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Emory Libraries is pleased to announce the purchase of eighteen databases from Adam Matthew Digital, a company that specializes in primary source materials in the humanities and social sciences. These eighteen databases are particularly strong in the areas of medieval history and culture, government documents from the United Kingdom, Asian history and culture, and women’s studies. Adam Matthew databases are composed of digitizations of well-known archives and print collections. One new database, China: Culture and Society, draws from the pamphlets in the Charles W. Wason Collection on East Asia at Cornell University; The American West database contains digitizations of manuscripts, periodicals, and images from the Everett D. Graff collection at the Newberry Library in Chicago. Many of the databases also contain scholarly essays, timelines, and maps that curate the primary source materials within.
Over the next few weeks, several subject librarians will be publishing additional blog posts to further highlight one of these fantastic new databases. We believe that these new online collections will be especially useful for faculty and graduate student research.
The eighteen databases are:
The American West
The American West is a digital collection of rare manuscripts, ephemeral material, and printed sources from the Everett D. Graff Collection of Western Americana at the Newberry Library of Chicago. The collection includes zoomable maps, notable manuscript collections such as the papers of James Audubon, city directories and prospectuses, and other sources that document the history of Native Americans, explorers, pioneers, agriculture, the Mormon exodus, and Wild West shows. The collection is indexed by title, author, date, format, theme, region, names and subjects.
China: Culture and Society
China: Culture and Society is a digital collection of extremely rare pamphlets from Cornell University Library’s Charles W. Wason Collection on East Asia. The pamphlets cover speeches, guides, reports, essays, catalogues, magazine articles, and other material addressing Chinese history, culture, and everyday life. The resource is full-text searchable, allowing for the collection to be comprehensively explored and studied. The wide variety of research interests and themes covered by the pamphlets include education, emigration, the foreign presence, missionaries, wars, rebellion, reform, opium, healthcare and language.
Confidential Print: North America, 1824-1961
Confidential Print North America is a digital collection of British Foreign and Colonial Office files from the National Archives at Kew. Documents include reports, dispatches, weekly political summaries, and monthly economic reports pertaining to the United States, Canada, the Caribbean and Central America. The database is indexed and is full-text searchable. It forms part of the Adam Matthew's Archives Direct collection of British National Archives records.
Confidential Print: Africa, 1834-1966
Confidential Print: Africa provides scholars with electronic access to the United Kingdom’s Colonial, Dominion and Foreign Offices’ confidential correspondence relating to Africa between 1834 and 1966. This resource will provide researchers with a searchable collection of scores of official documents covering almost the entire period of European conquest and colonization of Africa. 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 are all covered, as are the rising challenges to imperialism in the twentieth century that culminated in the rapid European withdrawal from the continent in the 1950s and 1960s.
Confidential Print: Latin America, 1833-1969
The documents of Confidential Print: Latin America are the full text records of the British Foreign Office, which cover the whole of South and Central America, plus the non-British islands of the Caribbean, from just after the final Spanish withdrawal from mainland America in the 1820s to the height of the Cold War in the 1960s. Covering revolutions, territorial changes and political movements, foreign financial interests, industrial and infrastructural development (including the building of the Panama Canal), wars, slavery, immigration from Europe and relations with indigenous peoples, amongst other topics, the files in this title form a vital resource for any scholar of Latin American history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Defining Gender, 1450-1910
Defining Gender is a collection of original source materials from British and European archives. Documents from 21 libraries are thematically organized by areas: Conduct and Politeness, Domesticity and the Family, Consumption and Leisure, Education and Sensibility, and The Body. The documents were selected by academic, consultant editors, who have contributed essays to the area sections, which relate directly to the source material. Manuscripts, printed works, and illustrations address key issues from both feminine and masculine perspectives.
Eighteenth Century Journals V
This portal to newspapers and periodicals provides full-text access to rare British newspapers and periodicals from the 17th and 18th centuries. Section V offers a complete run of one of the greatest periodicals of the age, The Lady's Magazine (1770 to 1832), as well as other relevant titles from the period.
Foreign Office Files for China, 1949-1980
The Foreign Office Files for China, 1949-1980, is a digitized collection of the British Foreign Office files dealing with China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, specifically, the complete FO 371 and FCO 21 files from The National Archives, Kew. The files include eye-witness accounts and detailed reports on life in China, in depth analysis of the Communist Revolution and all the major figures, and material on the Korean War, the Cold War, US relations, and the Cultural Revolution.
