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Huygens was a prominent Dutch mathematician, astronomer and physicist. He published major studies on mechanics and optics, and a pioneer work on games of chance. He is famous for his discovery of the rings of Saturn and its moon Titan, and for inventing the pendulum clock.
Shortly before his death in 1695 Huygens bequeathed a large part of his scholarly papers to Leiden University Library. After 1800, the legacy was further enriched by manuscripts and letters from family property, amongst others a large number of letters from Huygens' father Constantijn (1596 - 1687).
For over three centuries, many scholars have made the Codices Hugeniani the object of their research. The contents of the archive have been made partly accessible through the well-known Oeuvres complètes (a 19-volume 19th Century reference work). More recently, the Codices Hugeniani were described in detail by Dr. Joella Yoder in her Catalogue of the Manuscripts of Christiaan Huygens (Brill, 2013). With COHU the full archive's contents are now easily accessible for the first time.
Features and benefits
- Sections: COHU is logically organized in the same way as the original archive, i.e. 52 codices as main entrances, enabling an overview of the archive as a whole.
- Advanced search options: In each codex the scans are offered in smaller groupings ranging from 1 to several dozen folios each. These groupings are all described with detailed metadata. This offers the possibility of an advanced search for specific topics, etc.
- Rich metadata: For a large part the metadata are taken from Joella Yoder’s catalogue. This is the most authoritative overview and the outcome of 20+ years of hard work. The book contains valuable information about the archive that is not in the Leiden University Library's catalogue.
Direct link between famous Oeuvres complètesand archive
The COHU metadata offer a concordance between the physical archive and the Oeuvres complètes.
• Languages used: French
• Title list available
• MARC records are available
During the sixteenth century Protestant authors had grasped the importance of winning over the souls and minds of the French people from the outset and the production of Genevan presses was therefore predominantly in French. If the Catholic Church wished to preserve its position in France, it was vital to respond to the gauntlet thrown down by the Calvinist leaders. It is this response, the writings of the French Catholic authors against Calvin and his teachings, that are presented here. This unique selection of writings includes both works attacking the precepts of Calvinism and those defending the Catholic doctrine against the criticism and condemnation of Calvinist authors.
Location of originals: Bibliothèque de Toulouse, Bibliothèque Mazarine, Paris; Bibliothèque Méjanes, Aix-en-Provence; Bibliothèque municipale de Bordeaux; Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon; Bibliothèque municipale de Nancy; Bibliothèque municipale de Nîmes; Bibliothèque municipale de Reims; Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris; Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Paris; Médiathèque Ceccano, Avignon; Médiathèque de la ville de Rodez; Médiathèque du Pontiff roy, Metz; Universiteitsbibliotheek Katholieke Universiteit Leuven; Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, München; Bibliothèque de Genève, Genève; Institut d’histoire de la Réormation, Genèe; British Library, London; Palace Green Library, Durham University
Isaac Vossius (1618-1689) was a classical philologist and collector of manuscripts, maps, atlases and printed works. Vossius was born in 1618 as the son of the humanist Gerard Johannes Vossius (1577-1649). In 1648, Isaac started to work as a scholar for Queen Christina of Sweden. After he had sold the famous library of his father to Christina in 1649, Vossius was appointed court librarian a year later, with the task of expanding and cataloguing the library. After a stay of eighteen months in the Republic, partly forced, Vossius returned to Sweden in 1653, where he found his own book collection and the court library in great disarray. When Christina abdicated in 1654, a large part of her library was shipped to Rome. A part of the manuscripts and printed books was, however, taken from Christina’s library by Vossius as compensation for late payments, and for the loss of his own books. At the end of his life Vossius bequeathed his library to the children of his brother Matthaeus.
When negotiations with Oxford University had come to nothing, the heirs accepted an offer from the curators in 1690 to buy the collection for 33,000 guilders on behalf of Leiden University Library. The purchase of the Vossius library caused financial difficulties for Leiden University, but to its library it brought international fame. Especially the manuscripts proved to be of invaluable worth. The purchase of the Vossius library doubled the collection of Leiden University to c. 9,500 books. Doubles were removed from the printed books and these were auctioned in 1706. After ex libris slips had been attached to all title pages, the books were distributed over the existing collection which was grouped according to size and to subject. The manuscripts from Vossius (over 700 items) were always kept separately.
The 363 codices in all comprise 40,278 openings, resulting in 84,266 images, including covers and flyleaves.
The manuscript collection is enriched by detailed information drawn from by K. A. de Meyier's catalogues of the codices, providing users, both students and researchers, with essential information on the content, context, and physical appearance of each codex.
The collection chiefly contains State Department’s instructions to US diplomats and consuls dispatched in the Netherlands as well as letters, reports, recommendations, dossiers, and memos compiled by American diplomats posted in The Hague and across the whole Dutch colonial empire. The documents cover a broad range of topics including political, economic, and military relations, trade policies, migration, cultural and religious exchanges, and transnational social issues such as civil rights, pacifism, environmentalism, labor relations, and human rights.
A large part of the collection focuses on the post-1945 era and comprises papers on the development and execution of the Marshall Plan in the Netherlands, on the future of the Dutch colonial empire, and on the development of post-war European and Dutch politics. The postwar dispatches from The Hague are indeed an extremely useful source through which to read the evolution of the European integration process, the building of a transatlantic security community, the organization of concerted anti-communist activities, and the reactions to the emergence of a widespread anti-American sentiment in Europe in coincidence with the escalation of the Vietnam War.
This collection comprises 174,926 scans and is part of Transatlantic Relations Online: Digital Archives of the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies, which is the result of ongoing cooperation between the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies and Brill.
