PPHS World History Immersion

Historical timeline including prehistory, classical India, Muslim India, British India, and Modern South Asia.

Full text of primary source documents

The Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives is a manuscript and photograph repository dedicated to furthering the study of Asian and Middle Eastern art, archaeology and culture as well as turn-of-the-century American art. Our mission is to collect, preserve, organize, describe, and make available documentary materials that support the holdings and activities of the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. The Archives houses over one hundred and forty collections, amounting to over one thousand linear feet. We have over 2462 images online and are adding more daily.

Archives manuscript collections date from the early nineteenth century to the present and include the papers and records of collectors, dealers, scholars and archaeologists; making the Archives a critical repository for the study of the advent and development of Asian art scholarship and appreciation in America. Our photography holdings are particularly strong in mid to late 19th century views of Asia, and consist of important works by both western and native photographers and studios. Photographs and other visual documents from the Archives have been featured in numerous galleries exhibitions.

Welcome to SAOA. South Asia Open Archives is a free open-access resource for research and teaching - a rich and growing curated collection of key historical and contemporary sources in arts, humanities and social sciences, from and about South Asia, in English and other languages of the region. SAOA's collection currently contains hundreds of thousands of pages of books, journals, newspapers, census data, magazines, and documents, with particular focus on social & economic history, literature, women & gender, and caste & social structure.

The Visions collection includes the written and photographed experiences of Europeans and Americans who traveled to Southeast Asia during the period of imperialism. The peoples of Southeast Asia experienced waves of colonization beginning in 1511 when the Portuguese took Melaka, a strategic and thriving port city on the Malay Peninsula. The Spanish established a colony in the Philippines which they ruled from the 1560s until 1899 when the United States ousted the Spanish and governed the colony until Philippine independence in 1946. The Dutch gradually conquered the areas known today as Indonesia beginning in 1596 and ending after WWII. The British Empire, centered in South Asia, moved into the Malay Peninsula and Burma by the early 1800s but did not withdraw from Burma until 1948 and Malaysia and Singapore until 1957. France established a foothold in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos, an area grouped under the rubric of French Indochina and ruled by the French from the mid-to-late 1800s until after WWII.

The complex histories of colonization in Southeast Asia have enabled the production of a vibrant (and ethnocentric) multiplicity of accounts by missionaries, travelers, officials, military officers, captains, naturalists, scholars, children, and even a dog. The Southeast Asia Visions collection includes a selection of historically rich primary accounts which range chronologically from the 1550s to the 1920s. These travelogues, letters, official accounts, journals, autobiographies, guidebooks, and photo albums cover Southeast Asia in the main but also include East Asia, South Asia, Africa, South America and other locales. All sources are in English or French and with a few exceptions are written by European and American men and women.

postcards, photos, slides, posters, play scripts

Full transcripts of the writings of Lachlan Macquarie describing the British military campaign in 1799 against Tipu Sultan, the ruler of Mysore (South India), and the assault upon his fortress and capital at Seringapatam (Srirangapatna or Srirangapattana).

Historical timeline including prehistory, classical India, Muslim India, British India, and Modern South Asia.

Links to full texts of documents, images, maps, letters, poems.

Photos especially document culture and regional clothing. (Univ. of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)

Full transcripts of Lachlan Macquarie's letters and journal describing his involvement in the British military campaign to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in 1796.

Maps of the battles and campaigns of the Vietnam War, 1954-1975

Primary Source texts translated with discussion questions. Intended for Asian Studies and World History courses.

Historical Timelines for Vietnams regions (North, Central, and South)

Maps showing the campaigns of the War in Afghanistan

The documents include highest-level “snowflake” memos written by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld during the George W. Bush administration, critical cables written by U.S. ambassadors back to Washington under both Bush and Barack Obama, the deeply flawed Pentagon strategy document behind Obama’s “surge” in 2009, and multiple “lessons learned” findings by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) – lessons that were never learned.

The Tibetan and Himalayan Library (THL) is a publisher of websites, information services, and networking facilities relating to the Tibetan plateau and southern Himalayan regions. THL promotes the integration of knowledge and community across the divides of academic disciplines, the historical and the contemporary, the religious and the secular, the global and the local. In addition to more typical academic projects, THL promotes participatory knowledge that is created by and benefits local communities, while including contributors from all walks of life around the world. Data includes text, audio-video, images, maps, immersive objects, reference works, and interpretative essays. THL’s knowledge and technology are provided free of charge, and are built collaboratively by hundreds of people across the world who share this vision. We also have sister initiatives built by and for the communities in this region – the Tibetan Digital Library and the Bhutan National Digital Library. Explore our websites and services, and consider joining us as active participants.

The Cornell Modern Indonesia Project (CMIP) was initiated in the 1950s by faculty members in Cornell's Southeast Asia Program who were committed to making contemporary analyses of Indonesia and translations of its important documents available to scholars and students. The 75 titles in this series are divided into four categories: Interim Reports, Translations, Monographs, and Bibliographies. These works capture the drama of Indonesia's political and social evolution through the twentieth century: its struggle for independence from the Dutch under the leadership of Sukarno, reactions to the Japanese Occupation, the development of its civil government, its civil insurgencies, and the conditions that prevailed throughout the long dictatorship of General Suharto. A few other works in this series, such as Benedict Anderson's Mythology and the Tolerance of the Javanese, reflect on earlier Indonesian history relevant to the modern nation.