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.
We have expanded our access to UK Parliamentary Papers to include House of Lords Parliamentary Papers (1800 to 1910), House of Commons Parliamentary Papers (2015 to 2023) and Public Petitions to Parliament (1833 to 1918).
House of Lords Parliamentary Papers, 1800 to 1910
This collection is of international significance, revealing previously unknown material such as statistical data, oral evidence, letters and business papers relating to Britain, and the many parts of the world that were under British influence. Examples include reports relating to the abolition of slavery, evidence presented about the working conditions of children employed in cotton mills and letters from the Governor-General of India describing the Indian rebellion of 1857.
House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, 2015 to 2023
This resource allows researchers to explore the British perspective on events from the recent past through an authoritative archive of official government documents including drafts of legislation, and reports from committees. One such source is the Treasury Committee report on “Jobs, growth and productivity after coronavirus” which includes documented oral testimony from Professor Bart van Ark, the Professor of Productivity Studies at the Alliance Manchester Business School.
Public Petitions to Parliament, 1833 to 1918
Petitioning has been a popular form of political participation for centuries, and this collection will allow researchers to exploit new sources on the formative role of petitions to Parliament during the nineteenth century (1833 to 1918), an unparalleled period of political modernisation and democratisation in Britain. This collection illuminates attempts by ‘the people’ to influence Parliament, in contrast to the traditional top-down view of history. Users will be able to analyse the social, geographical, religious, and gender compositions of popular responses to key contemporary issues and undertake detailed textual and rhetorical analysis of the petitions.
In addition to searching across the U.K. Parliamentary Papers database collection (the default option) unticking the Advanced Search option allows you to select and search specific modules, including Hansard (1803-2005) and these recent acquisitions.
This resource will be of particular interest to the University’s interdisciplinary research groups in the Humanities such as the Politics, Institutions and Policy Research Group and the Manchester Centre for Regulation, Governance and Public Law (ManReg).
Archives of Sexuality and Gender
This database, currently the largest portfolio of digital primary source material to address this complex area of cultural studies, encompasses social history, social and political science, psychology, health, and policy studies.
The Library offers access to three diversely sourced collections. The broad expanse of LGBTQ History and Culture since 1940 and sex and sexuality from the sixteenth century to the twentieth allow scholars to trace how sexual norms have changed over time, the evolution of public health, changing gender roles, and the ebb and flow of social movements and activism. Researchers can also draw upon a wider pool of material to uncover hidden histories, such as the full text of the landmark Wolfenden report (1957), and the testimonies that underpinned its findings.
The newly acquired, “Community and Identity in North America” archive comprises over a million pages of mainly unique or unpublished material, detailing how identities developed in different social conditions across the Americas. This collection also widens our offer to interdisciplinary groupings such as the Morgan Centre, CIDRAL and CSSC, whose work informs the University’s pioneering MA in Gender, Sexuality and Culture.
These collections have been selected to complement our growing reserves in the area – both digital (Gender: identity and social change and Defining Gender) and physical (LGBQT+ holdings in our Special Collections) - with the latter recently boosted by the acquisition of the archive which will feature prominently in the forthcoming ‘Secret Public’ exhibition at the Rylands.
The database incorporates multiple filtering options, including a term frequency tool, which enables mapping of the usage of a word or phrase by content type or popularity over a period of years. Researchers can also cross-search the entirety of the Library’s content hosted on the Gale Primary Sources platform.
The Harper’s Bazaar Archive significantly enhances the University’s existing holdings of one of the world’s most influential fashion and lifestyle magazines. Providing access to over 500,000 pages of content, coverage extends back to the first issues of both the US (1867-present, with subsequent issues added on an ongoing basis), and UK (1930-2015) editions, both of which are seamlessly cross-searchable.
The resource is fully indexed, and content is discoverable to either article level or, in the case of advertisements, by brand or company name. The highly visual content is presented in the original magazine layout, providing both context and opportunity for comparative studies of both the US and UK editions. The database also complements the University’s recent acquisitions in general interest magazines, notably those available on EBSCOhost Reseach Databases.
