History, British: Primary sources

* SERIES I: MULTI-TITLE PERIODICAL INDEXES
Over 7, 500 pre-1930 periodicals cited, covering science, law, engineering, literature, humanities and social sciences.
Poole’s Index to Periodical Literature, 1802-1906
Stead’s Index to Periodicals, 1890-1906
Cumulative Index to a Selected List of Periodicals, 1896-1899
Index to Legal Periodical Literature 1786-1937 (Jones and Chipman)
Index to Legal Periodicals, 1908-1935 (American Association of Law Libraries)
Catalogue of Scientific Papers, 1800-1900 Complete (Royal Society) *
Catalogue of Scientific Papers Subject Indexes -- Mechanics, Physics & Mathematics (Royal Society)
Index to Periodical Articles in Religion, 1890-1899
The Psychological Index, 1894-1905 *
Swem’s Virginia Index, 1619-1930
America: History and Life and Historical Abstracts (EBSCO) *
General Index to Engineering Periodicals 1883-1893
Descriptive Index of Current Engineering Literature (Engineering Index) 1857-1899 *
Index to General and Periodical Literature 1850-1899 (Cotgreave)

* SERIES II: BOOK INDEXES AND EXTENSIVE SERIAL RECORDS
Monographic indexes covering both pre-1900 book records as well as post 1900 data with 19th Century classifications
ALA Portrait Index, 1906
ALA Guide to General Literature, 1904
Wright American Fiction II, 1851-1875 *
19th Century Monograph Records through 1930.
Records with Nineteenth-Century classification. (1900-2011) *
19th Century Periodical Title Records

* SERIES III: NEWSPAPER INDEXES
Millions of citations covering notable as well as lesser-known newspapers.
New York Times Index, 1863-1905
New York Daily Tribune Index, 1875-1906
Palmer’s Index to the Times (London), 1880-1890 *
Index to the Oregon Spectator, 1846-1854
Historical Newspapers from Accessible Archives*

* SERIES IV: INDIVIDUAL PERIODICAL INDEXES
Focused indexing, with full text links, covering major periodicals of the period.
Appleton’s Magazine 1869-1881
Catholic World 1865-1901
DeBow’s Magazine 1846-1869
Ladies Repository 1841-1876
Overland Monthly 1868-1900
Princeton Review 1830-1882
Southern Literary Messenger 1834-1864
Southern Quarterly Review 1842-1857
Vanity Fair 1860-1862
Harper’s Magazine Index, 1850-1892
Atlantic Monthly Index, 1857-1901
North American Review 1815-1877
New England Magazine Index 1831-1835
Southern Historical Society Papers
American Missionary, 1878-1901
Bay State Monthly, 1884-1886
American Whig Review, 1845-1852
Century, 1881-1889
Continental Monthly, 1862-1864
Galaxy, 1866-1878
Library Journal Index, 1876-1897
International Monthly Magazine, 1850-1852
Living Age, 1844-1900
Manufacturer and Builder, 1869-1894
Old Guard, 1863-1867
Punchinello, 1870
Putnam’s Monthly, 1853-1870
Scientific American, 1846-1869
Scribner’s Magazine, 1887-1896
Scribner’s Monthly, 1870-1881
United States Democratic Review, 1837-1859
New England Magazine, 1886-1900
New Englander and Yale Review, 1843-1892
St.Nicholas: an illustrated magazine for young folks
Garden and Forest (1888-1897)
Journal of the United States Association of Charcoal Iron Workers (1880-1891)

* SERIES V: US AND UK GOVERNMENT DOCUMENT AND PATENT INDEXES
A trove of resources, from 13th Century UK documents to the Continental Congress to US Patent data.
Smithsonian Annual Reports Index, 1849-1961
Subject matter index of Patents issued by the U.S., 1790-1873
Congressional Record File to 1850 *
Index to the Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774-1789
Records from the U.S. Congressional Serial Set (Readex) 1817-1930
American State Papers, 1789-1838, United States Congress
Index to Hickcox Monthly Catalog of United States Government Publications, 1885-1894
Descriptive Catalog of the Gov. Pubs. of the U.S., 1774-1881
A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789-1897
Hansard’s Index to Debates, House of Commons only, 1803-1830
Hansard’s Index to Debates, House of Lords only, 1803-1830
Cobbett’s Parliamentary History of England, 1066-1803
Cumulative Title Index to U.S. Government Publications 1789-1900
Cumulative Subject Index to the Monthly Catalog of United States Government Publications, 1895-1899

