History

Seshat – Economy Variables

History, World History | culture, economy, luxury goods, seshat, social hierarchy

“This section of the database is dedicated to examining the production, provenance, and consumption of luxury items and goods across different strata of society. The data captures a wide array of luxury items such as precious metals, luxury fabrics, manufactured goods, spices, incense, and dyes, luxury drinks/alcohol, glass goods, fine ceramic wares, precious stones, statuary, and luxury food. These variables highlight the intersection of economy, culture, and social hierarchy.”

Data type: temporal

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Seshat – Religion Variables

History, World History | government, religion, seshat

“This section of Seshat encompasses a wide range of variables, each offering valuable insights into the dynamics of religious coexistence, government policies, and societal attitudes. This comprehensive collection of variables allows for a multifaceted analysis of religions, shedding light on the complexities of interactions between governments, societies, and religious communities. Key variables include measures of syncretism, the prevalence of official and elite religions, and the frequency of violence, both governmental and societal, against religious groups. Additionally, the dataset explores government restrictions on religious practices, property ownership, and the circulation of religious literature. It delves into taxation based on religious adherence, governmental obligations for official recognition, and limitations on constructing religious buildings. Furthermore, the prevalence of widespread religions, including the most widespread and up to the fourth most widespread, provides a nuanced understanding of religious landscapes.”

Data type: temporal

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Seshat – Warfare Variables (MilTech)

History, World History | military technology, seshat, war

“This section of the historical database delves into the tools, strategies, and innovations that shaped military capabilities in past polities. It catalogs a wide array of military technologies, from basic weapons like spears, swords, and daggers to advanced systems like crossbows, composite bows, and gunpowder-based firearms. Protective equipment such as helmets, chainmail, and plate armor is documented alongside fortifications like stone walls, moats, and long defensive walls. This section also includes entries on transportation and battlefield support, such as horses, camels, and elephants, as well as specialized vessels for naval engagements. By coding these variables systematically, we aim to provide insights into the evolution of warfare, reflecting how societies adapted their military technologies to defend territories, expand influence, or engage in conflict. This serves as a valuable resource for researchers interested in the history of military technologies and the socio-political impact of war in human history.”

Data type: temporal

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Seshat – Social Complexity Variables

History, World History | administration, economy, government, information, infrastructure, money, seshat

“This section of Seshat provides a detailed exploration of the diverse aspects that characterize past polities’ societal structures and advancements. It includes data on infrastructure like roads, bridges, and irrigation systems; administrative and governance systems such as courts, bureaucracies, and legal codes; and cultural and intellectual achievements, including writing systems, scientific literature, and sacred texts. This section also captures economic activities, including markets, trade emporia, and currency systems, as well as population dynamics and territorial extents. By coding these variables systematically, this section helps researchers analyze the development, complexity, and functionality of historical societies, offering a comprehensive view of how polities managed resources, facilitated communication, and maintained social order.”

Data type: temporal

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Seshat – General Variables

History, World History | language, polity, religion, seshat, succession

“This section of the Seshat database focuses on the essential aspects of polity organization and dynamics. It includes data on alternative name, original name, and capital, which provide information on how polities were identified. Variables such as degree of centralization, peak years, and duration reveal the administrative, temporal, and structural characteristics of past societies. Additionally, this section captures the relationships and interactions between polities, including preceding entity, succeeding entity, and relationship to preceding entity. Religious and cultural contexts are represented through variables like religion, religious tradition, and scale of supracultural interaction. Furthermore, linguistic and territorial attributes are documented, including language, language genus, linguistic family, and UTM zone.”

Data type: temporal

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The Lands of the Normans in England

History, Social History | England, family history, France, Middle Ages

In 1204 King Philip Augustus of France conquered Normandy, thus breaking up the ‘Anglo-Norman realm’ created after the Norman conquest of England in 1066. The severing of connections between the two countries had profound implications for French and English identity and politics, but it has not received the detailed study that it merits. The Lands of the Normans project is based on the study of a sample of Anglo-Norman landowners, based on the single most important English source for the confiscations of 1204, the Rotulus de valore terrarum Normannorum. The project team traced the history of each of the lay families and estates that appear in this source through the surviving records, English and French, royal and private, before and after 1204. These records were entered into an online database, designed and created by the historical members of the project team in combination with the technical officers at the Humanities Research Institute. “The database contains details of over 2,000 individual documents collected from over 100 historical sources. Nearly 3,000 different people and places appear in the database, and there are over 13,500 links describing the relationships between these people and places. The Lands of the Normans database thus provides an introduction to a number of important Anglo-Norman families, including their appearances in royal and private records and access to automated reconstructions of the genealogies of each family and maps of landholding. We hope that this may encourage other historians to explore the potential benefits of Information Technology for their own research.

Data type: spatial, text

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The Online Froissart

History | England, fourteenth century, France, Middle Ages

“Jean Froissart’s Chroniques cover the period from around 1326 to around 1400 and are the single most important contemporary prose narrative about the first part of the Hundred Years’ War. More than 150 manuscript volumes containing the Chronicles have survived in more than 30 different libraries across Europe and North America. Of the four Books of the Chronicles the first three exist in substantially different versions. […] The Online Froissart offers access to the core manuscript tradition of the first three Books of Froissart’s Chronicles, and to some manuscripts of Book IV. It delivers complete or partial transcriptions of all 114 surviving manuscripts containing Books I-III, partial transcriptions of three witnesses of Book IV, a new translation into modern English of a selection of chapters, providing readers with an accessible way of exploring chapters selected from the first three Books, several complete high-resolution reproductions of illuminated manuscript copies, including many pages containing miniatures, and a range of secondary materials (codicological descriptions, name/place index, historical and textual commentaries accompanying the transcriptions, scholarly essays, a glossary and some commentaries on the illustrations).”

Data type: images, text

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George Thomason’s Newsbooks

History, Social History | Early Modern, England, media, seventeenth century

“This website offers double rekeyed and fully searchable text of a selection of serials collected by seventeenth-century bookseller George Thomason. As is well known, the Thomason collection of newsbooks is a very significant body of texts. Though many bibliophiles from the period amassed impressive personal collections of contemporary books and pamphlets, none did so with Thomason’s assiduity, rigour and care. Thomason regarded serials as a key component of a rich archive of printed and manuscript materials; he acquired around 7,200 of them, approximately one third of his total book collection, and, in placing them cheek-by-jowl with very different kinds of text, privileging the date he received a work above the status of the author or genre of a text, problematized distinctions between cheap unbound pamphlets and the more stable and respectable bibliographic category of the book.”

Data type: text

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Piston, Pen and Press

History, Social History | England, literature, nineteenth century, poetry, Scotland, songs, working class culture

“Welcome to the ‘Piston, Pen & Press’ database. Here you can search or browse our records of industrial workers and literary culture across Scotland and the North of England. We have entries for individuals, for literary works (many including transcriptions of poems, songs or prose extracts), and for associations that sponsored literary activities and were connected to industry.”

Data type: audio, spatial, text, video

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Protestant Communities in the USSR

History, Social History | Latvia, Protestantism, Russia, twentieth century, Ukraine, USSR

This project examines the experience of Baptist and Pentecostal communities in the USSR.

Data type: audio, images, text

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