This powerful lens into American, British and International fashion is essential to students and researchers in Fashion, Business and Technology, with cross-searching facilitated between both Women's Wear Daily and The Vogue Archive by their shared ProQuest platform. However, whilst synonymous with designers and illustrators, Harper’s also showcased the work of acclaimed authors such as John Steinbeck and Virginia Woolf and photographers including Diane Arbus and Man Ray. Its diverse cultural range offers rich primary source material for the Departments of American Studies, English Literature and Creative Writing, Film Studies, History, and Sociology, as well as interdisciplinary research groupings across the Humanities including CIDRAL and the Institute for Cultural Practices.
Refugees, Relief and Resettlement
A key resource for the study of forced migration and the history of refugees, this collection collates materials from a wide range of sources including the U.K. National Archives, the British Library, World Jewish Relief, and the US Department of State.
Refugees, Relief and Resettlement comprises two parts addressing refugee crises across different chronological periods. The first part, Forced Migration and World War II, focuses on refugees and displaced persons across Europe, North Africa, and Asia from 1935 to 1950. The second part, The Early Cold War and Decolonization, examines the changes effected by the Cold War and the decolonisation of, and rise of independence movements within, the nations of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. This series offers a wealth of primary sources including legal briefs, refugee reports, and government documents, manuscripts, pamphlets, and letters.
Refugees, Relief and Resettlement addresses an ongoing global issue and is of value to students and researchers across a range of disciplines and research groups including Migration, Refugees and Asylum, Humanitarian and Conflict Response and Histories of Humanitarianism. This new addition enriches our collections of primary source materials in this challenging research area. These include both digital resources such as Border and Migration Studies (part of the Global Issues Library) and Post-war Europe: Refugees, Exile and Resettlement, 1945-1950, and the physical materials housed within our pioneering Humanitarian Archive at the Rylands. In addition, it aligns with the University's ongoing commitment as a University of Sanctuary.
The Library has recently secured online access to a significant archival collection of American-based general magazines.
Renowned for their high-quality photography, impeccable production, and trend-setting design and editorial styles, these collections will hold significant historical value to social and cultural historians, as well as interdisciplinary research groupings across the Humanities. The Centre for the Study of Sexuality and Culture and the Centre for the Cultural History of War will also benefit.
Accessible on Library Search, the archives are hosted by EBSCO, through which researchers already have access to the Time magazine archives.
The seven new collections comprise:
Chicago Defender (1909 - 2010)
Founded in 1905, the Defender was one of America's longest-running African American newspapers and the first to have a circulation exceed 100,000 - with more than half of this coming from outside of its home base in Chicago. The newspaper played a key role in promoting ‘The Great Migration’ of African Americans from the segregated Southern United States to the nation's urban centres in the north - especially Chicago - during the first decades of the 20th century.
As a result of consultation with staff in American Studies, the Library has now improved access to its digital archive to incorporate previously unavailable issues from 1976-2007 to benefit teaching and research in American Studies and History. This boosts a significant primary source for UG and PGR students carrying out independent research, including work for long essays and dissertations.
More particularly, the addition of these 30+ years also ‘map’ directly to the Library’s primary source materials on US Civil rights housed within the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre. These include a recently opened collection of around 100 oral histories made by the American sociologist Lou Kushnick, who founded the RACE Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Research Centre and of the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Education Trust in 1999. Undertaken between the early 1980s and late 1990s, these oral histories offer a gallery of America’s “Rainbow Coalition” - a constellation of figures engaged in civil rights activism, labour organizing, community building, social justice movements, political campaigning, and legal reform. Moreover, around a third of these interviews were done with figures directly connected to the city of Chicago or the state of Illinois, including long-time Defender journalist Lu Palmer, so more comprehensive access to the newspaper archive will facilitate ongoing staff and student research to fathom and contextualise these records.
