History: Databases

Translated Texts for Historians E-Library

Compiling material from 3 longstanding and well-respected book series this newly-launched digital compilation by Liverpool University Press makes available a range of historical sources from A.D. 300-800 translated into English, in many cases for the first time. Complementing the Aris & Phillips Classical Texts Online collection, the Translated Texts for Historians E-Library also extends the language pool of its source material beyond Greek and Latin to incorporate languages as varied as Armenian, Gothic and Old Irish, together with those of the Islamicate world, including Syriac and Arabic, giving researchers access and opportunity to widen both their reading and potential sources of comparison and contrast. The scope of the material within the repository is equally diverse and incorporates chronicles, letters, annals, formularies, political speeches, military and theological handbooks, poems, biblical and theological commentaries, sermons, church histories and records, Christian and pagan panegyric and polemic and lives of saints, bishops and popes.

Over 90 titles are now readily accessible and the collection might perhaps be best viewed as a foundational digital reserve for scholars operating across the Humanities at Manchester, either within the traditional confines of classics, ancient history and religions and theology, or interdisciplinary research groupings such as the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS).

In line with our standard practice to ease discovery, in addition to offering a link to the collection as a discrete database, the library has ensured that each volume - a selection of which can be seen above - is individually indexed. You can also move seamlessly across the platform to view the Aris & Phillips Classical Texts Online collection which is also now newly accessible to researchers.

Mass Observation Project: Series II & III (1990s/2000s) now available

African Diaspora, 1860-Present

An invaluable aide to understanding Black history and culture, African Diaspora, 1860-Present allows researchers to trace the migrations, developing societies, and evolving ideologies of people of African descent after the abolition of slavery. With a focus on communities in the Caribbean, Brazil, India, United Kingdom, and France, the collection includes an extensive range of newly digitized primary source documents, including personal papers, organizational papers, periodicals, newsletters, court documents, letters, and ephemera.

In addition to work by key thinkers and historians such as George Padmore and Paul Gilroy and material from the pioneering UK-based Caribbean publisher, Hansib, the collection also incorporates images and film – including David Olusoga’s acclaimed 2016 BBC television series, Africa and Britain: a Forgotten History. As such the holdings complement existing Library resources, such as Black Thought and Culture, which focuses on the Black experience in the USA, and in particular the notable and extensive print and oral history resources housed at the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE (Race Archives and Community Engagement) Centre.

A user-friendly interface facilitates topic searches allowing scholars to easily address the emergence of societal developments such as the Back to Africa and Pan-African movements.

Royal Geographical Society Archive (with IBG)

Following extensive consultation with academics, the Library is delighted to announce the purchase of the Royal Geographical Society Archive (with the Institute of British Geographers - IBG).

From its formation in 1830 the Royal Geographical Society has served as the leading organisation and support network for the discipline in both the UK and wider field of study.

This new digital collection compiled from the society’s comprehensive archives gives researchers online access to a wealth of material extending from 1482-2010, much of which is available online for the first time. Handwritten documents are made decipherable by the typeset transcripts feature and a special function makes it easy to keep an eye on your bibliography with the onscreen citations tab.

The archive not only bolsters studies in the conventional fields of geography and geology but also aligns seamlessly with the interdisciplinary investigations carried out by a wide range of research teams within the University.

The Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) digital archive, divided into two parts covering the periods 1482-1899 and 1900-2010, boasts a collection of over 150,000 maps, charts, and atlases. This extensive archive is enriched with valuable additions such as manuscripts, field notes, expedition reports, scrapbooks, correspondence, diaries, illustrations, and sketches.

With a particular focus on resources related to Agricultural Geography, Anthropology, Cartography, Borders, Nations & Power, Colonial and Post-Colonial Studies, among many others, the Royal Geographical Society archive has played an influential role throughout its history.

Furthermore, it augments the Library’s digital resource collections and complements the rich reserves of the “Maps, Travel and Discovery” holdings at The John Rylands Research Institute and Library, offering researchers potentially new ways of addressing the respective collections. As the archive of a leading professional body, the RGS holdings also throw an interesting sidelight on the activities of contemporary scientific organisations; those housed on the same platform (British Association for the Advancement of Science) and those at Rylands, which will be of particular interest to historians of science.  

Empire Online

To assist scholars looking at the rise and fall of empires around the world, the Library has purchased permanent access to Empire Online, an extensive and diverse repository of primary source material covering some 5 centuries. Offering a useful starting point for both newcomers and experienced researchers addressing this complex and contentious area of study, the collection offers primary source material from American, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and British perspectives, thereby providing varying points-of-view for comparative research. Documents from Africa, India and North America are also featured. Formats too are similarly diverse, encompassing first-hand travel accounts, manuscripts, maps, official government papers, periodicals, children’s adventure stories and a selection of images

Of wide-ranging appeal to researchers and students in areas as diverse as colonial history, decolonial studies, politics, economic ‘development’, the propagation of religion and issues of historical representation, this readily accessible digital repository also of course complements the rich physical holdings in these areas housed at the Rylands and the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre.

