LibGuides: Food in European History: Primary Sources

Primary Source Collections and Databases

Aaron Thomas: The Caribbean Journal of a Royal Navy Seaman
Journal writings of British seaman Aaron Thomas serving aboard a Royal Navy ship in the West Indies during the French Revolutionary Wars. Journal dated June 15, 1798 - October 26, 1799.

British Library Newspapers
A comprehensive range of regional and local newspapers in Britain between the mid-eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, providing a range of publications to reflect the social, political and cultural events of the times. The British Library Newspapers' collections feature London national newspapers, English regional papers, home country newspapers from Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, and titles in specialist areas such as Victorian radicalism and Chartism.
Colonial State Papers
The Colonial State Papers offers access to over 7,000 hand-written documents and more than 40,000 bibliographic records with this incredible resource on Colonial History. In addition to Britain's colonial relations with the Americas and other European rivals for power, this collection also covers the Caribbean and Atlantic world. It is an invaluable resource for scholars of early American history, British colonial history, Caribbean history, maritime history, Atlantic trade, plantations, and slavery.

A Colony in Crisis: The Saint-Domingue Grain Shortage of 1789
Website providing online access to both the French and original English translations of key primary sources dealing with the grain shortage faced by the colony of Saint-Domingue in 1789.
Cookbook and Home Economics Collection
Resource providing access to books collected libraries at UCLA and Berkeley, detailing life in the early decades of the 20th century. These books cover topics on cookery, textiles, family and home, budgeting, domestic sciences, and other subjects in home economics.
Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)
The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) offers a single point of access to millions of items—photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more—from libraries, archives, and museums around the United States. Search for the "Wilmington Ten" to find relevant sources related to this subject.

Early English Books Online
(EEBO) contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700 - from the first book printed in English by William Caxton, through the age of Spenser and Shakespeare and the tumult of the English Civil War. Access includes Thomason Tracts and Early English Books Tract Supplement. early_english_books_online.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online
Includes books, pamphlets, essays, broadsides and more. Based on the English Short Title Catalogue. Works published in the UK during the 18th century plus thousands from elsewhere.

Encyclopedia of Diderot and D'Alembert Collaborative Translation Project
Resource provides English translations of work from the French Enlightenment period.

European Views of the Americas: 1493 to 1750
European Views of the Americas is a comprehensive guide to printed records about the Americas written in Europe before 1750 from European Americana: A Chronological Guide to Works Printed In Europe Relating to the Americas, 1493-1750. The database contains more than 32,000 records, and covers the history of European exploration as well as portrayals of native American peoples. Find more information.

HathiTrust Food Studies Collection
Collection of primary source documents on food studies.
Internet History Sourcebook: The Early Modern World
Selected sources and link to information on the history of the early modern world.
London Lives 1680-1820
Searchable database of numerous manuscripts, archives, and datasets, giving access to 3.35 million names.

Making Of The Modern World
Provides digital facsimile images of primary sources that track the development of the modern, western world through the lens of trade and wealth. Full-text searching across millions of pages of works from the periods 1450-1850, 1851-1914, and 1890-1945 provides researchers access to material for research in the areas of history, political science, social conditions, technology and industry, economics, area studies and more. Includes books, serials, pamphlets, essays and more.

The Merchant Fleet of Late Medieval and Tudor England, 1400-1580
This website contains the details of English, Welsh, and Channel Islands merchant ships, and the voyages they undertook, between 1400 and 1580.
Papers of Sir Joseph Banks
The collection amounts to approximately 10,000 manuscript pages and includes correspondence, principally letters received, but also reports, invoices and accounts, journals, plus a small quantity of maps, charts and watercolors.
Sloane Letters Project
The correspondence of Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753) consists of thirty-eight volumes held at the British Library, London. The letters are a rich source of information about topics such as scientific discourse, collections of antiquities, curiosities and books, patients’ illnesses, medical treatments and family history.
Sugar and the Visual Imagination in the Atlantic World, circa 1600-1860
Sugarcane and its products were imaged in many ways in the early modern period, but least often as the white crystals that we commonly associate with the sweetener. The cane itself was frequently depicted in a variety of contexts, didactic, symbolic, and aesthetic; it can be found on title pages of travel literature, in satiric prints and children’s books. Molasses and rum made their way into visual representation less frequently, although here we see how rum came to signify in both pro- and anti-slavery imagery. Exhibit from the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.
Wellcome Library Recipe Books
Explore medicinal and culinary recipes through the ages with this collection of 16th-19th century domestic recipe manuscripts.