Chinese History: Find Primary Sources

This digitized collection of English-language pamphlets on China, published between 1750 and 1929, offers access to 244 (and counting) pamphlets on a wide variety of topics. Most pamphlets deal with Christian missionizing efforts, but other themes include the Chinese diaspora; international conflict and invasion; rebellion and revolution; the opium trade, consumption, and policy; and language and writing.

FBIS Daily Reports, 1941-1996 offers researchers primary source accounts of international economic, environmental, military, political, and social events. It contains first-hand news coverage translated by experts from the original language (e.g., Arabic, Chinese, Polish, Russian and many others) into English. Media represented include foreign radio and television news broadcasts, news agency transmissions, newspapers, periodicals, and government statements. These are the reports American diplomats and other U.S. decision makers relied on to understand major events as they unfolded around the globe.

Several of the innumerable topics covered by FBIS include World War II and the Axis powers; the final stages of European colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa; the first decades of apartheid in South Africa; the emergence of postcolonial Arab countries; the creation of Israel; the Iron Curtain and Berlin Wall (including its fall); the superpowers’ Space Race; the Suez and Cuban Missile crises; the Korean and Vietnamese conflicts; the Iranian Revolution; Lech Walesa and Poland's Solidarity movement; the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan; Mikhail Gorbachev and the dissolution of the Soviet Union; and Chinese students’ takeover of Tiananmen Square.

FBIS is the premier TCNJ Library database for researchers looking to find primary sources about the Cold War from a non-U.S. perspective.

Find here the digitized press of more than twenty cities on the Chinese mainland. The database offers an authentic window into life, culture, and politics during a critical period in Chinese history spanning Qing collapse, civil war, and the first years of the People's Republic (1911-1949).

"This collection includes photographs Hanson took in China between 1937 and 1938. Highlights of the collection include early photographs of Mao Zedong (毛澤東), Lin Biao (林彪), Zhou Enlai (周恩來), and Zhu De (朱德) at Yan'an (延安)—prominent members of the guerilla troops that took over China in 1949, creating today’s “People’s Republic of China”—and of Dr. Norman Bethune, the well-known Canadian surgeon who traveled to China in 1938 and created mobile medical units for Chinese forces fighting Japanese troops."