New Open Access E-Resource : Black Freedom Struggle in the United States

Black Freedom Struggle in the United States is a curated selection of primary sources for teaching and learning about the struggles and triumphs of Black Americans.

The Black Freedom Struggle website will include more than 2,000 documents curated around six crucial phases of the U.S. Black freedom struggle:

• Resistance to slavery by enslaved persons and the abolitionist movement of the 19th century
• The end of slavery during the Civil War and the Reconstruction Era
• The fight against Jim Crow segregation
• The New Deal and World War II
• The Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement from 1946-1975
• …and the contemporary Black experience since 1976.

This new open access website has been set up with the intention of supporting a wide range of students, independent researchers and anyone interested in learning more about the foundation of ongoing racial injustice in the US and the fights against it.

Also available to access via the Databases A-Z .

New E-Resource : African Diaspora, 1860-Present

We are pleased to announce the acquisition of the  African Diaspora, 1860-Present database on the Alexander Street Press platform.

Essential for understanding Black history and culture, African Diaspora, 1860-Present allows scholars to discover the migrations, communities, and ideologies of the African Diaspora through the voices of people of African descent. With a focus on communities in the Caribbean, Brazil, India, United Kingdom, and France, the collection includes never-before digitized primary source documents, including personal papers, organizational papers, journals, newsletters, court documents, letters, and ephemera form.

After the abolition of slavery, African diasporic communities formed throughout the world. The circumstances and histories of the establishment of each community were quite different, and as a result, the experiences, cultures and ideologies of the members of these communities vary significantly.

African Diaspora, 1860-present brings these communities to life through never-before digitized primary source documents, secondary sources and videos from around the world with a focus on communities in the Caribbean, Brazil, India, United Kingdom, and France. With content from key partners like The National Archives and Records Administration (US), National Archives at Kew (UK), Royal Anthropological Institute, and Senate House Library (University of London), this first release of African Diaspora, 1860-Present offers an unparalleled view into the experiences and contributions of individuals in the Diaspora, as told through their own accounts. Future releases will include further insights into African diasporic communities with the papers of C.L.R. James, the writings of George Padmore and many more sources.

Major themes include:

• Migrations of people of African descent to countries around the world, from the 19th century to present day.
• Diasporic communities including Afro-Brazilian communities in Rio de Janeiro, Black British communities in London, Sidi communities in India, Afro-Caribbean communities in Trinidad, Haiti, and Cuba.
• Movements and ideologies, including the Back to Africa movement and the Pan-African movement.

Text taken from the Alexander Street Press platform

Photo by Magda Ehlers on Pexels

Also available to access via iDiscover and the Databases A-Z .

Mass Observation Project : 1980s – access until 31st July 2020

Access to the Mass Observation Project : 1980s is now available until 31st July 2020.

Please send your feedback about this collection, or any of the other collections temporarily available, via the online form.

Launched in 1981 by the University of Sussex as a rebirth of the original 1937 Mass Observation, its founders’ aim was to document the social history of Britain by recruiting volunteers to write about their lives and opinions. Still growing, it is one of the most important sources available for qualitative social data in the UK.

This collection consists of the directives (questionnaires) sent out by Mass Observation in the 1980s and the thousands of responses to them from the hundreds of Mass Observers.

A user guide is available to help you make the most of the resource.

British Archives Online : trial extended until 30th June 2020

British Archives Online have generously been made accessible to the University of Cambridge by Microform Academic Publishers until 30th June 2020.

Please send us your feedback about this, and any of our other trials, via the online form.

British Online Archives is one of the United Kingdom’s leading academic publishers.

The richness and diversity of BAO’s 89 collections (currently and growing) both for the study of British and global history is staggering and will provide an online library of great value to researchers at Cambridge.

The Archive hosts over 3 million records drawn from both private and public archives. These records are organised thematically, covering 1,000 years of world history, from politics and warfare to slavery and medicine.

Whether you’re an individual interested in your family’s history, a librarian looking for ways to adapt in the digital age, or a professor in search of innovative teaching tools, we have something to meet your needs.

Gale Primary Sources available to access until 30th June 2020 – Making of the Modern World and Nineteenth Century Collections Online

The Gale Primary Sources Making of the Modern World and Nineteenth Century Collections Online are both available to access until 30th June 2020.

Please send your feedback regarding these resources via the online form.

The Making of the Modern World is an extraordinary series which covers the history of Western trade, encompassing the coal, iron, and steel industries, the railway industry, the cotton industry, banking and finance, and the emergence of the modern corporation. It is also strong in the rise of the modern labor 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. In addition, the archive offers resources on the role of finance and taxation and the growth of the early modern monarchy. It features essential texts covering the function of financial institutions, the crisis of the French monarchy and the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, and the connection between the democratic goals of revolutionaries and their legal aspirations.

Nineteenth Century Collections Online is a global digitization and publishing program focusing on primary source collections of the long nineteenth century.

The nineteenth century was the first great age of industrialization and technological innovation. It was an age of political revolution and reform, nationalism and nation building, the expansion of empire and colonialism, growing literacy and education, and the flowering of culture—both popular and high. It was an age that witnessed the development of the power-driven printing press and a massive explosion of written material that dwarfed the output of the centuries that preceded it. Any undertaking that attempts to synthesize the vast array of nineteenth-century content may be at best only provisionally comprehensive. Nevertheless, bringing a coherent, interdisciplinary, and global vision to the project is an important challenge. Gale’s international board of scholars, working in tandem with advisors for each of the program’s archives, have steered the program’s direction and helped identify the collections that most enhance it—for scholars and students alike.

