British Victorian Period Research: Primary Sources Online

Includes these Archives:

Archive 1: British Politics and Society
Archive 2: Asia and the West: Diplomacy & Cultural Exchange
Archive 3: British Theatre, Music, and Literature: High and Proper Culture
Archive 4: European Literature, 1700-1840: The Corvey Collection
Archive 5: Europe and Africa: Commerce, Christianity, Civilization, and Conquest
Archive 6: Photography: The World through the Lens, 1839-1939
Archive 7: Science, Technology, and Medicine: 1780-1925
Archive 8: Women: Transnational Networks
Archive 9: Science, Technology, and Medicine: 1780-1925, Part II
Archive 10: Children's Literature and Childhood
Archive 11: Mapping the World: Maps and Travel Literature
Archive 12: Religion, Society, Spirituality, and Reform

London Low Life is a full-text searchable resource, containing colour digital images of rare books, ephemera, maps and other materials relating to 18th, 19th and early 20th century London. It is designed for both teaching and study, from undergraduate to research students and beyond.

In addition to the digital documents, London Low Life contains a wealth of secondary resources, including a chronology, interactive maps, essays, online galleries and links to other useful websites.

Delve into the earliest voyages of Vasco da Gama, the opening of trade with the Spice Islands, the colonisation of the Americas and Australasia, the search for the Northwest and Northeast Passages, and finally the race for the Poles with this robust primary source collection. Featuring rare manuscript and early printed material, highly illustrated maps and documents, diaries and ships' logs from some of the most well-known voyages in history, this collection provides access to key events in the history of European maritime exploration from c.1420-1920.

Bringing together unique primary sources drawn from world-class maritime archives and heritage collections Life at Sea takes a sociocultural approach, focusing on the individual experiences and personal narratives of seafarers. Through a broad range of sources, from journals and memoirs to ships’ logs and court records, the lives of ordinary seamen, merchants, whalers and pirates can be explored. This resource offers exciting new insights into three centuries of the Anglo-American maritime world. Dates of materials are c1650-1850.

Empire Online offers about 60,000 images of original documents linked to essays by leading scholars in the field of Empire Studies. The sections cover Cultural Contacts, (1492-1969); Empire Writing and the Literature of Empire; the Visible Empire; Religion and Empire; and Race, Class, and Colonialism (c1783-1969). Maps, manuscripts, pamphlets, paintings, drawings, and rare books are included. Five centuries of history are represented.

With parts I & II spanning 1482-1899 and 1900-2010 respectively, the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) digital archive contains more than 150,000 maps, charts and atlases complemented by manuscripts, field notes, expedition reports, scrapbooks, correspondence, diaries, illustrations, and sketches.

The archive is representative of the world’s largest private collection of maps and charts, along with atlases, globes, world gazetteers, and original manuscript mapping dating back to the 1400s that is held in the Society building in London. Some of the most influential geographers of the last two centuries have contributed to the collection.

British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries includes the immediate experiences of approximately 500 women, as revealed in over 100,000 pages of diaries and letters. Particular care has been taken to index this material so that it can be searched more thoroughly than ever before. The collection now includes primary materials spanning more than 300 years. Each source has been carefully chosen using leading bibliographies. The collection also includes biographies and an extensive annotated bibliography of the sources in the database.

From government-led population drives during the early nineteenth century through to mass steamship travel, Migration to New Worlds showcases unique primary source material recounting the many and varied personal experiences of 350 years of migration. Explore Colonial Office files on emigration, diaries and travel journals, ship logs and plans, printed literature, objects, watercolours, and oral histories supplemented by carefully selected secondary research aids. Covers 1800-into the 20th c.

This resource brings together manuscript, printed and visual primary source materials for the study of global commodities in world history. The commodities featured in this resource have been transported, exchanged and consumed around the world for hundreds of years. They helped transform societies, global trading operations, habits of consumption and social practices.

