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What are primary sources?
Primary Sources
Primary sources can be:
- direct records of events
- works of art of fiction
Examples of primary sources in literary studies include:
- novels, plays, poems, and other literary works
- the manuscripts and notes, first editions, contemporary editions, or specific editions of a literary work you are researching
- newspapers, journals and diaries, correspondence, ephemera, art, and other material that is contemporary to a literary work you are researching
Secondary Sources
Secondary sources are works that analyze, interpret, and contextualize primary works. They were usually written or created after the primary material they are analyzing.
Oxford English Dictionary
To discover the historical usage and etymology of English words, look them up in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Because meanings shift over time, it is often important to understand how a specific word was used when the primary work you are studying was created.
Don't forget to include proper citations when referring to the OED. (Click here and scroll down for citing dictionary entries in MLA style.)
Proquest One LiteratureProQuest One Literature is the upgraded version of Literature Online.
ProQuest One contains 5 million literature citations from thousands of journals, monographs, dissertations, and more than 500,000 primary works – including rare and obscure texts, multiple versions, and non-traditional sources like comics, theatre performances, and author readings. Enhanced by interpretive sources such as book reviews and criticism sourced from wider, interdisciplinary publications in the fields such as humanities and history, it provides diverse, global perspectives with sources from all over the world – Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and North and South America - the majority of which are in full-text. The database can be browsed by literary period, literary movement, author name or literature collections.
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Gale Primary Sources Gale Primary Sources is an integrated platform that combines Gale’s digital archives into a single cross-searchable interface. This broadens and enhances the ability to discover primary source documents from multiple collections. This platform combines dozens of historical archives which include monographs, manuscripts, newspapers, maps, and photographs and covers more than 500 hundred of years of history.
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Intelex Past Masters InteLex Past Masters is comprised of 117 full-text humanities databases that make available cohesive collections of editions, in both original language and in English translation, of seminal figures in the humanities and social sciences. Much of the content is licensed from Oxford University Press, with significant collections from other major scholarly publishers including Harvard University Press, Indiana University Press and Pickering & Chatto. Major university initiatives included in the series are the Connaught Descartes Project from the University of Toronto, John Dewey's works and correspondence from the Center for Dewey Studies at Southern Illinois University, and Ludwig Wittgenstein's Gesamtbriefwechsel from the Brenner Archive at the University of Innsbruck.
Making of the Modern World (Gale)Research collection documenting history of the dynamics of Western trade, 1500 to the early 20th century. Covers historical underpinnings supporting the study of economics and European imperialism.
This wide-ranging collection looks at history through the lens of wealth and trade with a focus on economics, political science, history, philosophy, sociology, and special collections on banking, finance, transportation and manufacturing. In many instances this database has the only known copy of certain works. The 3 collections can be searched together, or individually. Part I: The Goldsmiths’-Kress Collection, 1450-1850 includes major works of many economists, political pamphlets and broadsides, government publications, proclamations, and ephemera. Part II: 1851-1914 is comprised mainly of monographs, reports, correspondence, speeches, and surveys, providing international coverage of social, economic, and business history, as well as political science, technology, industrialization and the birth of the modern corporation. It provides a glimpse into the second half of the 19th century and the global events and crises that were witnessed by those living them. Part III: 1890-1945 includes transnational coverage in an area of political economy, with content covering the First World War, the Great Depression, and the Second World War. Part IV: 1800-1890 covers the industrial revolution, and the High Victorian Era. when the foundations of modern-day capitalism and global trade were established.
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Empire Online A digitized collection of original documents relating to Empire Studies, sourced from libraries and archives around the world. It covers: cultural contact, empire writing and literature of empire, the visible empire, religion and empire, race, class & colonialism worldwide.
