English: Primary Sources

The Hartley Library’s Special Collections include the Anglo-Jewish Archives, Wellington Papers, Broadlands Archive, rare books and printed collections such as the Parkes Library and Cope Collection.

The Internet Archive is building a non-profit digital library of internet sites and other cultural artifacts.. This includes 330 billion web pages, 20 million books and texts, 4.5 million audio recordings (including 180,000 live concerts), 4 million videos (including 1.6 million Television News programs), 3 million images and 200,000 software programs.

A guide to finding and evaluating primary sources located on the internet.

The National Theatre Collection brings the stage to life through access to high definition streaming video of world-class productions and unique archival material offering significant insight into theatre and performance studies.

Academic Video Online is the most comprehensive video subscription available to libraries. It delivers more than 62,000 titles spanning the widest range of subject areas including anthropology, business, counselling, film, health, history, music, and more.

An off-air recording and media archive service that allows you to record TV and radio programmes scheduled for broadcast over the next seven days as well as retrieving programmes from the last seven days from a selected list of channels. In addition, you can watch programmes from the archive, create clips, and compile your favourite shows into playlists. Further information
Due to E.U legislation, any UK registered students in the EU will not be able to access BoB (apart from the BBC News Channel* ) from 1st January 2021.

Kanopy is an on-demand streaming video platform for public libraries and universities that offers films and documentaries.The service includes features such as captions, transcripts, clip creation, and playlist creation that allow users to share videos.

Please note: You will need to create a personal account to access Kanopy through either the mobile or TV apps. Creating an account on Kanopy will also allow you to save videos to your Watchlist to view later, create clips and playlists.

For more help creating an account, click here

An extensive online portal that allows users to search through and view more than 54,000 video testimonies of survivors and witnesses of genocide. Please note: you will need to register on the site to use features such as “My Projects/Bookmarked Projects/Shared Projects”.

Early European Books provides scholars with new ways of accessing and exploring all works printed in Europe before 1701, drawing together a diverse array of printed sources, regardless of language, as well as works published further afield.

Full-text of every significant English & foreign language title printed in Great Britain during the Eighteenth Century plus thousands of important works from the Americas.

Digital reproductions of some 1100 pages of fiction written in Jane Austen’s own hand.

This collection provides access to thousands of items selected from the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera held in the Bodleian Library. The collection offers a unique insight into daily life during the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and covers subjects such as the Booktrade, Popular Prints, Crimes, Murders and Executions, and Advertising.

Makes available, in a fully digitised and searchable form, a wide range of primary sources about eighteenth-century London.

The papers of Mass Observation, a pioneering social research organisation. Provide insights into the cultural and social history of Britain from 1937 to 1965.

A fully searchable, digitised collection of all surviving editions of the Old Bailey Proceedings from 1674 to 1913. It allows access to over 197,000 trials and includes biographical details of 2500 of the convicts.

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.

Black Drama, now in its expanded third edition, contains the full text of more than 1,700 plays written from the mid-1800s to the present by more than 200 playwrights from North America, English-speaking Africa, the Caribbean, and other African diaspora countries.

A growing image database of medieval and renaissance manuscripts.

A collection of Latin works from Antiquity to the modern period.

Aims to create a comprehensive digital collection of all surviving texts written in Greek from Antiquity to the present era. An individual username and password needs to be created for access. Click on 'register' at the top right of the screen.

A growing image database of medieval and renaissance manuscripts.

Early English Books Online (EEBO) contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700.

Early European Books provides scholars with new ways of accessing and exploring all works printed in Europe before 1701, drawing together a diverse array of printed sources, regardless of language, as well as works published further afield.

A collection of medieval sources published by Manchester University Press.

A collection of primary and secondary texts that focus on the theatre, literature and history of Shakespeare.

Offers a range of resources, including fully annotated texts of Shakespeare's plays and poems, multimedia materials and records of his plays in performance.

The World Shakespeare Bibliography Online is a searchable electronic database consisting of the most comprehensive record of Shakespeare-related scholarship and theatrical productions published or produced worldwide from 1960 to the present.

Subculture archives is educational & cultural research resource of primary sources exploring 100 years of youth culture through the scenes, styles, and sounds that forged them. From Rave, Punk, Rockabilly to Grime.
Subculture archives is formed from the collectons of the Museum of Youth Culture - an emerging museum dedicated to the styles, sounds and social movements innovated by young people over the last 100 years. Championing the impact of youth on modern society, the Museum of Youth Culture is a non-profit Heritage Lottery & Arts Council Funded collection incorporating photographs, ephemera, objects and oral histories celebrating our shared youth culture history. From the bomb-site Bicycle racers in post-war 1940s London, to the Acid House ravers of 1980s Northern England, the Museum of Youth Culture empowers the extraordinary everyday stories of growing up in Britain.