This series includes archival materials such as journals, correspondence, official records and personal papers over a two hundred year period, all related to British involvement in the Atlantic region, including both Africa and the Americas. This database is also known as British Online Archives.

Victorian Popular Culture contains primary sources about popular entertainment in the United Kingdom, United States, and continental Europe from 1779-1930. Four sub-sets: Spiritualism; Sensation and Magic; Circuses, Sideshows and Freaks; Music Hall, Theatre and Popular Entertainment; and the Advent of Cinema. Emphasis is on visual sources with a useful slideshow gallery for teaching and presentations. Some secondary resources are included: interactive chronology, biographies, glossary, bibliography. Digitization in color. Victorian Popular Culture video clips

1850s-1930s Contains Research Sources 1: British and Irish Architectural and Decorative Applied Arts 1850-1930s database. This is an ongoing project to digitize all books, exhibit catalogues, journals, and trade literature on this subject published in Britain and Ireland during this period. The resources include biographical information on architects, artists, and designers whose works are discussed or illustrated.

This collection makes available the John Murray archive held at the National Library of Scotland. One of the most important surviving publishing archives, the John Murray company published authors
who shaped the modern world through their writings, including Darwin, Austen, and Livingstone. The archive includes material on publishing history, book history, travel writing, politics and poetry, and also holds the most complete archival collection of the famed poet, Lord Byron.

Literary Manuscripts Berg comes from the nineteenth century holdings of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library. While the holdings of the Berg extend from 1480 to the present day, its most extensive holdings date from the nineteenth century. This database contains writings by, and about, the following fifteen authors: Matthew Arnold, Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Wilkie Collins, Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, George Elliot, George Gissing, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Ruskin, Alfred Tennyson, and William Makepeace Thackeray.

Contains manuscript collections of the Wordsworth Trust: notebooks, some printed annotated editions, verse manuscripts, diaries, travel journals, scrapbooks, autograph books, financial records/receipts, art works (Constable, Turner, Gainsborough, Haydon, Ruskin), and correspondence of William Wordsworth and his fellow writers, useful for studying interactions of key literary and political figures of the 18th and 19th centuries. Also has 18th and 19th century maps of and guidebooks to the English Lake District from the digital collection of Martin and Jean Norgate.

This multi-archive collection, including content from the London Metropolitan Archives and Senate House Library, comprises a wealth of primary source material, such as administrative records,
which detail the intricacies of the workhouse systems, and publications of settlement houses which document how hardships were alleviated through charitable efforts. Material focusing on philanthropic endeavors gives insight into the shift in social conditions and welfare reform in the period, as care for
the poor and general public health conditions developed.

Medical Services and Warfare presents digitized primary source material including military, scientific, professional and personal perspectives on medicine during conflicts across the globe from 1850-1949. Students and scholars can research medical developments including x-rays, plastic surgery and artificial limbs, with a focus on rehabilitation, nursing and the psychological toll of war. Highlights include the personal correspondence of Florence Nightingale and the scientific notebooks of Alexander Fleming (both now fully searchable thanks to innovative Handwritten Text Recognition technology), the diaries of VADs, hospital records, and literature from the Red Cross.

Enabling comparisons of medical advances across conflicts, the resource includes documents from the Crimean War, the Boer Wars, the American Civil War, the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War and inter- and post-war periods. Through analogous hospital records, medical reports and first-hand accounts, users can chart the progress of scientific advances informed by the experience of war.

Essential primary sources documenting the changing representations and lived experiences of gender roles and relations from the nineteenth century to the present. This expansive collection offers sources for the study of women's suffrage, the feminist movement, the men’s movement, employment, education, the body, the family, and government and politics.

This collection of manuscript, visual and printed works allows scholars to compare a range of sources on the history of travel, including many from private or neglected collections. Included are letters; diaries and journals; account books; printed guidebooks; published travel writing; paintings and sketches; architectural drawings and maps.

