HISTORY: Great Britain

The Bibliography of British and Irish History provides bibliographic data on historical writing dealing with the British Isles, and with the British Empire and Commonwealth, during all periods for which written documentation is available – from 55BC to the present. It is the successor to the Royal Historical Society Bibliography of British and Irish History, available online from 2002 to 2009.

The principal index to nineteenth-century books, periodicals, official documents, newspapers and archives (primarily US and UK). The C19 Index incorporates the Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue, The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, Poole’s Index to Nineteenth Century Periodicals, Periodicals Index Online and more to provide coverage of over 1.5 million books and official publications, 71,000 archival collections and 16.3 million articles published in over 2,500 journals, magazines and newspapers.

“The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is the national record of [nearly 60,000] men and women who have shaped British history and culture, worldwide, from the Romans to the 21st century. The Dictionary offers concise, up-to-date biographies written by named, specialist authors.” It also has over 500 theme articles.

The DNB is licensed for a limited number of simultaneous users. Please log out when you are do so others can get in.

Provides the most comprehensive, current bibliography of international scholarly literature in Medieval Studies available.

This extensive annotated bibliography focuses on the “interactions between different peoples and cultures on four continents and many islands in the period between Columbus’ voyages to the New World in the late fifteenth century and the end of slavery in the Americas in the late nineteenth century.”

This extensive set of 120 bibliographic entries explores the world as known to Europeans during the period “which spans roughly from the 14th through 17th centuries. The entries provide excellent orientations to seminal and current scholarships on broadly (the Ottoman Empire)and narrowly constructed topics (Montaigne).

This extensive set of annotated bibliographies “explores European and Mediterranean civilization from the 4th to the 15th centuries” through the lenses of many different academic disciplines. Nearly 100 entries are organized around people, places, concepts, ideas, events and more. They offer, equally, a survey of what is new as well as thoughtful orientations to key primary and secondary literature.

“The scholarly study of children and young people is a relatively new multidisciplinary effort that spans multiple epistemologies and methodologies, making it challenging for students and scholars to stay informed. From psychology to labor rights, from ethics to education, Childhood Studies is one of the most active fields in academia today. It encompasses the meanings that adults place on children’s innocence or competence, and interrogates the notion of childhood as a social category. . . .   Researchers and practitioners at all levels need tools that help them filter through the proliferation of information sources to material that is reliable and directly relevant to their inquiries. Oxford Bibliographies in Childhood Studies will offer a trustworthy pathway through the thicket of information overload.”

“Oxford Bibliographies in International Law is designed to provide authoritative guidance. The field is rife with debate and controversy, as with most anything that deals with such a complex system of rules and principles meant to govern the relations between states and other institutional subjects, such as the United Nations or the European Union. Because scholarship in this field is so bound up with diplomacy, the vast array of potentially relevant material that appears on the free web can overwhelm even the savviest scholars. . . . Oxford Bibliographies in International Law will offer a trustworthy pathway through the thicket of information overload.”

“The study of military history has evolved into a multidisciplinary effort to go beyond the history of military operations to consider broader political, cultural, and social questions. It spans across several disciplines and genres, including sociology and political science, biography, war and battle narratives, the history of technology, foreign affairs and international relations, and various national histories. From ancient military history to contemporary studies of international conflict, a great deal of this work has moved online with the most recent scholarship, research, and statistics appearing in online databases and often only discoverable through online search tools. . . . Oxford Bibliographies in Military History will offer a trustworthy pathway through the thicket of information overload.”

The Collection indexes and abstracts 400 journals pertaining to all branches of the military and government; full text is available for close to 300 titles, including some U.S. government documents.

Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) provides full-text searchable access to the digital images of 150,000 books and other materials published during the 18th Century. Based on the English Short Title Catalog bibliography, it includes English-language and foreign-language titles printed in the United Kingdom, along with thousands of important works from the Americas.

Indexes citations and provides linked page images of works represented in the microfilm series Early English Books I and II, based on The Short-Title Catalogue (Pollard and Redgrave, 1475-1640); the Short-Title Catalog II (Wing, 1641-1700), The Thomson Tracts (1640-1661), and The Early English Books Tracts Supplements.

This extensive full-text collection of primary source material focuses on the political and social climate of Great Britain during the long Nineteenth Century. The materials are drawn from more than 20 different sources including: Government documents, papers and correspondence of political figures, Radical and Labour periodicals, pamphlet collections and more. NOTE: The link takes you to a gateway page. Select the British Politics and Society option before you begin your search.

Compiled and edited by UC Davis faculty member Lynette Hunter. From the welcome page: “…Represents work by many bibliographers and social historians over the past three decades, who have given permission to use their original research in the creation of a resource for people interested in English-language printed books related to food, drink and diet, and their associated economics, technologies, science and sociocultural history.”

Drawn from several different archives, this online collection includes playbills, scripts and scores, as well as correspondence, meeting minutes and financial records all pertaining to “the inner workings of the arts world and life in Victorian Britain.”

From the Corvey Castle Library, this is a collection of nearly 18,000 monographs published in English, French and German between 1790 and 1840. NOTE: The link takes you to a gateway page. Select the European Literature, 1790-1840: The Corvey Collection option before you begin your search.

