About the Archive
The “Integrated History” website was created in order to provide researchers, instructors, and students with easy access to primary sources dealing with the history of East-Central Europe.
The first part of the site is geared toward an English-speaking and non-specialist audience and only includes sources that either were originally composed in English or have been translated into English. We had two particular groups of users in mind in planning this part of the archive:
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Educators and students engaged in broad survey courses on European History, Western Civilization, or World History
We understand that many educators would like to move beyond the traditional focus on France, Great Britain, Germany and the United States in introducing students to the complexity of European or “Western” historical experiences. Many topics that arise in the context of Western European history—the Reformation, absolutism, nationalism, socialism/communism—have interesting echoes, variations, or even roots in the lands of East-Central Europe. And yet even instructors who want to do justice to these aspects of European history have long found it extremely difficult to do so. Both published collections of primary sources and existing web-based archives of primary sources tend to focus disproportionately—indeed, often exclusively—on the large nation-states of Western Europe. Since few instructors teaching survey courses have the time, the resources, or the linguistic skills to hunt down and make sense of primary sources from East-Central Europe on their own, they are left with few options. What we are trying to do is create a central clearing house for primary source that would bring together the scattered material that already exists in various locations on the Web as well as gradually add newly scanned and/or translated material. By organizing this material under readily recognizable chronological and thematic headings, non-specialists will be able to browse the archive easily and find the kinds of texts that fit their pedagogical goals.
Educators and students engaged in courses focused on East-Central Europe
We know one of the biggest challenges facing this group is finding primary sources that are extensive and varied but also affordable, since most instructors and students do not have access to large research libraries with extensive holdings on East-Central European history. By making a larger array of sources readily available free-of-charge, we hope to help educators and students overcome this constraint. Furthermore, since many individuals teaching East-Central European history are specialists in one or two countries for a specific time period, they may not be aware of the kinds of primary sources available on other countries or time periods. This site has culled together and organized these sources thematically, geographically, and chronologically so that the commonalities between the historical experience of different countries/peoples/time periods can be fruitfully explored.
The second part of the "Integrated History" website is devoted to providing electronic access to a variety of unique original-language sources relating to East-Central Europe. Initially, the bulk of the material in this part of the web archive will be drawn from a rich and rare collection of material relating to Poland’s Solidarity movement during the 1980s. As the archive expands, we hope to include a wider variety of original-language primary sources that are not readily available, either online or in print.
Please bear in mind that this site is in its infancy. We will be adding to its holdings regularly, so if you do not find what you are looking for right away, we encourage you to check back with us in the future. One of the greatest advantages of this site is that we only include sources with reliable links. We have been able to do this by creating PDF versions of sources captured from other websites that we then store in a permanent repository called DSpace. This means that the site has room to grow and is not dependent on the longevity of the websites from which some material was originally drawn.
