LibGuides: Primary Sources: Travel &amp; Migration

Travel & Migration

Age of Exploration This link opens in a new window Explore five centuries (1420 - 1920) of journeys across the globe, scientific discoveries, the expansion of European colonialism, new trade routes, and conflict over territories. Featuring rare manuscript and early printed material, highly illustrated maps and documents, diaries and ships' logs from some of the most well-known voyages in history. Note: Scanned documents are in original language and have not been translated.
Air and Space Law: Hein Online This link opens in a new window Collection of books, documents, reports, and more illustrating the history of air and spaceflight through the programs and people that made these dreams possible. Through the collection, users will see how governments and regulators reacted to new technologies, the accidents and disasters that prompted reform, and the new frontiers that await as technology advances at an improbable speed.
Border and Migration Studies Online This link opens in a new window This collection explores and provides historical background on more than thirty key worldwide border areas, including: U.S. and Mexico; the European Union; Afghanistan; Israel; Turkey; The Congo; Argentina; China; Thailand; and others. Contains text, video and images and is organised by theme.
Early Experiences in Australasia: Primary Sources and Personal Narratives 1788-1901 This link opens in a new window Covering 1788-1901, this archive includes letters and diaries, narratives, and other primary source materials from those settling in the region in this period. The collection can be browsed by topic, collection, title, people and place.
Grand Tour This link opens in a new window Taking the phenomenon of the Grand Tour as a starting point, this resource explores the relationship between Britain and Europe from c.1550 to 1850, exploring the Anglo-European response to continental travel for pleasure, business and diplomacy.
Immigration: Records of the INS, 1880-1930 This link opens in a new window Covers the investigations made in the U.S. during the massive immigration wave at the turn of the 20th century. The files cover Asian immigration, especially Japanese and Chinese migration, to California, Hawaii, and other states; Mexican immigration to the U.S. from 1906-1930; and European immigration. Also covers the Immigration and Naturalization Service's regulation of prostitution and white slavery and suppression of radical aliens. Most files are INS correspondence with some oral histories from immigrants themselves.
Leisure, Travel & Mass Culture: The History of Tourism This link opens in a new window This resource presents a multi-national journey through well-known and little-known destinations unlocked for the traveller between 1850 and the 1980s. Providing insight into the expansion, accessibility and affordability of tourism for the masses.
Mapping the World: Maps and Travel Literature - Nineteenth Century Collections Online This link opens in a new window The archive presents unique insight into the age of cartography and the rise of leisure travel, spotlighting a distinguished array of historical atlases, gazetteers, travel narratives, and a variety of maps,
Medieval Travel Writing This link opens in a new window This collection presents manuscripts of some of the most important works of European travel writing from the later medieval period. The chief focus is on journeys to central Asia and the Far East. The collection also includes a number of important accounts of travels to or through the Holy Land. Date range: 12th century onwards
Migration to New Worlds This link opens in a new window Full text access to a wide range of primary source material focused on migration to the New Worlds.
North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries and Oral Histories This link opens in a new window Includes 2,162 authors giving a personal view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada between 1800 and 1950. Contains contemporaneous letters and diaries, oral histories, interviews, and other personal narratives. Also includes some audio files with the voices of the immigrants.
North American Women's Letters and Diaries This link opens in a new window This collection includes the immediate experiences of 1,325 women and 150,000 pages of diaries and letters. Coverage is broadly C18 to C20 with collections focusing on travel, pioneering and daily life for girls as well as covering women's views on family, marriage, travel, religion, disease, and death.
Overland Journeys: Travels in the West, 1800-1880 This link opens in a new window Contains a wide variety of material detailing the experiences of settlers in the American West, including many records from men and women making the westward journey and recording their experiences. Comprised of over 290 documents sourced from microfilm collections and based on bibliographies of Western history.
Post-War Europe: Refugees, Exile and Resettlement, 1945-1950 This link opens in a new window Covers the politics and administration of the post war refugee crisis in Europe as well as the day-to-day survival of the refugees themselves. Records are sourced from the UK's National Archives and the Wiener Library in London and contain a vast variety of documents including photographs, correspondence, statistics and other manuscripts.
Records of the Deutsches Ausland-Institut, Stuttgart: Records on Resettlement This link opens in a new window German language Nazi records on resettlement seized from the Axis Powers during and after WWII. Covers the implementation and modification of National Socialist race doctrine and includes negotiations and agreements with the Russians, Romanians and Italians, plus other records covering many other aspects of resettlement in the period 1939-1944.
Records of the Office of the Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of Germandom This link opens in a new window German language collection from the Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of Germandom (Reichskommissar fur die Festigung deutschen Volkstums, RKFDV): an office in Nazi Germany responsible for repatriation, and settlement of both German citizens and ethnic Germans who lived abroad, into Nazi Germany and German held territories. Covers 1939-1945.
Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) This link opens in a new window RGS archive of geography, travel and exploration from the 15th to the 20th century. Includes extensive map collections, charts, plans, expedition reports, fieldnotes, correspondence, diaries, grey literature, atlases and gazetteers, monographs, photographs, proceedings, lectures and ephemera. Special collections include the Everest expeditions, National Antarctic Expedition, David Livingstone, Younghusband and Ernest Shackleton collections.
Travel Writing, Spectacle and World History This link opens in a new window Hundreds of accounts by women of their travels across the globe from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. Includes unique manuscripts, diaries and correspondence to drawings, guidebooks and photographs. The resource also includes a gallery with hundreds of items of visual material, including postcards, sketches and photographs.
Western Books on Southeast Asia This link opens in a new window A collection of 318 rare Western-language publications selected from the John M. Echols collection on Southeast Asia at Cornell University. Publications date from C17-C19 and consist of travel writing by Europeans visiting Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia), Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Java and Indonesia, and the Philippines.
Reports of the Immigrant Commission, 1907-1910 This link opens in a new window This collection reproduces 41 bound volumes of reports by the U.S. Immigration Commission, analyzing the heavy waves of immigration to America early in this century and their effects on the country. 
Social History Archive This link opens in a new window Largest single online collection of mainly British & Irish historical primary source material although some U.S and European records are included. Includes birth, marriage and death records, local, regional, and national UK newspapers, electoral records and census returns, army and war records, crime reports and migration records.(Content, when fully migrated, will be the same as content in Find My Past)