African Diaspora, 1860-Present : access until 30th June 2020

Access to the African Diaspora, 1860-Present database on the Alexander Street Press platform is available until 30th June 2020.

Please send your feedback about this resources via the online

Essential for understanding Black history and culture, African Diaspora, 1860-Present allows scholars to discover the migrations, communities, and ideologies of the African Diaspora through the voices of people of African descent. With a focus on communities in the Caribbean, Brazil, India, United Kingdom, and France, the collection includes never-before digitized primary source documents, including personal papers, organizational papers, journals, newsletters, court documents, letters, and ephemera. form.

After the abolition of slavery, African diasporic communities formed throughout the world. The circumstances and histories of the establishment of each community were quite different, and as a result, the experiences, cultures and ideologies of the members of these communities vary significantly.

African Diaspora, 1860-present brings these communities to life through never-before digitized primary source documents, secondary sources and videos from around the world with a focus on communities in the Caribbean, Brazil, India, United Kingdom, and France. With content from key partners like The National Archives and Records Administration (US), National Archives at Kew (UK), Royal Anthropological Institute, and Senate House Library (University of London), this first release of African Diaspora, 1860-Present offers an unparalleled view into the experiences and contributions of individuals in the Diaspora, as told through their own accounts. Future releases will include further insights into African diasporic communities with the papers of C.L.R. James, the writings of George Padmore and many more sources.

Major themes include:

• Migrations of people of African descent to countries around the world, from the 19th century to present day.
• Diasporic communities including Afro-Brazilian communities in Rio de Janeiro, Black British communities in London, Sidi communities in India, Afro-Caribbean communities in Trinidad, Haiti, and Cuba.
• Movements and ideologies, including the Back to Africa movement and the Pan-African movement.

Text taken from the Alexander Street Press platform.

British Online Archives

Trial access is now available until 15 November to British Online Archives.

Drawn from recently scanned or microfilmed manuscripts and archives, the British Online Archives comprises collections for research in territories colonised by Britain (America, India, Africa, the West Indies, New Zealand, Australia and Melanesia), including records made by the East India Company and the records of missionaries from the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.

British Online Archives also contains a range of sources that relate to both politics and history, including the Parliamentary Labour Party papers and the Anti-fascist newsletters of the International Transport Workers’ Federation, and the records of the Communist Party of Great Britain and The British Union of Fascists’ newspapers and secret files.

Access the trial via this link and please send us your thoughts and feedback on the archives by writing to ejournals@lib.cam.ac.uk.  Thank you.

Users of Firefox may need to navigate to Options/Applications, find Portable Document Format and if it is set to “Preview in Firefox” change this to “Use Adobe Reader”.

Translated Texts for Historians e-library

New on eresources@cambridge A-Z: Translated Texts for Historians e-library

Liverpool University Press has published its renowned Translated Texts for Historians  book series since the early 1990s.  The series makes available historical sources from 300-800 AD translated into English, in many cases for the first time.

The Translated Texts for Historians e-library now offers this invaluable collection as a digital library, containing 52 volumes from the series that bring together a wealth of important historical texts with scholarship from leading academics.

Access the Translated Texts for Historians e-library via this link.

Image: Drawing of a man, face techniques – Coptic. Plain weave, painting on fabric using fabric dyes (6th – 7th century) [No. 3797; Coptic Museum, Coptic Cairo]

British History Online (premium content)

The University Library now provides access to the premium content of the British History Online resource run by the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London.

Comprising high quality digitizations of primary sources for the study of British history, British History Online includes, for example, the “Casket letters” used as evidence against Mary, Queen of Scots (from the Calendar of State Papers for Scotland), an architectural account of the Covent Garden Theatre and the Royal Opera House (from the Survey of London), the Bill of Rights (from the Statutes of the Realm), and Titus Oates’s Narrative concerning the “Popish plot” (from the House of Lords journal).

 

Now the “premium content” is also available to the University of Cambridge, consisting of the Parliament Rolls of Medieval England (Edward I to Henry VII), all the volumes of the Calendar of State Papers, Domestic 1537-1714, the Calendars of State Papers for Scotland and Ireland, plus the Calendar of Close Rolls.

British History Online can be accessed via the eresources@cambridge A-Z at this link.

 

 

BrillOnline Primary Sources platform

Brill (with Semantico) have launched BrillOnline Primary Sources. This new platform consists of thematic collections of unique materials such as rare books and documents from around the world.  Collections subscribed by the University of Cambridge on the new platform are:

Early Russian Cinema

Mass media in Russia Online

Screen and stage

Soviet cinema

Primary Sources offers access to over six million high resolution scans of documents, research data, models, illustrative images and associated metadata in over 70 collections in 9 different subject areas. Scholars are offered access to Brill’s primary source collections in an attractive and easy to use online environment.

Semantico built the site using their latest technologies. Scolaris, the next generation integrated content platform, is engineered to manage the complexities of journals, reference works and dictionaries. Scolaris promotes discoverability by providing intelligent, full-text search powered by Solr and allows rich taxonomy support for faceted search and browse. Content is consumed through the Scolaris Reader, a powerful and flexible solution for viewing and annotating rights-managed PDF files.