Full-text access to historical Anglo-American legal treatises derived from the law libraries of Harvard, Yale, Columbia and York (Toronto) libraries . . . featuring a fully-searchable database of more than 10 million pages and 21,800 titles (more than 25,000 volumes) - all primary source documents.

Based on holdings of the law libraries of Harvard and Yale, and the Library of the Bar of the City of New York, the product offers online access to these important collections.

IPA Source offers pronunciation transcriptions and literal translations of operatic arias and art song texts in Latin, Italian, German, French, and Spanish. Covers the work of over 550 composers, nearly 600 poets. New texts are added regularly.

This is a portal to Gale's primary source material which permits cross-searching between collections. At present, ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online) and NCCO (Nineteenth Century Collections Online) are included. It is useful if your topic spans the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries.

From its roots as an Anglican evangelical movement driven by lay persons, this resource encompasses publications from the CMS and the latterly integrated South American Missionary Society. Documenting missionary work from the 19th to the 21st century, the periodicals include news, journals and reports offering a unique perspective on global history and cultural encounter. Module I is comprised of periodicals published by the Church Missionary Society and South American Missionary Society from 1804-2009. Module II contains periodicals and annual reports published by the Church Missionary Society and its auxiliaries, and the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society, from 1816-1986. Documents are indexed by places (region, city, and mission station), countries, names and key search terms.

This resource presents a multi-national journey through well-known, little-known and far-flung destinations unlocked for the average traveller between 1850 and the 1980s. Guidebooks and brochures, periodicals, travel agency correspondence, photographs and personal travel journals provide unique insight into the expansion, accessibility and affordability of tourism for the masses and the evolution of some of the most successful travel agencies in the world.

Explore the phenomenon of world's fairs from the Crystal Palace in 1851 and the proliferation of North American exhibitions, to fairs around the world and twenty-first century expos. Through official records, monographs, publicity, artwork and artifacts, this resource brings together multiple archives for rich research opportunities in this diverse topic.

The Making of the Modern World: Part I, The Goldsmiths’-Kress Collection, 1450-1850 offers new ways of understanding the expansion of world trade, the Industrial Revolution, and the development of modern capitalism, supporting research in variety of disciplines.

The Making of the Modern World: Part II, 1851-1914 traces the progress of the 19th century nations' rapidly changing economies.

The Making of the Modern World: Part III, 1890-1945 is comprised exclusively of monographs and periodicals in the Goldsmiths’ Library of Economic Literature, which is held at the Senate House Library of the University of London, offering transnational coverage in an area of vital interest to historians—political economy. The works included are of interest to scholars in European and world history and meet the desire for more twentieth century content taking the collection past the First World War, the Great Depression, and the Second World War.

Includes:
Module 1: Trade, Governance and Empire, 1600-1947
Module 2: Factory Records for South Asia and South-East Asia
Module 3: Factory Records for China, Japan and the Middle East
Module 4: Correspondence: Early Voyages, Formation and Conflict
Module 5: Correspondence: Domestic Life, Governance and Territorial Expansion
Module 6: Board of Commissioners: Establishment of the Board

This digital resource allows students and researchers to access a vast and remarkable collection of primary source documents from the India Office Records held by the British Library, the single most important archive for the study of the East India Company.

Explore the history of South Asia between the foundation of the East India Company in 1615 and the granting of independence to India and Pakistan in 1947, through the wonderfully rich and diverse manuscript collections of the National Library of Scotland. The material comprises diaries and journals, official and private papers, letters, sketches, paintings and original Indian documents containing histories and literary works. Read the Nature and Scope Section.

Victorians on Film: Entertainment, Innovation and Everyday Life brings together an essential library of rich film content from the British Film Institute (BFI) in one easily navigable platform.

Capturing a unique view of the lives of Victorians at the dawn of cinema, from workers at the factory gates to royalty and other dignitaries,these films showcase the inventiveness and artistry of the medium's pioneers in its earliest stages.

From well-known films by leading names such as Mitchell and Kenyon, to lesser-known titles, the material represents the most extensive collection of films from the era.