Image caption: Reijn Dirksen, 1950 (US Economic Cooperation Administration, Washington, DC) - Public Domain
The uniqueness of this collection stems from van Stekelenburg’s focus on the individual motivations that induced Dutch people to migrate, his attention to the social composition of Dutch emigrants, to the political reaction of their governments, and to the many organizations that helped them settle in the New World. This collection, indeed, brings in the voices and perspectives of non-state agents and provides further examples of the non-linear processes of assimilation that Dutch migrants had to go through in North America.
Finally, the documents of this collection reveal the emphasis on cultural propaganda, conceived as an effective means to spread a certain range of ideas among a large and well-defined target audience, that characterized the phenomenon of Dutch-Catholic emigration. In doing so, this collection opens the field to further inter- and multi-disciplinary studies on the ways in which Dutch popular media, including radio, the press, and cinema, introduced and framed the numerous possibilities of overseas migration.
This collection comprises 13,081 scans and is part of Transatlantic Relations Online: Digital Archives of the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies, which is the result of ongoing cooperation between the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies and Brill.
Image caption: Author Unknown; Mrs. van Engelen, a Dutch woman packing her stuff before leaving for Holambra, Brazil, 1950 (National Archive, The Hague) - Public Domain
The collection contains correspondence, reports, lists, and pamphlets regarding Dutch immigration to the Americas (mostly in English), as well as correspondence from and about individual immigrants’ experiences (mostly in Dutch).
As with the van Stekelenburg collection, these documents illuminate the complex history of Dutch emigration, expanding traditional narratives chronologically, thematically, and spatially. In particular, the Stallinga-Ganzevoort collection focuses on the lives and choices of emigrants belonging to different Christian denominations (predominantly Protestant) and clarifies the importance of the continuous educational campaigns that Dutch churches were carrying on at home with the aim of training those professional figures whose expertise was needed on the other side of the Atlantic.
At the same time, this collection provides information about Dutch emigrants who decided to settle in such countries as Brazil. In this particular setting, Dutch people encountered different and partly novel problems and could not always rely on pre-existing national networks or communities. For this reason, the collection is especially appealing to those scholars who study global migrations, transnational identities, and cross-cultural exchanges.
This collection comprises 17,011 scans and is part of Transatlantic Relations Online: Digital Archives of the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies, which is the result of ongoing cooperation between the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies and Brill.
Image caption: Daan Noske / Anefo, The trip of four new couples from Schiphol to Canada, 1954 (National Archive, The Hague) - Public Domain
In 1949, the Fulbright Program was set up in the Netherlands as well. In order to better coordinate academic exchanges between the Netherlands and the US, the two countries formally established a bilateral United States Educational Foundation (USEF) in Amsterdam. Since then, that organization has changed its name twice. In 1972, USEF became the Netherlands America Committee for Educational Exchange (NACEE). NACEE in turn became the Fulbright Center in 2004. The documents collected by the USEF, NACEE, and the Fulbright Center are held by the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies (RIAS) in Middelburg. However, due to privacy regulations and classification, the only part of this collection that is digitally available is its Section G.
Section G contains a large variety of historical sources on the foundation and development of the NACEE and the Fulbright Center, including speeches by and on Senator Fulbright, papers related to an earlier exchange organization, the Netherland-America Foundation, and personal recollections of alumni. Section G is therefore the perfect starting point for any research aimed at discovering the historical development of such a relevant cultural program.
This collection comprises 6,848 scans and is part of Transatlantic Relations Online: Digital Archives of the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies, which is the result of ongoing cooperation between the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies and Brill.
Image caption: Joop van Bilsen / Anefo, Queen Juliana of the Netherlands and prince Bernhard receive the US Senator J. William Fulbright and his wife in Baarn, Utrecht, 1964 (Nationaal Archief, The Hague) - CC0
The RIAS holds hundreds of thousands of documents that help scholars and students at any level to investigate the complexity of American history. The RIAS collections focus on a variety of issues, such as civil rights, national security, intelligence, propaganda, radicalism, religion, and diplomacy. Collected over more than thirty years, these documents include presidential papers, personal correspondence and oral histories, departmental files, NGO records, diaries, memoires, historical periodicals, and journals.
In order to make its materials available to a larger audience, the RIAS, in cooperation with Brill, has recently started digitizing some of its most prominent holdings. Organized into the expanding online archival family Transatlantic Relations Online: Digital Archives of the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies and comprising, in this initial iteration, more than 200,000 scans, the digital archive currently consists of four different collections:
- Dutch-American Diplomatic Relations Online, 1784-1973
- The Fulbright Archives Online, 1949-2016 (excerpts): Papers of the Dutch-American Fulbright Program
- Dutch-Catholic Immigration to the Americas Online: The Henk van Stekelenburg Collection, 1820-1960
- Dutch-Protestant Immigration to the Americas Online: The Stallinga-Ganzevoort Collection, 1890-1960
Together, these collections provide unique insights into the history of Dutch-American relations, the development of transatlantic cultural programs, and the history of Dutch and European migration to North America. They are of particular interest to scholars working on cultural and public diplomacy, political and economic relations, migration flows, cross-cultural exchanges, the role of religion in foreign policy making, and the attractiveness of and resistance to American political, cultural, and economic hegemony in Europe.
• MARC records are available
Accounts of travel are a popular and accessible source for research on historical relations between “East” and “West” and are attractive for specialists and non-specialists alike. In the pre-modern period a large number of such accounts were published all over Europe. Predominantly covering the Ottoman Empire, the collection also stretches into Ethiopia, Central Asia, Afghanistan, North Africa, and of course Iran.