Humanities

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Adam Matthew's Medieval Travel Writing database begs to be browsed. 

It’s filled with manuscripts, maps, and travel texts, mostly from journeys to central Asia and the Far East, but also accounts of travels to the Holy Land.   Included are influential prose written in the late Middle Ages, such as the books of Marco Polo and ‘Sir John Mandeville’, but also works of relatively unknown Medieval missionaries and merchants.  Scholars may well choose to use this database as tool to gain context (social, cultural, political, economic), rather than to just locate a specific primary source.

And that is OK.   

Exploring a paper topic on pilgrimage, the origins of global trade, travels to the Holy Land, the Silk Road, or the representation of the ‘East’ or the ‘Other’ in the Middle Age? Then, browsing the essays, bibliography or chronology presented in the Medieval Travel Writing database might be a good first step.   

The brief biographies of the main 'travellers' include variant name spellings, which will help with future searches in other sources.

The original documents are in a range of languages, including French, Latin, German, Spanish, Dutch and English, so the secondary texts of translations and editions are very helpful.   Click on the Documents TAB and you see a list of items with uninspiring titles, such as MS 632  or  MS.e.Mus.124.  Follow a title link and you can view the entire manuscript as a pdf or as page-images.  You will also see all the document details and a sidebar of links to secondary material.

Don’t give up; keep clicking.   Lots of goodies are hidden under TABS with inconspicuous titles, like ‘Further Resources.’  If you take the time to browse, you are sure to find something unexpected.   

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This spring, the Emory Libraries' electronic book collection continues to grow larger with the addition of e-books published from 2011 through 2013 by Harvard University Press as part of a package distributed by De Gruyter.

Once you have logged in with your Emory ID and password, you may download titles from the De Gruyter catalog by chapter in PDF format. You may print them or transfer them to an e-reader or tablet to use as you need to. Books are added after they have been published in print, though not necessarily simultaneously.

The new e-books database is just one of many new electronic databases acquired this year by the Emory Libraries. In February, the libraries announced the availability of a series of primary-resource databases from Adam Matthew Digital, focusing on the humanities and social sciences.

Emory subscribes to a number of electronic book collections. For more information on finding and using e-books at Emory, visit our e-books research guide.

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The Robert W. Woodruff Library announces the winners of the 2013 Undergraduate Research Award.

From an impressive array of submissions by Emory undergraduate students, judges have selected three projects to be honored with this year's Undergraduate Research Award:

Megan Corbat—“Descriptive and Substantive Representation of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Persons in Connecticut’s Legislature: Single-Axis, Intersectional, and Qualitative Approach”
Faculty sponsor: Beth Reingold

Elizabeth Graham—“Cultural Relativism versus Human Rights: US Foreign Policy on Female Genital Circumcision”
Faculty sponsor: Carol Anderson

James Zainaldin—“Asclepius at Epidaurus: An Interpretation of the Sacred Space of Healing”
Faculty sponsor: Philippa Lang

Each winning entry will receive a prize of $500, supported by the Elizabeth Long Atwood Fund.

The judges also selected one project for an Honorable Mention:
Sweta Maturu—“United States Involvement in International Conflicts and Civil Uprisings: American Human Rights Policy towards Egypt during the Arab Spring”
Faculty sponsor: Carol Anderson

The awards will be presented at the Undergraduate Research Symposium on Wednesday, April 24 at the Dobbs University Center. The winners will share their work with the Emory community via poster presentations from 3 to 6 p.m.

Judges for this year’s research award were:
Tanya Molodtsova, Department of Economics
Daphne Norton, Department of Chemistry
Rob O’Reilly, Electronic Data Center
Nathan Suhr-Sytsma, Department of English
Stewart Varner, DiSC

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Emory’s African historians have had a great spring. Not only has the graduate program been recognized with a high ranking (No. 6 in the U.S.) but the library’s purchase of Adam Matthew’s digital collection, Confidential Print: Africa, has made the lives of anyone studying African history much easier. 

What are confidential prints? They are unpublished but printed internal documents of United Kingdom’s government departments. The confidential prints related to Africa are drawn from the Colonial (C.O.), Dominion (D.O.), and Foreign (F.O.) Offices files and are extremely important primary sources. The contents include a variety of reports, dispatches, analyses, and correspondence. There are also 300 maps. The originals are housed in the Public Record Office in Kew. 

While selected parts of these confidential prints have been printed or filmed, this digitized collection provides researchers unprecedented access to these materials which cover British interests in all of Africa, except Egypt. All documents are fully text-searchable once located by assigned headings or key words. Selections were made by a distinguished editorial board.

The time frame, 1834-1966, includes the early stages of imperial expansion and indigenous resistance in the interior of western and southern Africa, the European scramble for the continent in the late nineteenth century, and the expansion of settler colonialism in southern and eastern Africa, as well as the rising challenges to imperialism in the twentieth century that culminated in the rapid European withdrawal from the continent in the 1950s and 1960s.

Some sample contents: 

CO 879/1-190  Africa General, 1848-1861 reveals the spread of British sovereignty in west and South Africa, including the discovery and mining of diamonds. 

CO 885/1-140 Colonies general (selected files) covers the period from 1907 to 1929. These files concentrate on disease and medicine in Britain’s tropical African colonies, including sleeping sickness, hookworm, and leprosy.

FO 341/1-3 German Empire miscellaneous covers the years 1884 to 1900. These papers focus on the West Africa Conference (also known as the Berlin Conference and Congo Conference), which took place in Berlin in 1884-85 and marked the beginning of the European powers’ ‘Scramble for Africa.’

FO 403/1-482 Africa general spans the period from 1834 to 1959. Topics covered include the Activities of the Church Missionary Society in Lagos (1850s) and the establishments of the British East Africa Protectorate (modern Kenya) and Northern and Southern Rhodesia (1890s).