The archive comprises full-page images and article images from the Chicago Defender under all its title variants and offers researchers the opportunity to study many significant events in American history that received only cursory attention from other newspapers. Its location on the ProQuest platform, which also hosts a number of other significant US newspapers - including the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and The Washington Post - means that cross-searching to address the comparative treatment of an issue or incident is also a largely seamless process.
The Library offers full-text online access to the Le Monde historical archive (1944–2000). This invaluable resource allows researchers and students to delve into the 20th-century content of this globally respected French newspaper, renowned for its independent analysis, balanced coverage, and high journalistic standards. Offering critical insights and opinions, Le Monde is essential for studying French society, culture, and politics, serving as a valuable additional voice for researchers examining this volatile period of recent history across Europe and beyond.
With enhanced online access, users can explore significant events, key figures, and trends through detailed searches across articles, photos, ads, obituaries, cartoons, and more. The ProQuest platform also enables cross-searching with other major global newspapers like The New York Herald Tribune, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Times of India, and The Jerusalem Post. This feature enriches comparative research, allowing users to explore how different publications addressed the same issues, deepening their understanding of historical events and their impact on diverse cultures and societies.
A major collection offering researchers previously unavailable classified resources to significantly enhance their understanding of early 20th-century Europe and the rise of Nazism and fascism. Based on the most widely used of the Foreign Office files at the National Archives, the archive includes nearly 600,000 pages of declassified, exclusive, previously undigitized files sent to the UK Foreign Office from embassies, covert contacts, and other sources. In doing so the database documents a tumultuous period of hyperinflation, political extremism, and seizures of power, providing contemporaneous accounts, documents, reports, and correspondence of how Western democracies struggled with fascism and autocracy. In particular, the consular reports give indispensable first-hand accounts of culture, society and everyday life in Weimar and Nazi Germany and, as these are in English, they offer a particular useful reserve of primary sources for first time researchers and students undertaking extended projects and long essays, whilst complementing the Library’s existing German language holdings covering this period, most notably, Klemperer online: Tagebücher 1918-1959. Parallel political developments in Spain and Italy are also addressed. In addition to traditional disciplines such as German and History, interdisciplinary research clusters such as the Cultural History of War should also benefit from this new acquisition
The hosting platform (History Commons) offers a simple and streamlined but highly functional interface. At the top of the home page are facets for documents, topics, lists, and modules, as well as an option for uploading individualized content that users can create (and share) from the archive. Nine language options are available, and each document has an informative contents summary and detailed subject indexing. Text and data mining are also allowed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mass Observation Project: Series II & III (1990s/2000s) now available
Our Mass Observation Project online archive has been extended providing further material covering the 1990s and 2000s.
The Mass Observation archive is a pioneering project documenting the social history of Britain. It gathers valuable primary source materials, including survey responses, diaries, letters, lists, maps and photographs, offering a comprehensive insight into the everyday lives, experiences and opinions of ordinary people. These rich records, generated in response to a series of questionnaires (‘directives’), cover diverse themes such as current events, friends and family, the home, leisure, politics, society, culture, work, finance and the economy and new technology.
Material in Mass Observation Project, (1981-2009), addresses, in depth, a range of topics including attitudes to the USA, reading and television habits, morality and religion, Britain's relations with Europe, UK elections, and pivotal events such as the Falklands War, fall of the Berlin Wall, the Miners’ Strike, the death of Diana, Princess of Wales and 9/11.
The collection stands as an invaluable resource for studying social trends in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In particular, it holds significant value for the University's interdisciplinary research groups in the Humanities, such as the Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives, the Cathie Marsh Institute (CMI) and the Centre On the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CODE).
Use alongside our Mass Observation Online archive (1937-1967), providing primary material from the original Mass Observation study, for access to some of the most comprehensive sources for qualitative social data in the UK.
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.
We have expanded our access to UK Parliamentary Papers to include House of Lords Parliamentary Papers (1800 to 1910), House of Commons Parliamentary Papers (2015 to 2023) and Public Petitions to Parliament (1833 to 1918).
