 460,000 items: * published between 1473 and 1800 * mainly in Britain and North America * mainly, but not exclusively, in English * from the collections of the British Library and over 2,000 other libraries.
The ESTC now also includes records for early English serials, annuals, newspapers, and news-books. The geographical scope for these is the same as for books, and coverage is from the beginning of serials printing (around 1620) through to the end of 1800.
This version should be more up-to-date than the 2003 ed. but the search interface is different.
This is not a full-text database; for full-texts see the electronic resources entry for Early English Books Online (EEBO)for imprints from 1470s through 1700 and Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) for imprints from 1701-1800.

HathiTrust Digital Library

HathiTrust was conceived as a collaboration of the thirteen universities of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation and the University of California system to establish a repository for these universities to archive and share their digitized collections. There are now more than 60 partner libraries. For more information, see http://www.hathitrust.org/access.

Google Books Advanced Search

Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search and Google Print) is a service from Google Inc. that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical character recognition, and stored in its digital database.  A click on a result from Google Books opens an interface in which the user may view pages from the book, if out of copyright or if the copyright owner has given permission. Books in the public domain are available in "full view" and free for download. Most scanned works are no longer in print or commercially available.  For those which are, the site provides links to the website of the publisher and booksellers.  Iincludes some periodicals.  In the Advanced search it is possible to specify content "magazines."

Daily Life Through World History in Primary Documents

Explore the daily lives of people from major world cultures throughout history, as presented in their own words. Bringing useful and engaging material into world history classrooms, this rich collection of historical documents and illustrations provides insight into major cultures from all continents. Hundreds of thematically organized, annotated primary documents, and over 100 images introduce aspects of daily life throughout the world, including domestic life, economics, intellectual life, material life, politics, religion, and recreation, from antiquity to the present.