It includes both "manuscript and printed material and a broad range of document types; written by men and women from both the European and the non-European perspective:" exploration journals and logs, letter books and correspondence, periodicals, diaries, official government papers, missionary papers, travel writing, slave papers, memoirs, fiction, children's adventure stories, traditional and folk tales, exhibition catalogues and guides, maps, marketing posters, photographs, and illustrations, including many in colour. It has five thematic sections:
Section I: Cultural Contacts, 1492-1969
Section II: Empire Writing and the Literature of Empire
Section III: The Visible Empire
Section IV: Religion and Empire
Section V: Race, Class and Colonialism, 1607-2007
Artemis Literary SourcesArtemis Literary Sources searches across several literature databases subscribed to by the Library, and provides access to full text literary works, journal articles, criticism, reviews, biographies, and overviews and summaries. Includes Gale Virtual Reference Library, Scribner Writer Series,Twayne's Author Series, Literature Criticism Online, and Literature Resource Center.
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By Period/Century
Early English Books OnlineFrom the first book printed in English by William Caxton, through the age of Spenser and Shakespeare and the tumult of the English Civil War, Early English Books Online (EEBO) contains over 125,000 titles listed in Pollard & Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640), Wing's Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700), and the Thomason Tracts (1640-1661). Among the thousands of titles featured in EEBO are works by Malory, Bacon, More, Erasmus, Boyle, Newton, Galileo; musical exercises by Henry Purcell and novels by Aphra Behn; prayer books, pamphlets, and proclamations; almanacs, calendars, and many other primary sources.
British Literary Manuscripts Online Pt 2 MedievalConsisting primarily of works in Middle and Early Modern English, BLMO: Medieval and Renaissance is an essential resource for any scholar of the Medieval and Renaissance periods. Scholars can access online the original manuscripts of seminal literary, religious and philosophical texts and trace the prevailing social and cultural attitudes of the times through important historical documents like the letters of Alcuin and Lanfranc and the Chronicles of Waverly, Glastonbury, St Martins and Lichfield.
British Literary Manuscripts Online, c. 1660-1900British Literary Manuscripts Online presents facsimile images of literary manuscripts, including letters and diaries, drafts of poems, plays, novels, and other literary works, and similar materials. Searching is based on tags and descriptive text associated with each manuscript. Images of the complete manuscript can be viewed, manipulated and navigated on screen.
Please note that the text of the manuscripts themselves is not searchable.
Eighteenth Century Journals I to V The Portal to Newspapers and Periodicals c1685-1815 offers seamless, integrated access to Sections I, II, III,IV and V of the digital project Eighteenth Century Journals.
Eighteenth Century Collections OnlineA comprehensive digital edition of The Eighteenth Century microfilm set, which has aimed to include every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom, along with thousands of important works from the Americas, between 1701 and 1800. Consists of books, pamphlets, broadsides, ephemera. The full collection includes nearly 150,000 titles and more than 33,000,000 pages of searchable material.
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This collection makes available online hard-to-find material in every academic discipline, including:
*History and Geography: Ancient and contemporary history, accounts of voyages and discoveries, historical biographies and memoirs, genealogical collections, gazetteers, works on church antiquities and tourist guides of Britain. Topics include chronologies, recreation (travel, sports, parlor games), military history, maps, local history and topography. It should also be noted that this collection presents a comprehensive picture of the American Revolution from the British perspective.
*Social Science: Materials on manufacturers and merchants, artisans and skilled workers, and international business, banking, taxation and lotteries. Topics include current events, social reform, business/economics/finance (general advertising, lotteries, trade bills and more), political science (parliamentary papers, political satire, political essays, speech/addresses, handbills, parish registers, poll books and more).
*Fine Arts, Music, Art and Architecture: Treatises on music, painting, theater and architecture as well as books on building and carpentry, catalogs pertaining to vocal and instrumental music, paintings, prints, drawings, coins and metals and other collectibles, and material about private art collections.
*Medicine, Science and Technology: Many branches of science, works on applied science and technology, and works and treatises on the treatment of diseases and conditions. Topics include agriculture, cookbooks, military technology, natural philosophy, scientific education and more.
*Literature and Language: Celebrated eighteenth-century essayists, novelists, poets and playwrights, as well as Shakespeare's plays, poems and collected works. Topics include drama, poetry, ballads, religious poems, grammar, dictionaries, songs from plays, satire, book catalogues and more.
*Religion and Philosophy: From sermons, Bibles and prayer books to moral and ethical debates and prescriptions for proper conduct.
*Law: Development of law in the British Empire between 1701 and 1800. Topics include acts, criminal and international law, appellants' cases and more.