House of Lords Parliamentary Papers, 1800 to 1910
This collection is of international significance, revealing previously unknown material such as statistical data, oral evidence, letters and business papers relating to Britain, and the many parts of the world that were under British influence. Examples include reports relating to the abolition of slavery, evidence presented about the working conditions of children employed in cotton mills and letters from the Governor-General of India describing the Indian rebellion of 1857.
House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, 2015 to 2023
This resource allows researchers to explore the British perspective on events from the recent past through an authoritative archive of official government documents including drafts of legislation, and reports from committees. One such source is the Treasury Committee report on “Jobs, growth and productivity after coronavirus” which includes documented oral testimony from Professor Bart van Ark, the Professor of Productivity Studies at the Alliance Manchester Business School.
Public Petitions to Parliament, 1833 to 1918
Petitioning has been a popular form of political participation for centuries, and this collection will allow researchers to exploit new sources on the formative role of petitions to Parliament during the nineteenth century (1833 to 1918), an unparalleled period of political modernisation and democratisation in Britain. This collection illuminates attempts by ‘the people’ to influence Parliament, in contrast to the traditional top-down view of history. Users will be able to analyse the social, geographical, religious, and gender compositions of popular responses to key contemporary issues and undertake detailed textual and rhetorical analysis of the petitions.
In addition to searching across the U.K. Parliamentary Papers database collection (the default option) unticking the Advanced Search option allows you to select and search specific modules, including Hansard (1803-2005) and these recent acquisitions.
This resource will be of particular interest to the University’s interdisciplinary research groups in the Humanities such as the Politics, Institutions and Policy Research Group and the Manchester Centre for Regulation, Governance and Public Law (ManReg).
Archives of Sexuality and Gender
This database, currently the largest portfolio of digital primary source material to address this complex area of cultural studies, encompasses social history, social and political science, psychology, health, and policy studies.
The Library offers access to three diversely sourced collections. The broad expanse of LGBTQ History and Culture since 1940 and sex and sexuality from the sixteenth century to the twentieth allow scholars to trace how sexual norms have changed over time, the evolution of public health, changing gender roles, and the ebb and flow of social movements and activism. Researchers can also draw upon a wider pool of material to uncover hidden histories, such as the full text of the landmark Wolfenden report (1957), and the testimonies that underpinned its findings.
The newly acquired, “Community and Identity in North America” archive comprises over a million pages of mainly unique or unpublished material, detailing how identities developed in different social conditions across the Americas. This collection also widens our offer to interdisciplinary groupings such as the Morgan Centre, CIDRAL and CSSC, whose work informs the University’s pioneering MA in Gender, Sexuality and Culture.
These collections have been selected to complement our growing reserves in the area – both digital (Gender: identity and social change and Defining Gender) and physical (LGBQT+ holdings in our Special Collections) - with the latter recently boosted by the acquisition of the archive which will feature prominently in the forthcoming ‘Secret Public’ exhibition at the Rylands.
The database incorporates multiple filtering options, including a term frequency tool, which enables mapping of the usage of a word or phrase by content type or popularity over a period of years. Researchers can also cross-search the entirety of the Library’s content hosted on the Gale Primary Sources platform.
The Harper’s Bazaar Archive significantly enhances the University’s existing holdings of one of the world’s most influential fashion and lifestyle magazines. Providing access to over 500,000 pages of content, coverage extends back to the first issues of both the US (1867-present, with subsequent issues added on an ongoing basis), and UK (1930-2015) editions, both of which are seamlessly cross-searchable.
The resource is fully indexed, and content is discoverable to either article level or, in the case of advertisements, by brand or company name. The highly visual content is presented in the original magazine layout, providing both context and opportunity for comparative studies of both the US and UK editions. The database also complements the University’s recent acquisitions in general interest magazines, notably those available on EBSCOhost Reseach Databases.
