Cambridge University Libraries are delighted to announce the acquisition of the digital archive Making of the Modern World Part 1 with access to University members in perpetuity.
For this new acquisition, we are sincerely grateful to the legacy of Dr. Mark Kaplanoff, Fellow of Pembroke College, whose endowment provides Cambridge with rich and diverse collections to support the study of the history of the United States in the University.
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, supporting research in variety of disciplines.
This collection follows the development of the modern western world through the lens of trade and wealth — the driving force behind many of the major historical events during the period (1450-1850). With full-text search capabilities on an abundance of rare books and primary source materials, this resource provides unparalleled access to more than 61,000 books and 466 serials — more than 12 million pages in all — many of which are the only known copy of the work in the world.
We are thrilled to make this rich archive available in Cambridge, developing the access provided by Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) and offering new insights and pathways to research across the collections’ focus on history, interpreted in the widest sense, including political science, economics, women’s studies, legal and religious history, and special collections on transportation, banking, finance, and manufacturing.
Access the collection via this link or via the Cambridge University Libraries E-Resources A-Z.
Charles Christian Nahl, Der Isthmus von Panama auf der Höhe des Chagres River. 1850 Charles Christian Nahl, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
“Nor is the Chagres river, for most of the distance between Cruces and the Atlantic, in any sense obnoxious to the charge of unhealthiness. It cannot be so. The stream is too rapid, the water too clear, and the bottom and banks too solid and gravelly for the admission of such an idea. The current runs at the rate of about three miles an hour, and the indications of the timber and shrubbery that line its shores, all unite in repulsing the false notion, that up to within a short distance of the town of Chagres, any alarming miasmatic malady prevails, or can prevail. This view of the subject has no sort of connexion with the notorious unhealthiness of the little, squalid, miserable looking concern at its mouth, and which it is intended by all to avoid”–Union of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, at or near the Isthmus of Panama, examined and discussed : in a series of letters addressed to the National Institute, at Washington — Bryan, John A., National Institute for the Promotion of Science — 1845 — Kress Library of Business and Economics, Harvard University — GALE|U0106522206
Electronic Collection Management 