Women and Social Movements, International is a landmark collection of primary materials. Through the writings of women activists, their personal letters and diaries, and the proceedings of conferences at which pivotal decisions were made, this collection lets you see how women’s social movements shaped much of the events and attitudes that have defined modern life.

Women and Social Movements in Modern Empires since 1820 explores prominent themes in world history since 1820: conquest, colonization, settlement, resistance, and post-coloniality, as told through women’s voices - includes documents related to the Habsburg Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the British, French, Italian, Dutch, Russian, Japanese, and United States Empires, and settler societies in the United States, New Zealand and Australia.

Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 is a resource for students and scholars of U.S. history and U.S. women's history. The collection currently includes 124 document projects and archives with more than 5,100 documents and 175,000 pages of additional full-text documents, written by 2,800 primary authors. It also includes book, film, and website reviews, notes from the archives, and teaching tools.

Providing biographical information on more than 149,000 modern novelists, poets, playwrights, nonfiction writers, journalists and scriptwriters. Sketches typically include personal information, contact information, career history, writings, biographical and critical sources, authors' comments, and informative essays about their lives and work.

The series provides reliable information on authors and their works in an easy to understand, engaging format, while placing writers in the larger perspective of literary history. Dictionary of Literary Biography includes the main series, documentary, and yearbook volumes.

Providing a compilation of literary commentary.

Enabling a person or literary work search

Providing access to literary works and authors throughout history and includes more than 130,000 full-text poems and 650,000+ poetry citations, as well as short stories, speeches, and plays. The database also includes secondary materials like biographies, images, and more.

Providing access to US, European and British writers, and World poets.
Twayne’s Author Series provides access to of frequently-used Twayne Literary Masters books on individual World, US, or English authors.

Providing comprehensive access to all volumes ever printed in Gale's ‘Something About the Author’ series, which examines the lives and works of authors and illustrators for children and young adults and is the preeminent source on authors and literature for young people. Something About the Author Online includes both the main series and Something About the Author Autobiography Series, totaling more than 290 volumes, 20,000 entries, and nearly 30,000 images.

Providing access to of frequently-used Twayne Literary Masters books on individual World, US, or English authors.

Uncover the stories of American military personnel and civilians during the Second World War through their oral histories, correspondence, diaries, photographs, artifacts, and military records. This digital resource offers an insight into the personal experiences of those involved in the conflict, both on the United States home front and on deployment overseas in Europe, the Mediterranean, the Pacific, China, Burma and India.

London Low Life is a full-text searchable resource, containing colour digital images of rare books, ephemera, maps and other materials relating to 18th, 19th and early 20th century London. It is designed for both teaching and study, from undergraduate to research students and beyond.

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. Mass Observation Project consists of all the directives sent out by Mass Observation and the responses to them from the hundreds of Mass Observers.

Nineteenth Century Literary Society offers unprecedented digital access to the peerless archive of the historic John Murray publishing company. This digital resource enables researchers to discover the golden age of the company that published genre-defining titles including Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Austen’s Emma, and Livingstone’s Missionary Travels.

This digital resource reveals the story of war as told by the newspapers that brought information, entertainment and camaraderie to the forces at home and overseas. Explore over 300 titles from key nations across the globe that took part in the world-changing conflict.

This collection explores changing attitudes towards human sexuality, gender identities and sexual behaviors throughout the twentieth century. Investigate the breadth and complexity of human sexual understanding through the work of leading American sexologists, sex researchers, organizations and the public consciousness.

Victorian Popular Culture is a portal comprised of four modules, inviting users into the darkened halls, small backrooms, big tops and travelling venues that hosted everything from spectacular shows and bawdy burlesque, to the world of magic, spiritualist séances, optical entertainments and the first moving pictures.

This collection offers access to the works and legacy of many notable and influential women, but also a chance to hear the voices of forgotten and ordinary women. A breadth of printed and manuscript sources over four centuries, providing a multitude of perspectives on the changing roles of women in history.

Important primary sources, offering insight into many aspects of the conflict, including government policy, the war in the Pacific, and the war in Europe. Sources include the records of the Special Operations Executive; and private papers of American General Robert L Eichelberger, from the Pacific war.