LibGuides: History and Politics: Specialist resources

JSTOR Primary Source collections

JSTOR provides access to a wide range of resources as well as the journal articles for which it is best known. You will find these resources through a general search, but you can also search or browse within individual collections.

19th Century British Pamphlets 19th Century British Pamphlets, created by Research Libraries UK (RLUK), contains the most significant British pamphlets from the 19th century held in research libraries in the United Kingdom. These provide a corpus of primary sources for the study of sociopolitical and economic factors impacting 19th-century Britain.
American Prison Newspapers On March 24, 1800, Forlorn Hope was published within a prison in New York state, edited by an incarcerated person. In the intervening 200+ years, over 700 prison newspapers have been published from U.S. prisons in all fifty states. American Prison Newspapers will bring together hundreds of these periodicals from across the country into one collection that will represent penal institutions of all kinds, with special attention paid to women-only institutions.
Behind the Scenes of the Civil Rights Movement Behind the Scenes of the Civil Rights Movements focuses on unearthing and digitizing the histories of civil rights activism by the everyday citizens of Black, Latine, Indigenous, and Asian American/Pacific Islander communities. The program will include up to four collections, targeted for completion by the end of 2025. The first collection in development will focus on the African American experience and will draw on primary source materials from colleges and universities, historical societies, public libraries, community archives and other institutions.
Independent Voices Independent Voices is an open access digital collection of alternative press newspapers, magazines and journals, drawn from the special collections of participating libraries. These periodicals were produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century.
Struggles for Freedom: Southern Africa The liberation of Southern Africa and the dismantling of the Apartheid regime was one of the major political developments of the 20th century, with far-reaching consequences for people throughout Africa and around the globe. This collection focuses on the complex and varied liberation struggles in the region, with an emphasis on Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. It brings together materials from various archives and libraries throughout the world documenting colonial rule, dispersion of exiles, international intervention, and the worldwide networks that supported successive generations of resistance within the region.
Student Activism The collection aims to provide access to unique, yet essential, primary sources documenting the deep and broad history of student organizing in the United States. Reveal Digital’s Student Activism collection is intended to serve as a scholarly bridge from the extensive history of student protest in the United States to the study of today’s vibrant, continually unfolding actions.
World Heritage Sites: Africa World Heritage Sites: Africa links visual, contextual, and spatial documentation of African heritage sites. The materials in World Heritage Sites: Africa serve researchers in African studies, anthropology, archaeology, architecture, art history, Diaspora studies, folklore and literature, geography, and history, as well as those focused on geomatics, advanced visual and spatial technologies, historic preservation, and urban planning.

JSTOR Daily

JSTOR Daily provides context for current events using scholarship found in JSTOR, a digital library of academic journals, books, and other material. We publish articles grounded in peer-reviewed research and provide free access to that research for all of our readers.

Newspapers

Search for articles in national or regional newspapers, some going back to the 1980s.

Useful for an understanding of how the media and different local areas respond to events
Useful to see how different newspapers report on the same story
Contains text only, no images
Remember that newspapers are not academic sources, and will often be biased

Newspapers This link opens in a new window
Online access to newspaper articles from UK newspapers

For access to additional resources we strongly recommend that you join Gloucestershire public libraries, or your own local public library service. Membership will enable you to access the British Newspaper Archive from within libraries, and give you access to a range of other resources.

JISC Historical Texts

JISC retired the Historical Texts service on 31st July 2024.

You can access the content at the links below

Early English Books Online (EEBO) This link opens in a new window
Early English Books Online (EEBO) features 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.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) This link opens in a new window
Eighteenth 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.

Additional library resources

BFI Player This link opens in a new window
Watch freely available collections from the British Film Institute.
British Periodicals Collections I and II This link opens in a new window
British Periodicals is available in two separate collections, British Periodicals Collection I and II. This database provides access to full text for nearly 500 British periodicals published from the 17th through the early 20th centuries.
Topics covered include literature, philosophy, history, science, the social sciences, music, art, drama, archaeology and architecture
Carl Giles Digital Archive This link opens in a new window
The British Cartoon Archive is a library, archive and gallery dedicated to the history of British cartooning over the last two hundred years.
The BCA collections include more than 150,000 pieces of cartoon artwork by over 350 cartoonists, plus 85,000 newspaper cuttings. The BCA has been digitising its collections since 1990, and gives free access to more than 125,000 fully-catalogued cartoons. All the cartoons on the website are indexed and searchable and the website allows you to browse and drill down into the collection by viewing cartoons published on the same day, by the selected cartoonist, or with the same keywords.
Census Services This link opens in a new window
Provides access to data from the 1971, 1981, 1991, 2001 and 2011 UK censuses.
This resource is free to search, however registration is required in order to download data. You can also view historical censuses from 1841 to 1911 from the National Archives website.
Digimap OS and Historic Map Collection (EDINA) This link opens in a new window
Digimap OS allows On-line digital mapping and data extraction facilities using current Ordnance Survey data of Great Britain. Digimap Historic allows users to view and download Historic Ordnance Survey maps of Great Britain dating from 1843 to the early 1990s.

Historical Census data
Historical censuses from the National Archives, 1841-1911

Migration to New Worlds This link opens in a new window
A multi-archive collection that provides a wide-ranging and in-depth look at the movement of peoples from Great Britain, Ireland, mainland Europe and Asia to the New World and Australasia during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Thousands of unique primary documents are presented from multiple sources, including letter collections, travel journals, diaries and oral histories. English, Scandinavian, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Polish and Scottish migrant experiences are well represented, along with a rich variety of documents covering Chinese and Japanese migration to the United States and indentured labour in the West Indies.

Accessibility statement and help
Wiley Digital Archives: Royal College of Physicians, Part 1 (1200 to 1862) This link opens in a new window
The archives contain an eclectic range of 14th- to 19th-century manuscripts. Personal papers of past fellows from the 16th century to the 20th century provide glimpses into the personal lives and social concerns of many distinguished physicians.
Highlights include:
• Folk Medicine
• Recipe books
• Medieval Medicine
• Healers and domestic medicine
• The early days of Anatomy
• Herbal Medicine

Government and politics

UK Government

GOV.UK Central portal to UK government information including departments, agencies and more
Hansard The official report of all Parliamentary debates. Find Members, their contributions, debates, petitions and divisions from published Hansard reports dating back over 200 years. Daily debates from Hansard are published on this website the next working day.
UK Acts of Parliament
UK Bills before Parliament
UK Parliament

Other resources

Europa: summaries of EU legislation An online gateway to EU law - the summaries provide short explanations intended for a non-expert audience, helpfully divided by topic

Legal databases

Lexis + This link opens in a new window
UK / EU law reports and legislation. 50 legal journals. All UK national newspapers (except FT) and local newspapers - dates vary.
Westlaw UK This link opens in a new window
UK & EU case law, legislation & legal journals (Including access to the Legal Journals Index). Register with your email address to access personalised features.
Accessibility statement

Useful websites and resources

Any list of useful weblinks will not be complete, and will quickly become out of date. If you would like to recommend a website or would like to tell me about a broken link please contact me or fill in the form below.

Chronicling America Digitized American newspapers from 1836-1922 available through the Library of Congress
Library of Congress Digital Collections A range of online sources covering different aspects of American life and politics

Recommend a web link

Zines

The new Zines@FCH collection has just been launched.

Zines are a place for people to be able to tell their own stories, through the art of DIY magazines.

Find out more, or drop into the library to have a look.