Humanities

  Share

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 They are unpublished but printed internal documents of United Kingdom’s government departments.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.

New Orleans Lexicon, Jill Timm

  Share

To commemorate Fat Tuesday, I want to highlight an artist's book in MARBL, Jill Timm's New Orleans Lexicon. Timm, who got her start making miniature books, created New Orleans Lexicon after visiting the city to attend a Conclave of the Miniature Book Society. The book is 2.25 inches tall and about 3 inches wide. It does not resemble a book so much as a case with twelve folders in the Mardi Gras colors. Ten of these folders contain cards with definitions of words and phrases commonly used in the Crescent City. Each card also has a photograph or illustration made from plastic, cutouts, feathers, and beads. MARBL has one of only 25 copies of this book. New Orleans Lexicon was published under Mystical Places Press, which Timm established in 1998. MARBL possesses over thirty of Timm's books, many of them exquisite and beautiful miniatures.

New Orleans Lexicon will be a part of The Artists' Books Showcase, a digital exhibition highlighting pieces in MARBL's vast collection of artists' books. The exhibition is expected to go live in the spring of 2013.

Image © Adam Matthew 2013

  Share

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.”