This is a full-text collection of the publications of the British philanthropic institutions, the Church Missionary Society and the South American Missionary Society from 1804-2009. 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. The CMS was active in many African countries, the “Mediterranean, the Middle East, Asia, Oceania and the Americas.

Empire Online contains several thousand searchable scanned images of original documents relating to Empire Studies. Includes documents from English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and German points of view, and that from indigenous peoples from Africa, India and North America. Sections also include thematic essays by leading scholars in the field of Empire Studies.

This full-text primary source collection includes materials on the international relations between Asian countries and the United States and Britain during the 19th century. It contains government reports, diplomatic correspondence, periodicals, newspapers, treaties, trade agreements, NGO papers, and more. Documents are sourced from The National Archives, Kew; The National Archives, United States; and other collections. Most of the collection focuses on China and Japan, but significant material addresses Siam, Korea, the Philippines, Sumatra and Vietnam as well.

NOTE: The link takes you to a gateway site. Select this collection from the options at that site.

The digital Burney Collection provides full text access to almost 1 million pages and approximately 1,270 newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides and books gathered by the Reverend Charles Burney (1757-1817). The resource represents the largest and most comprehensive collection of early English and British colonial news media that helps chart the development of the concept of ‘news’ and ‘newspapers’ and the “free press”.

Includes full text and page images of the entire newspaper, including articles, editorials, advertising and images (excluding the Sunday Times) for 1785-2011. The “Access World News” database contains both the daily and Sunday Times, 1985-present.

“The complete online fully-searchable edition of the TLS from the first edition in 1902 onwards. . . Since 1902, the TLS has scrutinized, applauded and dissected the work of leading writers and thinkers, offering comprehensive coverage of the most important publications, in every subject, in several languages, as well as reviewing current theatre, cinema, music, and exhibitions.”

“This resource offers facsimile page images and searchable full text for more than 160 British periodicals published from the 17th through the early 20th centuries.”

“The Economist Historical Archive (‘EHA’) is the fully searchable complete facsimile edition of The Economist, the weekly paper which is essential reading for anyone engaged in politics, current affairs and all aspects of business and trade worldwide. Containing every issue since its launch in 1843 and more than 600,000 pages, EHA offers full-colour images, multiple search indexes, topic and area supplements and surveys. “

“These magazines were written by and for every type of unit from every combatant nation. As such they contain the hitherto unheard voices of hundreds of thousands of men and women writing from every facet of the conflict. . . Although the majority of journals that have survived originate from units based on the Western Front in France and Belgium, there are also magazines from units serving on the Eastern Front, in Gallipoli, Palestine, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India, Britain and America.

“The House of Commons Parliamentary Papers are vital to the historical record of Britain, its former Colonies and the wider world.” HCPP now includes over 200,000 House of Commons sessional papers from 1715 to the present with supplementary material back to 1688. HCPP delivers page images and searchable full text for each paper, along with detailed indexing. HCPP includes all the “sessional papers” of the British Parliament: bills, reports of committees, papers presented by Royal Commissions and government departments, treaties and international agreements, command papers, and statistics. It also includes the full text from “Hansard, the Official Report of debates in Parliament,” from both the House of Commons and House of Lords, from 1803 to 2005.

Colonial State Papers provides access to thousands of papers concerning English activities in the American, Canadian, and West Indian colonies between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.Also included is a digitised version of The Calendar of State Papers, Colonial: North America and the West Indies 1574-1739, which contains bibliographic records and extracts for thousands of additional documents.”

This full-text collection comprises “the most important papers generated by the Foreign and Colonial Offices” of Great Britain pertaining to Central and South America and the French- and Spanish-speaking Caribbean from 1833-1969. The documents range “from single-page letters or telegrams to comprehensive dispatches, investigative reports and texts of treaties” and cover a vast array of topics.

“This full-text collection includes “all of the most important papers generated by the [British] Foreign and Colonial Offices. Some of these were one-page letters or telegrams; others were large volumes or texts of treaties.” It covers a “broad sweep of history from c. 1839 to 1969, taking in the countries of the Arabian peninsula, the Levant, Iraq, Turkey and many of the former Ottoman lands in Europe, Iran, Afghanistan, Egypt and Sudan.”

This is a gateway site to primary and secondary source materials on Medieval and Early Modern Britain. It is organized both topically and geographically. It includes primary source material published by the History of Parliament Trust, the Centre for Metropolitan History and the Institute of Historical Research, among others.

This is a diverse set of over 23,000 freely accessible sound recordings organized into the following collections:
* Accents and dialects
* Arts, Literature and Performance
* Classical Music
* Environment and Nature
* Jazz and Popular Music
* Oral History
* Sound Recording History
* World and Traditional Music.
These collection names only hint at the rich and varied content–covering everything from symphonies to traditional drumming in India; from the lives of Nobel laureates to the daily lives of Yorkshire farmers.

Online versions of two volumes of Kent Records

Index of Wills Proved in the Rochester Consistory Court Wills 1440 – 1561 (Vol. 9)
Documents illustrative of Medieval Kentish Society Gen. Editor F.R.H. De Boulay (1964) (Vol. 18)