As well as being a record of events, The Annual Register was originally conceived as a miscellany, reproducing state papers, reviewing important books, and featuring historical sketches, poetry, observations on natural history, and other essays, reproduced from books and periodicals. The early volumes of The Annual Register continued to follow this format, with contributions ranging from an essay on taste by Montesquieu (1758, p.311) to a suggestion about making bread from turnips (1763, p.133). Although Burke was elected to parliament in 1765 and was a committed and prominent Whig, The Annual Register strove to remain non-partisan in its political coverage.

After the end of the war in 1763, the History section evolved to cover the past year’s developments more generally in Britain, its colonies, and mainland Europe. From 1775 its length was significantly increased, becoming the main focus of the publication. Burke apparently resigned the editorship in 1789; from that year until the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815 the History was primarily devoted to describing the French Revolution and the wars arising from it. After 1815 the usual form became a number of chapters on Britain, paying particular attention to the proceedings of Parliament, followed by chapters covering other countries in turn, no longer limited to Europe. The expansion of the History came at the expense of the sketches, reviews and other essays so that the nineteenth-century publication ceased to have the miscellaneous character of its eighteenth-century forebear, although poems continued to be included until 1862, and a small number of official papers and other important texts continue to be reproduced to this day.

From the 1920s volumes of The Annual Register took the essential shape in which they have continued ever since, opening with the history of Britain, then a section on foreign history covering each country or region in turn. Following these are the chronicle of events, brief retrospectives on the year’s cultural and economic developments, a short selection of documents, and obituaries of eminent persons who died in the year.

The online version of The Annual Register includes every volume published and will be updated with the latest volume each year. Every page has been scanned. Text has been captured through OCR (Optical Character Recognition) for the backfile, while recent volumes have text taken directly from the files used in the print publication. Presented alongside tables of content and indexes, this enables researchers to browse through volumes, search for index references, or conduct keyword searches within the full text itself.

It also links to other 19th century full-text sources in your library collection such as the House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, British Periodicals, American Periodical Series Online, and Periodicals Archive Online. Much of this content goes un-indexed in various other sources; some is unique to C19.

Confidential Print: Latin America includes the following file classes from The National Archives, Kew in their entirety:
FO 420/1-294: Central and South America general, 1833-1941
FO 467/1-5: Brazil, 1947-1951
FO 486/1-10: Mexico, 1947-1956
FO 495/1-10: River Plate countries (Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay), 1947-1956
FO 497/1-10: South America general, 1947-1956
FO 533/1-11: Central America and Caribbean general, 1946-1957

The following selected files are also included:
FO 118/276, 281, 287, 292, 305, 317, 331: South and Central America general, 1906-1913
FO 177/297: Chilean Revolution, 1891
FO 461/14-22: Americas general, 1958-1969
FO 508/8: South and Central America general, 1908-1909

