Suggestions for Resources by Era.

This site has some interesting pdfs about castles. This deals specifically with Welsh castles, but has some general stuff too (and links to other sources).

This is a (awesome) museum near to me dealing with buildings from 13th to 19th century, often with links to external sources about each house and the area/time it came from. They are also usually happy to answer enquiries.

For those of a more nautical bent, Portsmouth Royal Naval Museum is a good place to start. Again lots of links and they do answer enquiries (though it may take a while)

The Sussex Archaeological Society has fair bit of stuff too, from the Roman palace at Fishbourne to the Long Man of Wilmington (in fact I think most counties have a similar organisation). Again, lots of links and are helpful.

The Univ. of North Carolina has an informative site documenting the history of the American south with a collection of slave narratives, court records, census records, etc. that have been copied digitally. http://docsouth.unc.edu/browse/collections.html

JohnB

Hm... I should have a lot of 18th century links, considering that my blog is all about the 18th century, but the truth is I rely a lot more on books than online material (except clothing; you can't beat online museums for pics of extant clothes). There are a good number of good 18th century originals on Google books though, like cook books, guide books, memoirs, old law tracts etc. but I don't know if any of those would be interesting? I have a very specific (and extensive) links collection to those...

I love online newspaper archives, but I think you have a lot of those. Two I didn't see among them, though: The Word on the Street - basically 300 years of Scottish broadsheets (National Library of Scotland) – and for (mostly) 18th century London, the London Magazine is online and really well organized (1732-1829).

And I love this twitter account: http://twitter.com/GertrudeSavile It's the unpublished diary of a spinster from the 1720s being tweeted, original spelling and all.

The Greenwood Press Daily Life series has some nicely researched volumes covering a wide variety of places and time periods.

Maybe I just skimmed too fast, but I didn't see any of the published English manuscript collections, aside from Pepys, listed on the Resources by Era (Lisle Letters, Paston Letters, Oxinden Letters). There are a lot of good primary sources that have also been reprinted in the Victoria County Histories.

Also, for anyone who wants to consult original manuscripts, there's a good online paleography course (free) from Cambridge that'll help you decipher pretty much anything post 1500.

Mostly not online, but really good, solid, books since it seems recs for those are wanted too:

For Renaissance Italy: The Italian Renaissance Interior 1400 -1600 by Peter Thornton. So much more than it sounds like; it will tell you more about the daily life than most other books I've read. Also The Cardinal's Hat: Money, Ambition, and Everyday Life in the Court of a Borgia Prince by Mary Hollingworth. About one of Lucrezia Borgia's sons and his life in Ferrara and at the French Court as seen through his accounting books (great details and a lot more fascinating than it sounds) as he chases the elusive Cardinal's hat.

If anyone is interested in the later rule of Louis XIV and the French Regency (1715-1723) then the memoirs of Saint-Simon are a must. They're online in French here and an abridged version (if I remember correctly) can be found in English at Project Gutenberg. Saint-Simon cannot be trusted at all but it is a first hand account and is a must-read! Also The Man Who Would Be King: The Life of Philippe d'Orléans, Regent of France by Christine Pevitt is a really good book on that era. Philippe was quite a character (not to mention his mother).

For the equivalent period in England 1700: Scenes from London Life by Maureen Waller is outstanding. A quick but still pretty in-depth look at life in late 17th/early18th century England.

A really good book on clothes in the 18th C is The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England by John Styles (not just swanky coats like most costume books - it's really focused on what it says it is). Interestingly, another highly recommended book is by his wife Amanda Vickery (both are professors of history) - Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England. And Roy Porter's English Society in the Eighteenth Century is a good overview and introduction (if very brief and a little confusing since there's a lot crammed into a rather small book) to Georgian England.

Medieval history - hands down, anything by Frances and Joseph Gies.

Two great websites for 18th century American daily life are those for Colonial Williamsburg: http://www.history.org/history/

and the Claude Moore Colonial Farm:
http://www.1771.org

Both include a wide range of specific period information about food, clothing, buildings, crops, occupations, and other aspects of colonial daily life.

If you're in the Washington, D.C., area, I'd also encourage a visit to the Claude Moore Colonial Farm - one of the area's lesser-known but worthwhile historical attractions. While places like Mount Vernon and Monticello show what life was like for elites, this farm's reenactors illustrate daily life for a tenant family in Virginia in 1771.

Sure, np. Most of these links are worldcat citations (worldcat will tell you the nearest library where they're available).

Greenwood Press Daily Life Series - I can attest that the ones I've read so far have been v. good

Paston Letters edited by Norman Davis

Lisle Letters, edited by Muriel St Clare Byrne

Oxinden Letters, edited by Dorothy Gardiner

And this isn't a direct link to how to find the books, but here's the Victoria County History project's webpage

9th century Carolingian Empire -- anything by Allen Cabaniss.

Who Wore What?: Women's Wear 1861-1865 It has photographs, tintypes, duerrogortypes (sp?). Not drawings.

8th & 9th century --

Daily Life in the World of Charlemagne by Pierre Riche

Victorian London, The Life of a City 1840-1870, by Liza Picard, 2005

I took this out from my local library and it's great, especially in terms of its organization. Chapters include: Smells, Streets, Railways, Domestic Service, Food, Clothes, etc., which really helped me to organize my research.

Also, for the same era, although there are other English slang dictionaries out there, I like this one for authenticity (1865):

http://books.google.com/books?id=o0...ce=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false