German Historical Institute Launches New Edition of Its Award-Winning Website GHDI

Since its original launch, twenty years ago, the site has been widely adopted for teaching and research use in the United States, Germany, and beyond while receiving accolades from the American Historical Association and other organizations for its breadth, variety, and academic rigor. With funding from the DFG (German Research Foundation) program for Scientific Library Services and Information Systems, the site’s underlying infrastructure has been adapted to fit modern technological requirements, including a responsive, accessible, and mobile-friendly design. The new German History in Documents and Images now has the capacity to present audiovisual sources and includes a wider variety of image-presentation options for classroom use as well as custom-designed maps. In addition, the site’s editorial board has expanded its topical coverage, specifically including more sources related to environmental history, global history, and the history of migration, while the background essays which accompany the primary sources have been revised and expanded to encompass the new research published since the site’s original debut.

The relaunched German History in Documents and Images continues the original site’s format of ten period-based volumes. Two volumes of the new edition—From Vormärz to Prussian Dominance, 1815–1866, and Two Germanies, 1961–1989—are now available on GHDI’s new website, germanhistorydocs.org. The remaining eight volumes, spanning from the early 16th century to the 2010s, will be published to the new site over the coming months. During this transition period the original GHDI site will continue to be available at its current URL (www.germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org); once the relaunch is complete the original site will be preserved in a web-archive format and remain accessible.

A spin-off of GHDI – German History Intersections – went online in 2022. German History Intersections examines three broad topics – migration, knowledge and education, and Germanness – from 1500 to the present. By charting these topics across centuries, the project offers an alternative to traditional histories that focus on discrete historical periods. Taking a long view allows the project to better illustrate the interconnectedness of the chosen topics – migration, knowledge and education, and Germanness, it is clear, do not follow parallel or independent paths over the course of modern German history, but rather intersect at frequent points and in multiple ways.