Civil War Petitions contains petitions to the state from veterans and their families for welfare payments as a result of injuries and bereavement sustained during the English Civil Wars. It aims to share information on the human costs of this devastating conflict, which continued to affect communities long after the fighting was over.
The Famine and Dearth database contains searchable transcriptions of over 700 multilingual primary sources relating to situations of famine and dearth in early modern India and Britain. The archive contains texts in ten different languages including Persian, Bengali and Hindi as well as English, and offers English translations for the majority of texts. These texts cover a wide range of genres, including chronicle histories, gazetteers, official correspondence, legislation, pamphlets, periodicals, plays, poetry, surveys, and fiction and non-fiction prose.
The War Widows’ Stories website hosts all transcripts and recordings of the oral history interviews we have conducted in the course of the War Widows’ Stories project, and they can be access and downloaded for free by anyone. Recordings can be streamed or downloaded; transcripts can be read and searched online or downloaded as PDFs.
This project aims to survey the vast hidden archive of early Stuart England’s manuscript pamphlets. In collaboration with the British Library, this project will construct a database of manuscript pamphlet texts, bibliographic information, and digital images. This will allow users to search transcriptions of the pamphlets; analyze the distribution of copies through time and space; and see how such materials were presented: large and small, elaborate and plain, professional and amateur. The project will conduct additional research in the private papers of Francis Russell, fourth earl of Bedford, who was a major political figure of the early Stuart era as well as a reader and collector of manuscript pamphlets.
The database contains entries of over 550 pageants (and growing). These list a wealth of information about individual historical pageants, sometimes in great detail. Insofar as records allow (and little trace remains of many pageants), we have sought to record details of the times and places of performances, those involved in organising and staging them, and how many people attended. For each pageant, we have also sought to record, again as fully as possible, whether the pageant made or lost money, details of the music that was played and who composed it, and synopses of the individual episodes which featured. In addition, for each pageant record we provide lists of the names of the notable historical figures that featured in the action. Last but certainly not least, we have prepared a detailed summary essay explaining each pageant and placing it in its wider historical context. We have information on all – or nearly all – of the largest pageants performed in twentieth-century Britain as well as a broadly representative sample of smaller pageants.
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.
Collection of historical records of violent incidents in the United States, spanning from 1782 to the present day. The dataset is categorized by date, incident type, subtypes, casualties, geographical location of the violence, documented fatalities, and the authoritative sources from which this data is derived. Additionally, each entry includes a detailed narrative describing the specific circumstances surrounding the violent incident.
This research project explores the insight that the period between the introduction of tobacco in the 1570s and the ‘Gin Craze’ of the early eighteenth century was a formative phase in the production, traffic, consumption, and representation of intoxicants. By intoxicants – a less ideologically loaded term than ‘drugs’, and a more historical descriptor for non-medicinal commodities – we mean substances understood at the time to be ‘poisoning, or envenoming’ and ‘tuddling or making drunk’, and which today are recognized as having an often detrimental impact on the body’s physiological and mental processes, especially if consumed to excess.” “The resulting research tool will be an interactive website, providing free access to the datasets generated by the project, and allowing the research team and a wider community of users to explore the relationships between the economic, social, political, material, and cultural realms of early modern intoxication. “These include people, places, objects (such as drinking vessels, printed images), organisations, language (context-specific terminology), and events (such as legislation or transactions). Each of these entities will have its own set of characteristics as well as relationships with one or more other entities. The resulting ‘ontology’ will enable the PI, Co-Is, and RAs to interrogate the entire range of data and visualise the results in ways which reveal trends and relationships that are not evident when consulting the documents individually. For example, changing volumes of tobacco or numbers of licence holders or uses of the word ‘drunkenness’ can be traced and contextualised diachronically whilst relationships between entities – for example tobacco, licences, and ‘drunkenness’ – are revealed synchronically.
“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.”