The Confidential Print series, issued by the Foreign and Colonial Offices since around 1820, is one of the fundamental building blocks for research that should be possessed by any academic library and one of the most important series produced by the British Government.
The series originated out of a need for the Government to preserve all of the most important papers generated by the Foreign and Colonial Offices. Some of these were one-page letters or telegrams; others were large volumes or texts of treaties. All items marked ‘Confidential Print’ were printed and circulated immediately to leading officials in the Foreign Office, to the Cabinet and to heads of British missions abroad.
Spanning the full era of the modern European colonisation of Africa, from the occupation of Algeria by France, through increasing British presence on the west African coast and around the Cape of Good Hope in the south, the Berlin Conference which set off the ‘Scramble for Africa’, the high-water mark of economic exploitation of Africans in the Congo Free State, rivalries amongst European powers and the era of withdrawal that followed the Second World War, Confidential Print: Africa is a fundamental resource for academics, students and researchers studying modern Africa and its recent history.
The resource also features 300 colour maps, a number of them previously separated from their parent files at The National Archives but cross-referenced with those files here for ease of scholarly use.
Confidential Print: Africa includes the following classes from The National Archives, Kew in their entirety:
CO 879/1-190: Africa general, 1848-1961
CO 886/1-11: Dominions general, 1887-1926
DO 116/1-8: Union of South Africa and High Commission Territories, 1913-1944
FO 341/1-3: German Empire miscellaneous, 1884-1900
FO 401/1-48: Abyssinia, 1846-1956
FO 403/1-482: Africa general, 1834-1959
FO 413/1-99: Morocco and north-west Africa, 1839-1957
FO 458/1-157: Liberia, 1882-1950
FO 468/1-4: British Commonwealth general, 1945-1949
FO 485/1-3: Liberia, 1947-1949
FO 540/1-6: Libya, 1951-1956
Selected files from the following series are also included:
CO 885/1-140: Colonies general (1907-1929)
DO 114/1-140: Dominions general (1924-1947)
DO 201/1-53: Commonwealth Relations Office (1949-1966)
WO 287/1-287: War Office (1905-1944)
[Publisher]

Some of these were one page letters or telegrams – others were large volumes or texts of treaties. All items marked ‘Confidential Print’ were printed and circulated immediately to leading officials in the Foreign Office, to the Cabinet, and to Heads of British missions abroad.
We commence with coverage of key classes concerning:

* Canada
* The Caribbean
* The USA

We include the following classes from The National Archives, Kew in their entirety:
CO 880/1-32 North America, 1839-1914
CO 884/1-38 West Indies, 1826-1961
FO 414/1-278 North America, 1824-1941
FO 461/1-13 America, 1942-1956
FO 462/1-10 USA, 1947-1956

Documents are selected and edited by the official historians of the FCO, with many documents specifically declassified for inclusion. The Documents on British Policy Overseas database is produced in collaboration between ProQuest and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

The texts cover subjects from art to religion, science to literature, and music to medicine. In seconds, users can search and retrieve the centuries-old books, pamphlets, and periodicals that helped shape and record cultural developments around the world.

Eighteenth Century Journals I contains material from the Hope Collection at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, one of the finest surviving collections of eighteenth-century periodicals. In this resource we have drawn together 95 rare journals printed between 1693 and 1799, combining major publications with more ephemeral works to underline the broad variety of eighteenth century print journalism.

The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center holds one of the finest collections of 17th and 18th century newspapers and periodicals in the world, and it was from here that items for Eighteenth Century Journals II were selected. These holdings were documented in ‘British Newspapers and Periodicals, 1632-1800’, compiled by Powell Stewart in 1950. More recent acquisitions have further enhanced these collections.

Materials for Eighteenth Century Journals III are drawn from two sources: the British Newspaper Library at Colindale, London and Cambridge University Library. This section focuses on journals published outside of London. The inclusion of Canadian, Caribbean and Indian journals allows users to explore the ways in which major world events were reported in different areas of the globe. There are also a large number of Irish journals and British provincial publications.
Continuing our commitment to publishing periodicals from outside of London, Eighteenth Century Journals IV consists of material sourced primarily from Chetham’s Library in Manchester. From its excellent 18th century holdings, a strong collection of rare magazines and newspapers, literary periodicals and political journals have been included to chart the transformation of Manchester during a time of rapid industrialisation and political turmoil. These varied sources are supplemented by a selection of periodicals, many European, from the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds.

In the eighteenth century, London’s economic and political influence receded with the rising importance of towns and cities like Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Bristol and Glasgow. In order to explore this subtle shifting of power away from London and to follow on from Eighteenth Century Journals III, which also focuses on material published outside of London, Eighteenth Century Journals IV contains key material published in Manchester during this time of rapid industrial change and political turmoil.