*Reference: Ephemeral material on the whole of life in the eighteenth century. Topics include almanacs, catalogues and more.
Nineteenth Century Collections OnlineNineteenth Century Collections Online is a multi-year, global digitization and publishing program focusing on primary source collections of the nineteenth century. Content is full-text searchable. Archives published in the program include works in Western as well as non-Western languages and are sourced from rare collections at libraries and other venerable institutions from around the globe.
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Asia and the West: diplomacy and cultural exchange
Features primary source collections related to international relations between Asian countries and the West during the 19th century. These invaluable documents include government reports, diplomatic correspondence, periodicals, newspapers, treaties, trade agreements, NGO papers, and more. This unmatched resource allows scholars to explore in great detail the history of British and U.S. foreign policy and diplomacy; Asian political, economic, and social affairs; the Philippine Insurrection; the Opium Wars; the Boxer Rebellion; missionary activity in Asia; and other topics. This resource also includes personal letters and diaries, as well as nautical charts, maps, shipping ledgers, company records, and expedition and survey reports for more than a century of world history. British politics and society
Includes tens of thousands of primary sources related to the political climate in Great Britain during the “long” nineteenth century. From Home Office records and papers of British statesmen to working class autobiographies and ordnance surveys, British Politics And Society is a remarkable resource for scholars looking to uncover new connections or explore new directions in understanding 19th century British political and social history. British Politics And Society enables researchers to explore such topics as British domestic and foreign policy, trade unions, Chartism, utopian socialism, public protest, radical movements, the cartographic record, political reform, education, family relationships, religion, leisure, and many others. British theatre, music, and literature : high and popular culture
Features primary sources related to the arts in the Victorian era, from playbills and scripts to operas and complete scores. These rare documents, many of them never before available, were sourced from the British Library and other renowned institutions, and curated by experts in British arts history. Interest in the arts became big business in the Victorian era, as a burgeoning middle class became patrons. This resource explores Victorian popular culture, penny dreadfuls, music, the history of the English stage, the Royal Literary Fund, and more, and provides a detailed look at the state of the British art world with not only manuscripts and compositions, but also documents like personal letters, annotated programs, meeting minutes, and financial records. Children’s literature and childhood – this archive charts the study of the history of the child in Europe, Asia, North America, Australia and Latin America during the Long Nineteenth Century. A wealth of children’s literature texts document the changing construction of childhood, the growing popularity of children’s literature, and the legal and sociological contexts for both. It has fully searchable text and includes intricate illustrations and children’s book texts. Europe and Africa : commerce, Christianity, civilization, and conquest
Many research topics emerged from the colonial conquest and the legacy of slavery in modern South African society—the Anglo-Boer War, imperial policy, and race classification among them—that this volatile corner of 19th-century history draws enduring interest from scholars and students. To support their research, Nineteenth Century Collections Online: Europe And Africa: Commerce, Christianity, Civilization, And Conquest delivers monographs, manuscripts, and newspaper accounts covering key issues of economics, world politics, and international strategy. European literature, 1790-1840 : the Corvey collection
Includes the full-text of more than 9,500 English, French, and German titles. The collection is sourced from the remarkable library of Victor Amadeus, whose Castle Corvey collection was one of the most spectacular discoveries of the late 1970s. The Corvey Collection—one of the most important collections of Romantic era writing in existence—includes fiction, short prose, dramatic works, poetry, and more, with a focus on especially difficult-to-find works by lesser-known, historically neglected writers. As a resource for Romantic literature and historical studies, the Corvey Collection is unmatched. It provides a wealth of fully searchable content with digital research tools that enable scholars to uncover new relationships among authors and works, on range of topics including Romantic literary genres; mutual influences of British, French and German Romanticism; literary culture; women writers of the period; the canon; Romantic aesthetics; and many others. Mapping the world: maps and travel literature – this archive offers Nineteenth Century maps; travel diaries; gazetteers, travel guidebooks; travel narrative manuscripts; sketch maps; European, Asian and African rail and canal routes; atlases, maritime and nautical charts; ordnance surveys and Admiralty charts. All of the material, including place names on maps, is fully searchable and is accompanied with a state-of-the-art image viewer. Photography: the world through the lens
