Early Modern History

I have the best possible excuse for not having written any posts here recently. For the last two days, I have been exploring the resources of the Internet Archive site which I found completely by accident on Monday morning. I am sorry to confess that I had known nothing of it before then.  It holds digital copies of between 400,000 and 500,000 books. Amongst them are:

Copies of eighty five Historical Manuscripts Commission Reports.

Several dozen early Camden Society volumes.

Four of the volumes from the Calendar of State Papers Domestic between 1603 and 1625.

The complete run of S.R.Gardiner's History of England.

Copies of the House of Commons' debates edited by Gardiner for 1610 and 1625; Notes of Proceedings in the House of Lords in 1621, 1624 and 1628; Sir John Eliot's Apology for Socrates: John Forster's two volume biography of Eliot; Helen Relf's 1917 work on the Petition of Right; Notestein and Relf's edition of the Proceedings in the House of Commons in 1629: Notestein's edition of D'Ewes's diary for 1640-1641: both volumes of D'Ewes's autobiography and correspondence; the Fairfax Correspondence; Robert Baillie's Letters and Journals; the Hardwicke State Papers. I could go on singing its praises indefinitely.

It is a marvellous resource about which I had not known. Do not expect to find every eighteenth or nineteenth-century publication there that you may hope to find. But you will be surprised to see how many there are.

Go to:   http://www.archive.org/details/texts     to start searching.

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