United Kingdom

British Black and Asian Shakespeare Performance Database

Drama and Theatre Studies, History of Theatre | ethnic minorities, performance, Shakespeare, twentieth century, twenty-first century, United Kingdom

The database, edited and principally compiled by Dr. Jami Rogers, contains the records of over 1100 productions of Shakespeare to which British black or Asian actors, directors and other production personnel have contributed. The database spans the time period of 1930 – 2015 and tracks casting patterns for ethnic minority performers. It contains information about the production, the media reaction to the BAME personnel’s work within these productions, and lists the roles actors have played in the plays recorded. It provides a record of achievements and a statistical framework for analysing shifting professional opportunities over 85 years. The database is a major theatre history tool as well as having the ability to track casting policies from 1930 – 2015.

Data type: text

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The Marie Duval Archive

History, Social History | cartoons, gender studies, illustration, nineteenth century, United Kingdom, women's studies

Marie Duval was one of the most unusual, pioneering and boisterous cartoonists of the nineteenth century. This archive offers for scrutiny high resolution scans of as much of Duval’s published work as possible, organised according to date and details of publication.

Data type: images

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Famine and Dearth Database

History, Social History | Bengali, eighteenth century, fiction, Hindi, India, non-fiction, pamphlets, periodicals, Persian, plays, poetry, seventeenth century, sixteenth century, surveys, translation, United Kingdom

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.

Data type: text

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The Windrush Scandal in a Transnational and Commonwealth Context

History, Political History | Caribbean, discrimination, ethnic minorities, interviews, migration, oral history, race, twentieth century, twenty-first century, United Kingdom

From the Project Abstract on the UKRI Grant List website: The key outputs will be 60 oral history interviews which will be available electronically and a searchable database of existing oral history resources on the ‘Windrush generation’. 30 of the interviews will focus on the response of Caribbean governments and their representatives in London to the legal restrictions imposed on immigration to the UK from the Caribbean from the early 1960s, and the plight of those members of the diaspora community whose right to remain in the UK was challenged by the British state. The other 30 interviews will focus on members of the diaspora community, those who found themselves under threat of deportation or actually deported, and their supporters and legal and political representatives. The interviews will explore the extent to which the complexities and ambiguities of the law governing nationality exacerbated confusion around competing notions of Caribbean and British identity and belonging. They will seek to identify the extent to which members of the diaspora community were aware of changes to their rights and obligations brought about by successive acts of parliament from 1962, and the stages by which it became clear that significant numbers of people were having their right to remain in the UK challenged. This oral history research will be supplemented by archival research in collections in the UK and the Caribbean. Selected documents will be digitized and made available on the project website alongside the recordings of the interviews and supporting explanatory materials including a series of podcasts produced by the project team.

Data type: text

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The Redress of the Past: Historical Pageants in Britain, 1905-2016

History, Social History | music, performance, twentieth century, United Kingdom

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.

Data type: images, spatial, text

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UK RED

English Literature, Literature | autobiography, diaries, eighteenth century, fifteenth century, interviews, letters, nineteenth century, seventeenth century, sixteenth century, twentieth century, United Kingdom

The Reading Experience Database, 1450-1945 (RED), housed and developed at the OU is the world’s largest database about reading habits. An online, open-access project with over 30,000 entries, it is revolutionising public understanding of the history of reading. RED is democratising scholarship about the history of reading by encouraging ordinary members of the public from any location to contribute and use information about readers through history. 120+ volunteers from outside academia have already contributed some 6,000 entries. RED attracts over 1500 users per month from over 135 countries and has inspired partner projects in Australia, Canada, the Netherlands and New Zealand.

Data type: text

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Mapping Sculpture

Art, History of Art | Ireland, nineteenth century, sculpture, twentieth century, United Kingdom

Mapping Sculpture can be summed up as an investigation of sculptural practice that aims to reveal the numerous personal and professional connections underlying the production of sculpture. The project’s state of the art database provides the means of searching this complex web of connections.There are over 50,000 records in the database. This wealth of information can be used to answer many questions and will also suggest many new avenues for further investigation.

Data type: text

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War Widows’ Stories

History, Social History | gender studies, interviews, oral history, twentieth century, United Kingdom, war and conflict, women's studies, World War II

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.

Data type: audio, text

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Ellen Terry and Edith Craig Database

Drama and Theatre Studies, Theatre and History | family history, letters, nineteenth century, Shakespeare, United Kingdom

A new and creative interactive interface to the AHRC Ellen Terry and Edith Craig Database has new search facilities, attractive to a new user group outside academia and accessing a selection of newly digitized theatre programmes, enabling this already valuable resource to engage in new ways with the public and the principal stakeholders, the British Library and the National Trust. The enhancements to this existing online database catalogue of one of the UK’s most significant theatre archives, of over 20,000 archival documents, highlights the transatlantic and Antipodean theatre activities of Britain’s most renowned performers of Shakespeare in the nineteenth century: Ellen Terry and Henry Irving. The database is accessible freely online.

Data type: text

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Spaces of Hope: Peoples’ Plans

Social Sciences, Urban Studies | community, twentieth century, twenty-first century, United Kingdom

“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.”

Data type: images, spatial, temporal, text

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