Drawn from the best available critical editions, EE is not simply an “electronic bookshelf” of isolated texts but a network of interconnected documents, allowing you to see the complex web of personal relationships in the early modern period and the making of the modern world.
But that's not all. The EE team have created an ongoing programme of expanding, linking and original scholarly research to give you:
• thousands of newly composed biographical notes;
• tens of thousands of corrections of minor errors;
• scores of thousands of expansions of abbreviations and sigles;
• hundreds of thousands of internal links and cross-references
Letters and lives in Electronic Enlightenment
The rich variety of people in EE represents a real cross-section of early modern society in Europe and the Americas. By treating every correspondent — not only the “great men” — as someone significant, EE reveals the existence of the myriad unknown and ignored figures of the period and raises questions about their place in the structures of their time, challenging the traditional concept of the “Enlightenment” as the preserve of philosophers.
Through EE you can see the ideas and concerns not only of thinkers and scholars, politicians and diplomats, but also butchers and housewives, servants and shopkeepers. With a wealth of personal detail revealed in these personal documents, you can explore as never before the relationships, correspondence networks and movement of ideas, the letters and lives of the early modern world.

"The era from 1949, when the Chinese Communist Party won power, until Mao Zedong's death in 1976, is a colossally important period in modern Chinese history. Britain was one of very few western countries to maintain diplomatic relations with China and from 1950 onward, and from their vantage point in Beijing British diplomats reported on the turbulent and confusing political, social, and economic developments. Making these records available in digital, searchable form will be exceptionally valuable to all scholars and students of post-1949 China". Dr Priscilla Roberts, Department of History, The University of Hong Kong
Published in three sections covering the periods 1949-1956; 1957-1966; and 1967-1980; this project addresses a crucial period in Chinese history, from the foundation of the People’s Republic, in 1949, to the death of Zhou Enlai and Mao, the arrest of the Gang of Four and the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976.
We make available the complete British Foreign Office Files dealing with China, Hong Kong and Taiwan in this period. These files are particularly important because Britain was one of the first countries to recognise Communist China.
The quality and depth of the Foreign Office’s reporting on politics, industry, trade and cultural affairs is formidable.
• Eye-witness accounts and detailed reports on life in China, 1949-1976.
• In depth analysis of the Communist Revolution and all the major figures.
• Material on the Korean War, the Cold War, US relations and the Cultural Revolution.

The Gerritsen curators gathered more than 4,700 publications from continental Europe, the U.S., the United Kingdom, Canada, and New Zealand, dating from 1543-1945. The anti-feminist case is presented as well as the pro-feminist; many other titles present a purely objective record of the condition of women at a given time.

The broad scope of the collection allows scholars to trace the evolution of feminism within a single country, as well as the impact of one country's movement on those of the others. In many cases, it also provides easy access to primary sources otherwise available only in a few rare book rooms.

The Gerritsen Collection consists of two segments: the Periodical Series and the Monograph Language Series.

Periodical Series
Periodicals constitute 25 percent of the entire collection. For the years from 1860 through 1900, the period covered by most of the titles, there is no comparable resource. Gerritsen scrupulously sought complete runs, and her successors acquired additional materials to fill whatever gaps arose. The result is a collection containing such titles as The Suffragist (1913-21) and The Women's Protest Against Woman Suffrage (1912-18).

Monograph Language Series
There are over 4,000 monographs and pamphlets, comprising 75 percent of the titles. They are grouped by language:

* English - With more than 2,000 titles, this is the greatest single source for tracing suffragism and feminism in the English-speaking world. Included are Carrie Chapman Catt's Ought Women to Have Votes for Members of Parliament? (1879), as well as Anti-Suffrage Essays by Massachusetts Women (1916).
* German - These 929 titles document the history of an organized movement, as well as women and socialism, Jewish women's status, and Swiss feminism.
* French - the 734 French titles cover women in the military, law, and reforms in women's legal, civil, and economic rights, as well as women's influence on French literature from Gallic times through World War II.
* Other languages - 12 languages and 472 titles.

For each monograph, The Gerritsen Collection includes an English-language summary of its contents.