Assembles collections of photographs, photograph albums, and photographically illustrated books and texts on the early history of photography from libraries and archives worldwide, delivering approximately 2 million photographs from Britain, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. While some images are well known, many have rarely been viewed. Key areas of research covered include: exploration and travel; empire, colonization, and life in colonized regions; topography and archaeology; daily life in 19th century in countries across the globe; people and portraiture; science, medicine, and criminology; photography as reproduction of art works; and key events and wars. Religion, society, spirituality and reform – faith and skepticism shaped many aspects of Nineteenth Century life, including politics, law, economics, and social and reform movements. Collections within this archive include: Literature of Theology and Church History in the United States and Canada; Literature of Theology and Church History: British Theology; the Charles Bradlaugh Pamphlets; Christliches Kunstblatt, 1859 – 1905; the Papers of George Ripley, 1802 – 18880; the Caroline Wells Healey Dall Papers, 1811 – 1917; the Theodore Parker Papers, 1826 – 1865; and the Corban Society Records, 1811 – 1850. Science, technology, and medicine : 1780-1925
The collection consists primarily of two components: Journals track the connection between major episodes in the history of science, specifically in general science, medicine, biology, entomology, botany, chemistry, physics, mathematics, geology, paleontology, and technology. Monographs in the hard and social sciences touch upon the history of anthropology, archeology, ecology, public health, sanitation, geography, oceanography, astronomy, industrial and battlefield technology, and the philosophy of science. Science, technology and medicine 1780-1925, pt. II - this archive includes monographs and journals drawn from several specialised thematic Collections. These include the Collection on Natural History in the Huntington Library, California, which incorporates texts on zoology, botany, the history of soils and agriculture, geology and the formation of the Earth. There is the Collection on Entomology from the Bruce Peel Special Collections Library, University of Alberta, with its legacy of books with sophisticated illustrations and aesthetic beauty. There is the Collection on The Rise of Public Health in England and Wales which incorporates materials concerned with the New Poor Law of 1834, the Poor Law Union Correspondence, and The Journal of the Society of Medical Officers of Health, 1888 – 1920. And there are 2 million pages of Academies of Sciences Publications, where ideas, findings, and inventions discovered by scholars of the great Enlightenment were first published. Women: transnational networks
Issues of gender and class ignited 19th century debate in the context of suffrage movements, culture, immigration, health, and many other concerns. Using a wide array of primary source documents, Nineteenth Century Collections Online: Women: Transnational Networks focuses on issues at the intersection of gender and class from the late 18th century to the era of suffrage in the early 20th century, all through a transnational perspective. The collection contains deep information on European and North American movements, but also expands its scope to include collections from other regions. Researchers and scholars will find rare content related to social reform movements and groups, high and “low” culture, literature and the arts, immigration, daily life, religion, and more.
Literary Manuscripts: Victorian Manuscripts from the Berg CollectionLiterary Manuscripts is drawn from the extensive nineteenth century holdings of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature.
These unique manuscripts are supplemented by some rare printed materials, including early editions annotated by the authors.
Authors represented in the collection include:
Matthew Arnold
The Brontës
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Robert Browning
Wilkie Collins
Joseph Conrad
Charles Dickens
George Eliot
George Gissing
Thomas Hardy
Henry James
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
John Ruskin
Alfred Tennyson
William Makepeace Thackeray
Correspondence, unpublished poems, working notebooks, holograph manuscripts and drawings trace the inspiration and genesis behind the period's greatest works.
London Low LifeDrawn from the primary-source material held by Indiana University's Lilly Library, this collection will be of interest to 19th century scholars researching the underworld, slang, working-class culture, street literature, popular music, urban topography, 'slumming', prostitution, the Contagious Diseases Act, the Temperance Movement, social reform, Toynbee Hall, police, criminality and like topics.
This digital collection brings to life the teeming streets of Victorian London, inviting students and scholars to explore the gin palaces, brothels and East End slums of the nineteenth century's greatest city.
