Databases
- British Literary Manuscripts OnlineThis extensive digital archive includes poems, plays, essays, novels, diaries, journals, correspondence and other manuscripts from the Middle Ages through the Victorian era.
- Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers CollectionA digitized collection of predominantly London newspapers of the 17th & 18th centuries. Also includes broadsides, newsbooks, pamphlets, periodicals, and a few provincial newspapers.
- Eighteenth Century Collections OnlineA fully text-searchable corpus of books, pamphlets and broadsides in all subjects published during the 18th Century in the United Kingdom with digitized images.
- Eighteenth Century Drama: Censorship, Society and the StageA unique archive of almost every play submitted for license between 1737 and 1824, as well as hundreds of documents that provide social context for the plays.
- Eighteenth Century JournalsBritish newspapers and periodicals, published from 1685-1820, from several US and British Libraries.
- Gale Primary SourcesCross-search and explore history through all available Gale Primary Sources databases focusing on American and British history. Browse and filter by date, content type, and more. A great place to begin your research!
- Global Commodities: Trade, Exploration & Cultural ExchangePrimary source materials for the study of global commodities in world history. The commodities featured have been transported, exchanged and consumed around the world for hundreds of years.
- Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Nichols Newspapers CollectionDigitized UK newspaper collection covering the period 1672-1737. The collection charts the history of the development of the press in England and provides invaluable insight into seventeenth and eighteenth century England.
- Oxford BibliographiesMulti-disciplinary authoritative research guides and bibliographies. Browse by subject. A great place to start your research!
- Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational ArchiveCollections on the transatlantic slave trade, the global movement for the abolition of slavery, the legal, personal, and economic aspects of the slavery system, and the dynamics of emancipation in the U.S. as well as in Latin America, the Caribbean, and other regions.
Other Resources
- Early English Books OnlineFull-text and page images of almost every work printed in the British Isles and North America, as well as works in English printed elsewhere from 1470-1700.
- HathiTrust Digital Library
A collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world.
- Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
Biographies of significant, influential or notorious figures who shaped British history.
Online Access - 1 simultaneous user
Literary Research and the British Eighteenth Century by ISBN: 9780810887961Publication Date: 2013-01-01This volume explores primary and secondary resources, including general literary research guides; union library catalogs; print and online bibliographies; scholarly journals; manuscripts and archives; 18th-century books, newspapers, and periodicals; contemporary reception; and electronic texts and journals, as well as Web resources.
Open Access Databases
The Grub Street Mapping Project
The project has many dimensions, but one of the most interesting is the maps tab, which allows you to see interactive maps from different eras in London's history.
Interested in old manuscripts? Find a first edition at Hodges that has marginalia but don't know how to read old handwriting? You can learn about paleography (the study of handwritten texts) and even take a course in reading old handwriting. The National Archives also has a nice online course on paleography.
Lewis Walpole Library Digital Collection
This is a very basic, unfussy, but really useful online DB of scanned images from the LWL, which is part of Yale University's library system. They specialize in images, including prints, paintings, playbills--all kinds of "ephemera," or one-off single sheet things that won't show up in EEBO or ECCO.