This powerful lens into American, British and International fashion is essential to students and researchers in Fashion, Business and Technology, with cross-searching facilitated between both Women's Wear Daily and The Vogue Archive by their shared ProQuest platform. However, whilst synonymous with designers and illustrators, Harper’s also showcased the work of acclaimed authors such as John Steinbeck and Virginia Woolf and photographers including Diane Arbus and Man Ray. Its diverse cultural range offers rich primary source material for the Departments of American Studies, English Literature and Creative Writing, Film Studies, History, and Sociology, as well as interdisciplinary research groupings across the Humanities including CIDRAL and the Institute for Cultural Practices.
Refugees, Relief and Resettlement
A key resource for the study of forced migration and the history of refugees, this collection collates materials from a wide range of sources including the U.K. National Archives, the British Library, World Jewish Relief, and the US Department of State.
Refugees, Relief and Resettlement comprises two parts addressing refugee crises across different chronological periods. The first part, Forced Migration and World War II, focuses on refugees and displaced persons across Europe, North Africa, and Asia from 1935 to 1950. The second part, The Early Cold War and Decolonization, examines the changes effected by the Cold War and the decolonisation of, and rise of independence movements within, the nations of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. This series offers a wealth of primary sources including legal briefs, refugee reports, and government documents, manuscripts, pamphlets, and letters.
Refugees, Relief and Resettlement addresses an ongoing global issue and is of value to students and researchers across a range of disciplines and research groups including Migration, Refugees and Asylum, Humanitarian and Conflict Response and Histories of Humanitarianism. This new addition enriches our collections of primary source materials in this challenging research area. These include both digital resources such as Border and Migration Studies (part of the Global Issues Library) and Post-war Europe: Refugees, Exile and Resettlement, 1945-1950, and the physical materials housed within our pioneering Humanitarian Archive at the Rylands. In addition, it aligns with the University's ongoing commitment as a University of Sanctuary.
The Library has recently secured online access to a significant archival collection of American-based general magazines.
Renowned for their high-quality photography, impeccable production, and trend-setting design and editorial styles, these collections will hold significant historical value to social and cultural historians, as well as interdisciplinary research groupings across the Humanities. The Centre for the Study of Sexuality and Culture and the Centre for the Cultural History of War will also benefit.
Accessible on Library Search, the archives are hosted by EBSCO, through which researchers already have access to the Time magazine archives.
The seven new collections comprise:
Chicago Defender (1909 - 2010)
Founded in 1905, the Defender was one of America's longest-running African American newspapers and the first to have a circulation exceed 100,000 - with more than half of this coming from outside of its home base in Chicago. The newspaper played a key role in promoting ‘The Great Migration’ of African Americans from the segregated Southern United States to the nation's urban centres in the north - especially Chicago - during the first decades of the 20th century.
As a result of consultation with staff in American Studies, the Library has now improved access to its digital archive to incorporate previously unavailable issues from 1976-2007 to benefit teaching and research in American Studies and History. This boosts a significant primary source for UG and PGR students carrying out independent research, including work for long essays and dissertations.
More particularly, the addition of these 30+ years also ‘map’ directly to the Library’s primary source materials on US Civil rights housed within the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre. These include a recently opened collection of around 100 oral histories made by the American sociologist Lou Kushnick, who founded the RACE Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Research Centre and of the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Education Trust in 1999. Undertaken between the early 1980s and late 1990s, these oral histories offer a gallery of America’s “Rainbow Coalition” - a constellation of figures engaged in civil rights activism, labour organizing, community building, social justice movements, political campaigning, and legal reform. Moreover, around a third of these interviews were done with figures directly connected to the city of Chicago or the state of Illinois, including long-time Defender journalist Lu Palmer, so more comprehensive access to the newspaper archive will facilitate ongoing staff and student research to fathom and contextualise these records.
The archive comprises full-page images and article images from the Chicago Defender under all its title variants and offers researchers the opportunity to study many significant events in American history that received only cursory attention from other newspapers. Its location on the ProQuest platform, which also hosts a number of other significant US newspapers - including the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and The Washington Post - means that cross-searching to address the comparative treatment of an issue or incident is also a largely seamless process.