From salacious swells, guides to scandalous broadsides and subversive posters, the material sold and exchanged on London's bustling thoroughfares offers an unparalleled insight into the dark underworld of the nineteenth century city. Children's chapbooks, street cries, slang dictionaries and ballads were all part of a vibrant culture of street literature.
London Low Life is also an incredible visual resource for students and scholars of London, depicting in full colour maps, cartoons, song sheets, street cries and a full set of the essential John Tallis' Street Views of London - a unique resource for the study of London architecture and commerce.
Twentieth Century North American Drama (Second Edition)Twentieth-Century Drama, Second Edition contains the essential collection of published plays from throughout the English-speaking world, covering the history of modern drama from the 1890s to the present day, alongside unpublished works by major writers and Pulitzer Prize winners. The collection's contents range from canonical authors such as George Bernard Shaw, Langston Hughes, Sean O'Casey, Noël Coward, Eugene O'Neill, Harold Pinter, Neil Simon, Tom Stoppard and Thornton Wilder, to off-Broadway experimentation and South African township theatre.
Women
Women Writers OnlineThe Women Writers Project from Brown University transcribes works by and about women into electronic form for the use of scholars. Texts are mainly works in English dating from the pre-Victorian period (before 1850). Includes bibliographies, articles, book reviews, correspondence, catalogues and photographs. Indexes women writers from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf, literary criticism, autobiography and more.
Perdita Manuscripts: Women Writers, 1500-1700Complete facsimile images of over 230 manuscripts written or compiled by women living in the British Isle during the 16th and 17th centuries. Contents include account books, advice, culinary writing, meditation, travel writing, and verse. Perdita manuscripts can be searched by name, place, genre, and first lines of both poetry and prose.
Orlando Women's Writing in the British Isles"Orlando: Women's Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present is a highly dynamic textbase. It is a rich resource for researchers, for students, and for readers with an interest in literature, women's writing, or cultural history more generally. With about five and a half million words of text, it is full of interpretive information on women, writing, and culture. It includes documents on the lives and writing careers of about a thousand writers, together with a great deal of contextual historical material on relevant subjects, such as the law, economics, science, writing by men, education, medicine, politics."
British and Irish Women's Letters and DiariesThe British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries database currently includes the full text of 60,000 pages of letters and diaries of 430 women from Colonial times to 1950. Ultimately over 1000 women's writings will be represented in over 150,000 pages of full text. Biographical information on the writers is also included, as is a bibliography of sources in the database.
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North American Women's Letters and DiariesThe collection includes approximately 150,000 pages of published letters and diaries from more than 1500 women writing from Colonial times to 1950. Some 7,000 pages of previously unpublished materials are included in addition to biographical information. Much of the material is in copyright and is drawn from more than 1,000 sources, including journal articles, pamphlets, newsletters, monographs, and conference proceedings.
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Theatre
Theatre and Drama PremiumTheatre and Drama Premium is the world's first and largest, integrated resource for teaching and studying theatre arts and dramatic writing.
Bringing together over 13,500 written plays; 150,000 pages of original designs, reference material, and ephemera; 300 audio plays; and 750 hours of filmed stage performances, documentaries, and video training materials, Theatre and Drama Premium serves both practical and scholarly purposes for theatre arts and literature programs.
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Provides searchable and browsable access to a variety of theatre arts related materials including all aspects of theatre and performance. Includes access to full-text plays, audio plays, filmed stage performances, documentaries, and other video content, contextualizing materials (designs, reference, and ephemera) including recent Broadway productions and previously unpublished plays. Covers key writers, creators, and performers. Includes full content of the following collections: Drama Texts Collection Contemporary World Drama Black Drama: Third Edition Twentieth Century Drama: Second Edition Theatre in Performance Collection The BroadwayHD Collection The Royal Shakespeare Company Collection Theatre in Context Collection Performance Design Archive Online.
Theatre in Context Theatre from Alexander Street features performances of works by American, European, Asian, and other worldwide dramatists from the past several centuries. In addition to performances, Theatre also features dozens of documentaries and interviews about theatre, discussing the history of theatre, acting methods, pioneering dramatists and actors, and much more.
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North American Women's Drama North American Women's Drama includes over 1000 plays by 247 playwrights together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. The database also includes selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays.