All items are included in their entirety within a structure of five sections selected around key themed topics: Cultural Contact, 1492-1969; Empire Writings and the Literature of Empire; The Visual Empire; Religion and Empire; and Race, Class, Imperialism and Colonialism, 1607-2007. To further enhance teaching and research a range of learning tools, including contextual scholarly essays, interactive maps and chronologies, historiography, searching aids and biographies of individuals who shaped the course of Empire have also been developed to enable the demonstration of the theories, practices and consequences of empire.

Making of The Modern World

In collaboration with academics from the Faculty of Humanities, the Library has arranged for electronic access to the complete Making of The Modern World database, a rich collection of digitised primary source material centring on the dynamics of Western trade and wealth from the last half of the fifteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century. Through the lens of industries such as coal, iron, steel, cotton, railways and banking and financial systems, areas as diverse as the rise of the modern labour movement, the evolving status of slavery, the condition and making of the working class, colonization, the Atlantic world, Latin American/Caribbean studies, social history, gender, and the economic theories that championed and challenged capitalism in the nineteenth century can be re-examined. Sourced from a variety of major historical library collections – including those of Senate House, Goldsmiths’, Yale, Columbia, and Harvard’s Kress Library – much of this material is rare and often unique. Whilst topics can be conveniently and readily traced across the database as a whole, MOMW is also grouped into 4 themed collections:

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.

The Making of the Modern World, Part II: 1851–1914 documents the progress of the nineteenth century nations' rapidly changing economies through a wide variety of local reports, broad overviews, abstract analyses, reports on the financing of railways, economic textbooks, social polemics, and political speeches.

The Making of the Modern World, Part III: 1890–1945 deepens holdings into the twentieth century and moves beyond the study of economic thought to incorporate resources for the study of social and political forces unleashed by economic transformations and the upheaval of international conflict.

The Making of the Modern World, Part IV: 1900-1890 offers extensive coverage of the “Age of Capital,” the industrial revolution, and the High Victorian Era. The core of this collection (1850s-1890s) offers rich content in the high Victorian period, the apogee of the British Empire. It is especially strong in “grey literature” and non-mainstream materials rarely preserved by libraries - including pamphlets, plans, ephemera, and private collections.

London Evening Standard Archive:

Print culture remains integral to both teaching and research by staff and students at all levels of study, particularly in relation to press coverage of specific events as the issue of mediatisation becomes ever more pertinent within education. Accordingly, and in collaboration with academic colleagues in the humanities, the Library has arranged for the purchase of the London Evening Standard archive, which extends from its first publication in May 1827 to effectively the present day (within 1 week). Although this resource is patently of value to researchers looking at aspects of British history, politics and culture, it’s worth noting that the newspaper not only employed a wealth of foreign correspondents, but from the 1980s to 2010 it became the only paid for London evening paper – endowing it with particular significance to those undertaking work on culture in that time frame from disciplines in the social sciences such as politics and social statistics and social change.

Serving as a central access point for the paper’s evolution through variant titles, the database also allows searching across the ProQuest hosting platform which encompasses a number of other historical newspapers for additional - often more generalised – perspectives on topics. Available material incorporates news articles, photos, advertisements, classified ads, obituaries, cartoons (including the renowned contributions of David Low) and more. The Evening Standard’s place “at the heart of the British Empire, tucked under the arm of the British government, and wrapping the chips of the common Londoner” offers clear and fruitful scope for interrogation and re-interpretation today. The near two centuries of coverage allow researchers to trace the historical treatment of a variety of themes with the likes of observations on London fogs in the 1880s reminding us that environmental issues are not confined to any one generation. User-friendly support and indexing tools facilitate such research, with hit-term highlighting, searchable PDFs, and image downloads in PDF format.

Black Thought & Culture 

A key digital resource for research in black studies, political science, American history, music, literature, and art, Black Thought and Culture covers some 250 years of history centred on the non-fiction writings of major American black figures and leaders. Hosted by Alexander Street Press, the database has sought to provide as comprehensive a collection as possible of the principals involved, which has led to the digitisation of much previously inaccessible and scarce material - in formats as diverse as letters, speeches, essays, leaflets, periodicals, interviews, and court transcripts. Beginning with the works of Frederick Douglass, contributors include W.E.B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, Alain Locke, Mary McLeod Bethune, Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, Langston Hughes,, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Amira Baraka, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Angela Davis, Houston Baker, Jesse Jackson, Ida B. Wells, Bobby Seale, and many others. 