FO 458/1-157 and FO 485/1-3 Liberia cover British interests in Liberia during the years 1882 to 1950.

DO 201/1-53 Commonwealth Relations Office (selected files) covers the period between 1949 and 1966. Covers the independence of a number of colonies, including Nigeria.

For a fuller listing of contents, see the Nature and Scope page on the website.

Essays to give context to the collection will soon be included. 

Confidential Print: Africa is part of Adam Matthew’s Archives Direct program of digitizing selected contents of the British Public Record Office. Similar collections for the Middle East and Latin America are also available. All Adam Matthew digital collections can be cross searched through Adam Matthew Archive Explorer.

Bob Grantham Quickfall, Western Life and How I Became a Bronco Buster. 1891. Graff 4979.

From the Newberry Library Graff Collection. 

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In January, the Robert W. Woodruff Library acquired The American West Collection: Sources from the Everett D. Graff Collection of Western Americana at the Newberry Library, Chicago, 1722-1938, an extensive digital archive of manuscripts and printed materials on the history and culture of western America. Derived from the Newberry’s Everett D. Graff Collection, one of the premier collections of western Americana in the US, the database documents key people, events, and images related to the early American frontier and its borderlands. Students will find histories of Native Americans, pioneers, ranchers, hunters, explorers, outlaws, and vigilantes. They will uncover documents on mining and the gold rush, the Mormon exodus, travel and early settlement, the railroads, agricultural development and the environment. They will also encounter documents on the imagined west—popular representations of the region like Wild West shows.

To locate these materials, researchers should pay attention to several of the database’s features. Although the interface is somewhat dated (it is in the middle of being re-designed), it provides a good deal of useful information, especially if patrons take the time to explore beyond the home page. 

Under the “documents” tab, for example, you can browse the entire collection alphabetically, or explore it by theme, region (ranging from Alabama and Ohio west to Mexico), or document type. Clicking on the “document type” link leads you to two broad categories, printed and manuscript, and thirteen additional document types: Brand Book, Broadside, Correspondence, Currency, Diary, Directory, Ephemera, Journal, Pamphlet, Periodical, Photograph, Poster, and Rare Book. Clicking on “currency” link yields early bank notes from Nebraska, Iowa, and Ohio; on “posters,” announcements for theater productions from 1860s Montana, advertisements for new gold fields in Wyoming, and stage company passenger routes; on diaries, records of fur traders in the Black Hills, cowboys in Kansas, and life among the Sioux. They are all well described, like this Idaho broadside seeking horses for winter herding:

For those who wish to browse by subject or perform particular key word searches, the “searching” tab is also a good place to start. It includes a list of “popular searches”—a place for students with little prior knowledge of the subject to begin. Clicking on the subject “Buffalo Bill,” for instance, brings up more than 500 results—rare books, correspondence, photographs, pamphlets, and broadsides. For those who wish to search by keyword, the site has a well-developed help page that explains the organization of search results and tips for finding useful materials. Some things to keep in mind: printed sources will appear first in results; up to 100 results can be viewed per page; enclosing search terms in double quotations allows patrons to search for specific phrases.

Finally, researchers interested in maps and images should explore the “map” tab and the database’s slideshow feature. The map tab includes over 400 maps organized by region, date and theme. (A detailed overview of how to work with maps is available on the help page.) The database's slideshow gallery, which can be found under the “additional resources” tab, also contains nearly 800 high-resolution photographs, bookplates, and sketches—including a number of Audubon illustrations.

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This interdisciplinary database contains primary sources in thematically organized documents from 21 British and European libraries. The source material covers social, cultural, and intellectual concerns arranged according to the following areas: conduct and politeness; domesticity and the family; consumption and leisure; education and sensibility; and the body. Each section features essays by two or more of the eighteen academic consultant editors, which relate directly to the source material.

Among the authors whose documents are included are Jane Barker, Aphra Behn, Susanna Centlivre, Daniel Defoe, Maria Edgeworth, Eliza Haywood, Margery Kempe, Joseph Lancaster, John Locke, Delarivier Manley, Richard Steele, and Mary Wollstonecraft.

The manuscripts, printed works, and illustrations include pamphlets, commonplace books, diaries, periodicals, letters, government papers, poetry, novels, travel writing, and advice literature. In addition to the sections on the essays and the documents, there are those for biographies, chronology, and teaching. Above the page tabs, there are two boxes where one can click and gain access to lists of the names and topics covered.

This rich source material will enhance the teaching and research experience of those studying history, literature, education, and cultural studies from the perspective of gender.

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In preparation for Emory's Primary Evidence QEP, the library has just purchased 18 additional primary source databases from the vendor Adam Matthew that can be incorporated into course assignments or aid scholars researching a broad array of subjects. 

The Medieval Family Life database provides access to the only five existing letter collections from fifteenth-century England: the Paston, Cely, Stonor, Plumpton, and Armburgh papers. Many topics are covered in these letter collections, such as marriages, inheritance, estate management, financial dealings, and women and their role within the family. These manuscripts would be of great interest to researchers interested in medieval domestic life, economics, politics, and family dynamics. The database provides full-color digital images of all of the manuscripts alongside searchable transcriptions.

Medieval Family Life also features:

• An interactive map that students can use to look at places relating to the Paston, Stonor, Cely, and Plumpton families.
• Family trees for the Paston, Stonor, Cely, and Plumpton families.
• A gallery of images from manuscripts housed in the British Library.

The database also provides an extremely helpful tutorial with eighteen sections that cover aspects of medieval cultural and social history. These sections, which discuss topics ranging from courtship and marriage to trade and economic conditions, also list relevant primary source documents that students and researchers can consult as they investigate a topic.