The Grand Tour was a rite-of-passage for many aristocratic and wealthy young men of the eighteenth century: a phenomenon which shaped the creative and intellectual sensibilities of some of the eighteenth century’s greatest artists, writers and thinkers. These accounts of the English abroad, c1550-1850, highlight the influence of continental travel on British art, architecture, urban planning, literature and philosophy.
This collection of manuscript, visual and printed works allows scholars to compare a range of sources on the history of travel for the first time, including many from private or neglected collections. We include letters; diaries and journals; account books; printed guidebooks; published travel writing; paintings and sketches; architectural drawings and maps.

The Grand Tour is a wonderful source of information about daily life in the eighteenth century, highlighting such everyday issues as transportation, money, communications, food and drink, health and sex.

The material also covers European political and religious life, British diplomacy; life at court, and social customs on the Continent, and is an invaluable resource for the study of Europe’s urban spaces.

There is a wealth of detail about cities such as Paris, Rome, Florence and Geneva, including written accounts and visual representations of street life, architecture and urban planning.

At the core of this site are the full texts of thirty-eight manuscripts that are known collectively as the Masson Papers and cover the period ca 1790-1820. The patrimonial importance of these diaries is of the first order and provide important insights into the history of the North West Company and the fur trade in general.

Macmillan Online provides complete coverage (nearly 12,000 pages) of the Cabinet Conclusions (Minutes) (CAB 128) and Memoranda (CAB 129), including recently released material. The Cabinet Conclusions are taken by the Secretary of the Cabinet or one of his assistants and comprise summaries of all discussions in Cabinet together with a note of decisions reached. Cabinet Memoranda consist of all papers circulated to members of the Cabinet and to other Ministers for information or as a basis for discussion. These classes provide a distillation of the work of all the other departments of government, ranging in subject matter from agricultural policy and trade, to nuclear policy and issues of international diplomacy. Macmillan Online also offers unique access to 165 files (over 16,000 pages) from the Prime Minister's Private Office (PREM 11). These provide an important supplement to Cabinet Records and cover all aspects of policy making. They are particularly valuable in providing:
Two volumes from PRO Class CAB 134 (Cabinet Committees) are also included featuring Minutes and Memoranda of the Colonial Policy Committee, 1957, and of a committee convened to discuss "Future Policy", 1959-1960. These are essential sources for the study of decolonisation, Commonwealth affairs, nuclear policy and Foreign and Defence Policy.
Also includes five original essays concerning particular aspects of the Macmillan administration:
a) The Challenges of Affluence - by Mark Jarvis & Professor John Turner b) The Economy and Domestic Affairs - by David Tyler
c) Europe, 1957-1963 - by Richard Lamb
d) Decolonisation under Macmillan - by Dr Philip Murphy
e) The Cold War, Defence and Anglo-American Relations - by Gillian Staerck
[Publisher]

This project brings together, for the first time, images of the original medieval manuscripts that make up these family collections and provides access to full text searchable transcripts of many of these manuscripts.
This is primarily a resource containing medieval correspondence, but we have also included any supporting material such as wills, deeds, account books etc. that help to round out the picture of medieval family life. Often they have not been included in the printed editions or if they have, often they are referenced but not fully transcribed, unlike the letters. These items will therefore often not have a corresponding transcript.
There are two ways of accessing the documents. Either by browsing the list of manuscripts or by looking through the images of the printed editions. These are linked to each other in the site so it is possible to look at both the manuscript and the printed edition no matter which route is followed. The manuscript document details page has a link at the bottom to the relevant section of the available printed edition. The printed editions have been divided into sections and it is possible to navigate straight to a particular letter, it is then possible to view the manuscript images from here by clicking on the manuscript link next to the section heading.
Where available the manuscripts can be viewed side by side with the transcriptions. Where there is more than one edition these will be presented as alternative transcription options to view. In the printed volumes these transcriptions often run over more than one page, so for ease of use these have been reformatted here to provide the whole transcription on one html image.
Another strong feature of this digital project is the 'Further Resources' section - with Visual Sources Gallery, some excellent Family Trees, a full chronology of the period, a collection of interactive maps, an extensive glossary (with hypertext links), as well as a useful section on links to external websites.
The resource also has much other important material to help teaching as well as research. There is a detailed 'Tutorial' section as well as a 'Teaching ' section with guidance on how to use individual documents and images in online courses or in teaching packages.
[Publisher]

Slavery as an institution goes back much further to the ancient Mediterranean civilisations of Egypt, Greece, the Roman Empire, Assyria and the Islamic Caliphate. A few rare books included within this project will look back to these earlier periods, but our principal focus here will be 1490-2007. This project provides access to many thousands of original manuscripts, pamphlets, books, paintings and maps in high quality greyscale and colour.

