This [dataset] allows you to search millions of records from around fifty datasets, relating to the lives of 90,000 convicts from the Old Bailey. Use our site to search individual convict life archives, explore and visualise data, and learn more about crime and criminal justice in the past.
Broadside ballads were single-sheet songs that sold for a penny a piece. This website concentrates on over 100 resoundingly successful examples that you can investigate through recordings, images and a wealth of other materials. Whether you are interested in music, art, love, gender, tragedy, politics, family life, crime, history, humour or death, you will find something to engage you here.
Bess of Hardwick (c.1521/2 or 1527-1608) is one of Elizabethan England’s most famous figures. She is renowned for her reputation as a dynast and indomitable matriarch and perhaps best known as the builder of great stately homes like the magnificent Hardwick Hall and Chatsworth House. The story of her life told to date typically emphasises her modest birth, her rise through the ranks of society, her four husbands, each of greater wealth than the last, and her ambitious aggrandisement of her family. Bess of Hardwick’s letters, which number almost 250 items of correspondence, bring to life her extraordinary story and allow us to eavesdrop on her world. Her letters allow us to reposition Bess as a complex woman of her times, immersed in the literacy and textual practices of everyday life, as her correspondence extends from servants, friends and family, to queens and officers of state.
The Gersum Project, funded by the AHRC, aims to understand Scandinavian influence on English vocabulary by examining the origins of more than 900 words in a corpus of Middle English poems from the North of England. Investigating the early history of these words allows us to address questions about how we can identify Old Norse loans, and how and by whom these words were used in the first few centuries after their adoption into English, especially in the crucial Middle English period.
“SPACES OF HOPE: the Hidden History of Community Led Planning in the UK has explored the often-overlooked ways in which local people and organisations have come together to improve their physical and social environments. Since the 1960s a rich but hidden history has emerged of communities campaigning, drawing up their own land-use plans, owning, occupying and developing sites and initiating creative community projects. Bringing together universities, artists and archivists and working in partnership with the Town and Country Planning Association, SPACES OF HOPE: PEOPLES’ PLANS is an AHRC-funded research project that aims to reveal these histories and spark debate about how lessons can be applied to current community place-shaping.”
Throughout his campaigns, Cobden used his personal correspondence as a key method of organising, persuading and sharing his own knowledge and experience, while also eliciting new information to help inform his speeches and pamphlets. His letters also give an insight into his private life, and the stresses and strains of agitation. The Letters of Richard Cobden (1804-1865) Online provides free access to digital transcripts of Cobden’s letters collected by the Letters of Richard Cobden Project, first established in 2002.
