World History by Topic: Science & Technology

Primary sources provide immediate, firsthand testimony or direct evidence concerning an event or topic.

Examples of primary sources include letters and diaries; photographs, audio and motion picture recordings; transcribed speeches; books, newspapers and magazines published during the period under consideration; government documents and other publications; oral histories, autobiographies and memoirs; and even artifacts, like clothing, furniture, and other items of material culture from the period.

Charles Darwin's Library. 
A digital edition and virtual reconstruction of the surviving books owned by Charles Darwin, with transcriptions of his annotations and marks. 

Darwin Correspondence Project. 
Full text database of more than 9,000 of Charles Darwin’s letters.

Database of Scientific Illustrators, 1450-1950. (DSI)
Containing illustrations from natural history, medicine, technology and other sciences. A project by the Section for History of Science & Technology at the University of Stuttgart's History Department. 

École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne. (EPFL) PLUME.
EPFL's digitized collection of more than 900 scientific volumes dating from the 15th to the 19th century.

Einstein Archives Online. 
Access to Albert Einstein’s scientific and non-scientific manuscripts held by the Albert Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Epact: Scientific Instruments of Medieval and Renaissance Europe. 
A catalogue of medieval and renaissance scientific instruments from four European museums: the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford, the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, Florence, the British Museum, London, and the Museum Boerhaave, Leiden.

Harvard University. Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments.

Harvard University. Contagion: Historical Views of Diseases and Epidemics. 

​​​​​Henry Ford Archive of American Innovation. Digital Collections.

History of Science and Medicine Primary Sources at Yale. 
Extensive lists of published and archival materials.

Images from the History of Medicine. (IHM)
Online access to images from the historical collections of the U.S. National Library of Medicine. IHM includes image files of a wide variety of visual media including fine art, photographs, engravings, and posters that illustrate the social and historical aspects of medicine dating from the 15th to 21st century.

Linda Hall Library. Digital Collections. 
Digitized items from an independent research library devoted to science, engineering, and technology. 

Linus Pauling Research Notebooks. 
The Pauling Papers holdings include forty-six research notebooks spanning the years of 1922 to 1994 and covering the scientific fields in which Dr. Pauling involved himself. In this regard, the notebooks contain many of Pauling's laboratory calculations and experimental data, as well as scientific conclusions, ideas for further research and numerous autobiographical musings. From the Special Collections & Archives Research Center at Oregon State University Libraries.

Medical Heritage Library. 
Digitized rare books, pamphlets, journals, and films covering the history of medicine, with representative works from each of the past seven centuries. 

Medicine and Madison Avenue. 
Digital collection that explores the relationship between modern medicine and modern advertising, or "Madison Avenue," through health-related advertisements printed in newspapers and magazines from the 1910s through the 1950s. From Duke University. 

NASA History Series Publications. 
A collection of some 100 books from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) History program, ranging from the early days of NASA's predecessor agency, NACA through the earliest days of American space flight to the present, including histories of the centers, missions, technologies and space science. Includes several atlases of solar system bodies.

Newton Papers. 
Cambridge University Library holds the largest and most important collection of the scientific works of Isaac Newton (1642-1727). Digitized and available online.

The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.
Online access to the Royal Society of London's journal of scientific discoveries, from 1665 to 1886. 

Science History Institute. Digital Collections. 
digital.sciencehistory.org/Representing artifacts, photographs, advertisements, letters, rare books, oral histories, and more, and dating from the Roman Empire to the 21st century,

U.S. National Library of Medicine. History of Medicine Collections. 
Provides links to Books and Journals; Archives and Modern Manuscripts; Prints and Photographs; Films and Videos; and Digital Collections.

UCSB Library. History of Science and Technology. 
Lists of materials available in the UCSB Library's Department of Special Research Collections.

University of Toronto Library. Anatomia, 1522-1867. 
Illustrations of human anatomy selected from the Jason A. Hannah and Academy of Medicine collections in the history of medicine at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

The Wellcome Library. (London) 
An extensive library of books, manuscripts, archives, films and pictures on the history of medicine from the earliest times to the present.

Fordham University. History of Science Sourcebook. 
A subset of texts derived from Fordham's Internet Ancient History Sourcebook, Internet Medieval Sourcebook, and
Internet Modern History Sourcebook.

The Cambridge History of Science. 
Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000 -
​- Sciences Engineering Library Q125 .C32 2000
Contents: ​v.1: Ancient science. v.2: Medieval science. v.3: Early modern science. v.4: Eighteenth-century science. v.5: The Modern physical and mathematical sciences. v.6: The Modern biological and Earth Sciences. v.7: The Modern social sciences. v.8: Modern science in national and international context. (Not yet acquired)

A Chronology of the History of Science, 1450-1900. 
New York: Garland Pub., 1987.
- Sciences & Engineering Q125 .G39 1987

Chronology of Science. 
New York: Facts on File, 2006.
- Sciences & Engineering Q125 .R455 2006

See also the "Cambridge history of medicine" series … which includes such titles as Public health in British India: Anglo-Indian preventive medicine, 1859-1914 (1994) and Plague and the poor in early Renaissance Florence (1986), as well as the following series:

▪ [Ashgate] History of medicine in context,
▪ Cambridge studies in the history of medicine,
▪ Clio Medica,
▪ Henry E. Sigerist series in the history of medicine (Johns Hopkins UP),
▪ [Routledge] Studies in the social history of medicine, and
▪ Wellcome Institute series in the history of medicine.

Other useful title may be found in the following series: 
▪ Berkeley papers in history of science,
▪ Cambridge history of science,
▪ Dibner Institute studies in the history of science and technology,
▪ Johns Hopkins introductory studies in the history of science,
▪ Pittsburgh-Konstanz series in the philosophy and history of science,
▪ Routledge studies in the history of science, technology, and medicine, and
▪ Uppsala studies in history of science.

Search the Library Catalog portion of UCSB Library Search for "Cambridge history of medicine" (or other series title) as an Exact Phrase in Any Field.