Databases
- British Library Newspapers This link opens in a new windowSourced from the extensive holdings of the British Library, British Library Newspapers delivers a wide range of irreplaceable local and regional voices to reflect the social, political, and cultural events of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. These newspapers, emerging during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a crucial channel of information in towns and major cities, provide researchers with a unique, first-hand perspective on history.
- British Periodicals This link opens in a new windowThis database provides access to the searchable full text of hundreds of periodicals from the late seventeenth century to the early twentieth, comprising millions of high-resolution facsimile page images. Topics covered include literature, philosophy, history, science, the social sciences, music, art, drama, archaeology and architecture.
- Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) This link opens in a new windowEighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) is a vast eighteenth-century library at your desktop—a fully text-searchable corpus of books, pamphlets and broadsides in all subjects printed between 1701 and 1800. It currently contains over 180,000 titles amounting to over 32 million fully-searchable pages.*
ECCO is a digitization of the eighteenth-century section of the works catalogued in the English Short-title Catalogue (ESTC). The ESTC project has been recording all works published or printed in Britain, Ireland, territories under British colonial rule, and the United States. It also catalogues material printed elsewhere which contains significant text in English, Welsh, Irish or Gaelic, as well as any book falsely claiming to have been printed in Britain or its territories. - Eighteenth Century Drama: Censorship and The Stage This link opens in a new windowUnique archive of almost every play submitted for license in Britain between 1737 and 1824, as well as hundreds of documents that provide social context for the plays.
- Eighteenth Century Journals This link opens in a new windowArchive of rare historical journals that examine a variety of topical issues such as colonial life, provincial and rural affairs, the French and American revolutions, reviews of literature and fashion throughout Europe, political debates, and London coffee house gossip and discussion.
- English Crime and Execution BroadsidesThis collection of nearly 600 broadsides highlights crime and capital punishment, primarily in England, as seen through the popular press in the 18th and 19th century.
Harvard University Library - The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913A fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London's central criminal court.
- Times Digital Archive (London Times) This link opens in a new window
Full images of the pages of The Times (London) including advertising, book reviews, letters to the editor, and obituaries as well as news articles.
- British History Online This link opens in a new windowBritish History Online is a collection of nearly 1300 volumes of primary and secondary content relating to British and Irish history, and histories of empire and the British world. BHO also provides access to 40,000 images and 10,000 tiles of historic maps of the British Isles.
- Empire Online This link opens in a new windowThis project has been developed to encourage undergraduates, postgraduates, academics and researchers to explore colonial history, politics, culture and society. Material in the collection spans five centuries, charting the story of the rise and fall of empires; from the explorations of Columbus, Captain Cook, and others, right through to de-colonisation in the second half of the twentieth century and debates over American Imperialism.
- London Low Life This link opens in a new windowRare books, ephemera, maps, periodicals, and other materials relating to 18th, 19th and early 20th century London. Chronology, interactive maps, essays, online galleries and links. Fast literature, street ephemera (posters, advertising, playbills, ballads and broadsides), penny fiction, cartoons, Tallis’ Street Views, chapbooks, Old London Street Cries, Swell’s guides to London prostitution, gambling and drinking dens, tourist guides, and topography, manuscripts of George Gissing.