This resource brings together hundreds of accounts by women of their travels across the globe from the early 19th century to the late 20th century. Students and researchers will find sources covering a variety of topics including; architecture; art; the British Empire; climate; customs; exploration; family life; housing; industry; language; monuments; mountains; natural history; politics and diplomacy; race; religion; science; shopping; war.
A wide variety of forms of travel writing are included, ranging from unique manuscripts, diaries and correspondence to drawings, guidebooks and photographs. The resource includes a slideshow with hundreds of items of visual material, including postcards, sketches and photographs.
A broad time period is covered. The earliest document is a letter from Lucretia Goddard to her cousin describing the wedding of Mehetable May Dawes to Samuel Goddard, 30 September 1818. After getting married, the Goddards went to England for nine years initially living in Liverpool and then in Manchester. This source touches on the diverse topics of marriage, clothing, family life, cities, monuments, class, slavery, festivals, climate, households, work, industry, customs, agriculture, money and violence. The latest documents are Ida Pruitt’s notes and correspondence from the early 1970s concerning visits to China.
The sources can also be used to examine the variety of motivations for travel including tourism, work, exploration, missionary work and pilgrimages. They also show the diverse range of women who travelled. Documents range from the first trip of a young student abroad to the spiritual journey of a retired woman seeking enlightenment.
Voyages by rail, road, sea and air are all covered as are walking, cycling and even a journey by stagecoach. Some items are relatively brief such as the record of a car journey when cars were relatively new, which records the places that were passed through, the weather and the road conditions. Others are daily journals which describe long tours of Europe, where all the details of the trip are meticulously recorded. Then there are scrapbooks containing fantastic visual material such as photographs, postcards, cuttings and sketches and other ephemera.

Places visited include: USA and Canada; China, Japan and the Philippines; Europe (very well documented); Russia; Africa; and Australia. [Publisher]

The resource is divided into three self contained sections:

* Spiritualism, Sensation and Magic
* Circuses, Sideshows and Freaks
* Music Hall, Theatre and Popular Entertainment

Scanned from the microfilm collection “A Change in Attitude: Women, War and Society, 1914-1918”, published by the Cengage Learning imprint Primary Source Microfilm™ along with an additional 5000 photographs and press-cuttings from the Imperial War Museum, Women, War and Society features a fully searchable database of approximately 126,000 images. It provides researchers with a logical, interdisciplinary research resource, and allows this unique primary source material to be quickly searched by academics and students, local and family historians, writers and researchers. With full-text search capabilities, researchers can conduct precise searches and comparative research across the collection.

Not only does Women, War and Society enable researchers to search contemporary materials in a wide variety of formats – pamphlets, letters, news-cuttings, photographs, letters, reports and many other document types, but its state-of-the-art search capabilities allow students and scholars to focus their search on full text, specific keywords or phrases, title, subject and more, making research far more convenient and generating comprehensive results faster than any other resource of its kind. From the results list, the user then has the ability to link directly to the full citation for the document, and facsimile images. Women, War and Society also includes advanced page navigation options, allowing users to navigate within multi-image records such as pamphlets by using a list on the side of the screen to navigate between pages.

About the Women, War and Society Film Collection
Originally accrued between 1917 and 1920, the “Women’s Work Collection” contained art, models, documents, uniforms, badges, books, photographs and memorabilia, which have since been dispersed among the Museum’s departments. The core however, remains the documents within the Printed Books department, published on microfilm in 1984. The contents of the 189 boxes of papers, 20 press-cutting albums and journals represent a challenging range of type and size of archival file for digitisation, but a full and authentic record of the wide range of new tasks, skills and activities women took up during the First World War.