Global Commodities: Trade, Exploration and Cultural Exchange
The Global Commodities database provides primary source materials arranged around fifteen major trade goods from world history such as chocolate, coffee, cotton, and opium. Each commodity is documented through a wide range of manuscript materials, maps, posters, paintings, photographs, ephemera, objects, and rare books so that the scholar can explore the origins of the commodity, their first uses, the trade that developed and the ways in which these items were marketed and consumed. The project touches on themes of exploration and discovery; imperialism and colonialism; trade wars; translocation and economic geography; slavery; taste; and the evolution of global branding.
The Grand Tour
The Grand Tour was a rite-of-passage for many aristocratic and wealthy young men of the eighteenth century (1701-1800). This database contains primary source letters; diaries and journals; account books; printed guidebooks; published travel writing; paintings and sketches; architectural drawings; and maps that illustrate the everyday issues of transportation, money, communications, food and drink, health, and sex, as well as European political and religious life. The architecture, street life and urban planning of cities such as Paris, Rome, Florence and Geneva are highlighted.
Mass Observation Online
Mass Observation Online: British Social History, 1937-1972 from the University of Sussex incudes material divided into two main types: material collected by investigators and that collected by volunteers. The first type includes surveys, collections of emphemera, accounts of ‘overheards’ and covert observations of the general public, while the volunteer material is personal accounts of individual lives provided by the amateur observers from MO’s ‘National Panel’. The database includes File Reports, 1937-1972 on topics such as popular culture, consumerism, branding and fashion, sex, marriage, and the family, as well as attitudes to war, politics and America, Russia, and Europe. There are also MO publications, diaries, directives, and full color digital images.
Medieval Family Life
The Medieval Family Life database contains the only 5 major letter collections from fifteenth-century England, the Paston, Stonor, Cely, Plumpton, and Armburgh Papers. The Paston letters document the life of a gentry family during the War of the Roses. The Celys were a merchant family in the wool trade and collections contains commercial dealings for both the economic and social historians. Plumptons documents continue through to the early 16th century, and Armburgh family material is primarily concerned with a dispute over a family inheritance. It includes both the original medieval manuscripts and transcripts, as well as family trees, a chronology, a glossary, a and an interactive map.
Medieval Travel Writing
This database presents manuscripts of European travel writing dating from the 13th to the 16th centuries culled from libraries around the world. It covers geography, exploration, trade, literature, and the new field of medieval postcolonial studies. The chief focus is on journeys to central Asia and the Far East, including accounts of travel to Mongolia, Persia, India, China, and South-East Asia, as well as travel to the Holy Land. The original documents are in a range of languages, including French, Latin, German, Spanish, Dutch and English, so supporting secondary texts of translations and editions are included. There is also a gallery of maps and images, a bibliography and chronology, and a slideshow.
Meiji Japan
A collection of the personal and professional papers of Edward Sylvester Morse, a zoologist and author of various works related to Japan. Having initially traveled to Japan in 1877 to study brachiopods, Morse introduced modern aspects of biology and zoology to Japan and developed an interest in Japanese ethnology and archaelogy, collecting pottery and artifacts and keeping detailed notes on his observations of daily life. The papers, digitized by the Peabody Essex Museum, include his diaries, travel journals, correspondence, lectures, drawings, and numerous other types of documents.
The Nixon Years, 1969-1974
The Nixon Years is a digital collection of Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) Files 7 and 82 from the British National Archives at Kew. It covers Nixon’s handling of numerous Cold War crises, his administrations achievements, and his use of executive powers culminating in Watergate from a British, European and Commonwealth perspective. Documents in the collection are full-text searchable and are indexed by notable people, places, and topics.
Travel Writing, Spectacle and World History
This database contains primary source accounts by women of their travels across the globe from the early 19th century to the late 20th century. Documents span from 1818-1970 and cover topics such as: architecture; art; the British Empire; climate; customs; exploration; family life; housing; industry; language; monuments; natural history; politics; race; religion; science; and war. Maps explore destinations and travel routes. All documents come from the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library (Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University).
Victorian Popular Culture IV: Moving Pictures, Optical Entertainments and the Advent of Cinema
Victorian Popular Culture describes popular entertainment in America, Britain, and Europe in the period from 1779 to 1930 and shows how interconnected these worlds were. The fourth section explores the pivotal era in entertainment history when previously static images came to life and moved for the first time.
Women in the National Archives
Women in the National Archives is part of Archives Direct and is comprised of two elements: “A Finding Aid to Women’s Studies Resources in the National Archives at Kew” and “Original Documents on the Suffrage Question in Britain, the Empire, and Colonial Territories.” The Finding Aid is a detailed analysis, on an item basis, of the holdings of the National Archives on the subject of women from c1559 – 1995. The second part of the resource is the collection of original documents, particularly relating to “The Campaign for Women’s Suffrage in Britain, 1903 – 1928” and “The granting of women’s suffrage in Colonial territories, 1930 – 1963.”
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