These new holdings complement other extant Library resources which incorporate material on and the legacies of the Black experience in the USA, in particular the post-1960 resources on anti-racist activism and social justice campaigning housed at the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE (Race Archives and Community Engagement) Centre. In addition to free text searching, a range of topic and themed searches - from sharecropping to segregation and from Négritude to the NAACP - are offered through a comprehensive index, whilst a number of full text survey works are also hosted. The collection also includes biographical essays by leading scholars and an extensive annotated bibliography of the sources in the database.

Gender: Identity & Social Change

As a result of consultation with academics from the Faculty of Humanities and colleagues at the Rylands, the Library has arranged for electronic access to the Gender: Identity and Social Change database. Hosted by AM, the collection serves as a valuable reserve of digitised primary materials documenting the changing representations and lived experiences of gender roles and relations, and in particular the struggle for women’s rights, from the nineteenth century to the present. Sourced from institutions from across the United States, Canada, Australia and the UK - including, as a guarantor of worth, the Rylands - contents are grouped under 13 key themes: Women’s Suffrage; Feminism; The Men’s Movement; Education and Training; Employment and Labour; The Body; Conduct and Politeness; Domesticity and the Family; Government and Politics; Legislation and Legal Cases; Leisure and Entertainment: Organisations, Associations and Societies; Sex and Sexuality.

As such the material not only aligns with academic activity undertaken within traditional disciplines such as sociology and history, but also ongoing interdisciplinary research undertaken by research hubs clustered around the social sciences (such as the Morgan Centre and Movements@Manchester) and within SALC, CIDRAL and CSSC, whose work informs the long-running MA in Gender, Sexuality and Culture. The collection also contributes further to the library’s extensive reserves in a fertile area of study – complementing both other large-scale digital archival collections (most notably, the Archives of Sexuality and Gender and Defining Gender, 1450-1910) and the deep repository of physical materials offered at the Rylands, which are of course considerably more extensive than the selection digitised for inclusion in the database.

A variety of secondary features further facilitate study and offer a useful starting point for first-time researchers. These include scholarly essays, highlighted biographies, featured organisations, video interviews and an interactive chronology to provide context to support printed resources and the wealth of visual material offered

Paris Peace Conference and Beyond, 1919-1939

Hosted by British Online Archives, Paris Peace Conference and Beyond, 1919-1939 brings together a comprehensive collection of primary source materials relating to the Paris Peace Conference and later diplomatic activity leading to the establishment of a new international order in the aftermath of the “war to end all wars.” Largely sourced from the Foreign Office, documents cover the treaties of Versailles, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Neuilly-sur-Seine, Trianon, Sèvres, Lausanne, and Locarno, as well as the foundation of the League of Nations. Collectively, these severely restricted German power and influence, redrew national boundaries in Europe and the Middle East, and effectively led to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.

Accordingly, this new collection has much to offer those researching: the First World War, the Second World War, inter-war international governance, international relations, peace-making and the beginnings of humanitarianism, colonialism, 20th-century war, diplomacy, and politics.

Prosecuting the Holocaust

As the subtitle of ‘British investigations into Nazi crimes, 1944-1949’ makes clear, Prosecuting the Holocaust comprises a collection of primary sources documenting the British governments efforts to gather evidence and prosecute Nazi crimes during this five year time frame. Drawn from the UK’s National Archives and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the material sheds light on almost every aspect of the Holocaust – from concentration camp ‘systems’ and medical war crimes, to the Nuremberg trials and liaison between allied powers and organisations. Critically, it also affords a voice to those who experienced such atrocities, many of whom testified about their experiences immediately after the war. As such it further bolsters our collections in this necessary area of study – most notably the testimonies offered in the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive and the Fortunoff Video Archive together with Testaments to the Holocaust: documents and rare printed materials from the Wiener Library, London. As well as traditional disciplines such as History and Religion and Theology, interdisciplinary research clusters such as the Cultural History of War should also benefit from this new acquisition.

World News in Indian Newspapers 1782-1908

Hosted on the British Online Archives platform, World News in Indian Newspapers, 1782-1908 brings together 3 English language newspapers - The India Gazette (1782-1828); The Bengal Hurkaru (later The Bengal Hurkaru and Chronicle) (1822-1866) and The Bengal Times (1876-1908) – to offer new insight into the long nineteenth century and its contemporary treatment in a colonial press. Conveniently broken down into three sections - East India Company to the First Anglo-Burmese War, 1782-1828; Trade and turmoil, 1829-1856 and Colonial expansion and rebellion 1857-1908 - the material is readily searchable and offers a direct and often surprising insight into the nature of British involvement in India, revealing how a colonial class saw both themselves and their subjects, and how that perception was challenged and obliged to shift over time.