The Library offers full-text online access to the Le Monde historical archive (1944–2000). This invaluable resource allows researchers and students to delve into the 20th-century content of this globally respected French newspaper, renowned for its independent analysis, balanced coverage, and high journalistic standards. Offering critical insights and opinions, Le Monde is essential for studying French society, culture, and politics, serving as a valuable additional voice for researchers examining this volatile period of recent history across Europe and beyond.
With enhanced online access, users can explore significant events, key figures, and trends through detailed searches across articles, photos, ads, obituaries, cartoons, and more. The ProQuest platform also enables cross-searching with other major global newspapers like The New York Herald Tribune, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Times of India, and The Jerusalem Post. This feature enriches comparative research, allowing users to explore how different publications addressed the same issues, deepening their understanding of historical events and their impact on diverse cultures and societies.
A major collection offering researchers previously unavailable classified resources to significantly enhance their understanding of early 20th-century Europe and the rise of Nazism and fascism. Based on the most widely used of the Foreign Office files at the National Archives, the archive includes nearly 600,000 pages of declassified, exclusive, previously undigitized files sent to the UK Foreign Office from embassies, covert contacts, and other sources. In doing so the database documents a tumultuous period of hyperinflation, political extremism, and seizures of power, providing contemporaneous accounts, documents, reports, and correspondence of how Western democracies struggled with fascism and autocracy. In particular, the consular reports give indispensable first-hand accounts of culture, society and everyday life in Weimar and Nazi Germany and, as these are in English, they offer a particular useful reserve of primary sources for first time researchers and students undertaking extended projects and long essays, whilst complementing the Library’s existing German language holdings covering this period, most notably, Klemperer online: Tagebücher 1918-1959. Parallel political developments in Spain and Italy are also addressed. In addition to traditional disciplines such as German and History, interdisciplinary research clusters such as the Cultural History of War should also benefit from this new acquisition
The hosting platform (History Commons) offers a simple and streamlined but highly functional interface. At the top of the home page are facets for documents, topics, lists, and modules, as well as an option for uploading individualized content that users can create (and share) from the archive. Nine language options are available, and each document has an informative contents summary and detailed subject indexing. Text and data mining are also allowed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mass Observation Project: Series II & III (1990s/2000s) now available
Our Mass Observation Project online archive has been extended providing further material covering the 1990s and 2000s.
The Mass Observation archive is a pioneering project documenting the social history of Britain. It gathers valuable primary source materials, including survey responses, diaries, letters, lists, maps and photographs, offering a comprehensive insight into the everyday lives, experiences and opinions of ordinary people. These rich records, generated in response to a series of questionnaires (‘directives’), cover diverse themes such as current events, friends and family, the home, leisure, politics, society, culture, work, finance and the economy and new technology.
Material in Mass Observation Project, (1981-2009), addresses, in depth, a range of topics including attitudes to the USA, reading and television habits, morality and religion, Britain's relations with Europe, UK elections, and pivotal events such as the Falklands War, fall of the Berlin Wall, the Miners’ Strike, the death of Diana, Princess of Wales and 9/11.
The collection stands as an invaluable resource for studying social trends in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In particular, it holds significant value for the University's interdisciplinary research groups in the Humanities, such as the Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives, the Cathie Marsh Institute (CMI) and the Centre On the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CODE).
Use alongside our Mass Observation Online archive (1937-1967), providing primary material from the original Mass Observation study, for access to some of the most comprehensive sources for qualitative social data in the UK.
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.
The following are important databases for this subject area, however if you don't see what you're looking for, please go to the Database Directory for History to browse a wider selection.
Follow the links below to browse databases for specific types of resources.
You can use our Database Directory to browse a broader range of databases that are relevant to History as well as other subjects. The directory also allows you to identify databases that provide access to specific types of resources (e.g. Full Text Articles, Streaming Video, Patents, Theses and Dissertations, and much more).
The University of Manchester's research is internationally recognised. Go to Research Explorer, Manchester's research database, to discover the breadth of research produced by staff across the University.
Browse research publications from the Department of History (please note: whilst many of the publications listed are available to access/Open Access, some records are for forthcoming titles awaiting publication).