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North American Indian Drama"This edition of North American Indian Drama contains 172 plays by 33 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more."
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English DramaMore than 3,900 plays in verse and prose tracing the development of drama in English from the medieval mystery cycles to the comedies of Oscar Wilde.
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Black DramaBlack Drama contains the full text of plays written from the mid-1800s to the present by more than 100 playwrights from North America, English-speaking Africa, the Caribbean, and other African diaspora countries. Many of the works are rare, hard-to-find, or out of print. Nearly a quarter of the collection will consist of previously unpublished plays by writers such as Langston Hughes, Ed Bullins, Willis Richardson, Femi Euba, Amiri Baraka, Randolph Edmonds, Zora Neale Hurston, and many others.
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Other Primary Literature Resources
American Film Scripts OnlineAmerican film scripts, produced or written in the 20th century; includes independent films as well as those created by major studios. This edition of American Film Scripts Online (AFSO) contains 386 scripts by 484 writers together with detailed, fielded information on the scenes, characters and people related to the scripts. When complete, the collection will include more than 1,000 scripts and over 100,000 scenes of life as portrayed in the movies.
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North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral Histories North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries and Oral Histories (IMLD) includes 2162 authors and approximately 100,000 pages of information, illustrating what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada between 1800 and 1950. Composed of contemporaneous letters and diaries, oral histories, interviews, and other personal narratives, the series provides a rich source for scholars in a wide range of disciplines. In selected cases, users will be able to hear the actual audio voices of the immigrants.
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American Fiction 1774-1920Contains more than 17, 500 works of prose fiction from the political beginnings of the United States through World War I. The collection is based on authoritative bibliographies including Lyle H. Wright's American Fiction: A Contribution Toward a Bibliography, widely considered the most comprehensive bibliography of American adult prose fiction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Geoffrey D. Smith's American Fiction, 1901-1925: A Bibliography, comprising nearly three-quarters of all adult fiction published in the United States at that time. Includes novels, short stories, romances, fictitious biographies, travel accounts and sketches.
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Latino Literature: Poetry, Drama and Fiction Latino Literature contains about 200 novels, several hundred short stories, 20,000 pages of poetry, and 190 plays. The major groups represented are Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans, along with Argentines, Salvadorans, Dominicans, and other Central and South Americans. The majority of Latino Literature is in English, with selected works of particular importance (approximately 25% of the collection) presented in Spanish.
Canadian PoetryOne of the Literature Collections included in Literature Online.
Created in partnership with the Electronic Text Centre at the University of New Brunswick Libraries, this unique collection currently contains the full text of more than 12,000 poems by 142 poets including Bliss Carman, Isabella Valancy Crawford and Archibald Lampman, and will soon offer a comprehensive survey of Canadian poetry from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth.
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Digital Library of Classic Protestant Texts"A uniquely exhaustive resource for historians, theologians, political scientists, and sociologists studying the religious and social upheavals of the 16th and 17th centuries, the Digital Library of Classic Protestant Texts gives researchers immediate, Web-based access to an extensive range of seminal works from the Reformation and post-Reformation eras."
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Archives of Sexuality & Gender The Archives of Sexuality and Gender provides a significant collection of primary sources for the historical study of sex, sexuality, and gender.
Includes newsletters, organizational papers, government documents, manuscripts, pamphlets, and other primary sources from the Lesbian Herstory Educational Foundation, Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, GLBT Historical Society, New York Public Library.
The Archives of Sexuality and Gender consists of three archives:
LGBTQ History and Culture Since 1940, Part I
LGBTQ History and Culture Since 1940, Part II
Sex and Sexuality, Sixteenth to Twentieth Century
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Defining Gender, 1450-1910 A digitized collection of original documents relating to Gender Studies, sourced from libraries and archives around the world. "There is original material from the John Johnson collection of ephemera, from boy's public schools and female women's colleges, as well as receipt books, account books, diaries, periodicals, commonplace books, novels, ballads, pamphlets, poetry, and conduct and advice literature." Other documents include: ephemera, pamphlets, college records and exam papers,letters, ledgers, educational practice and pedagogy, government papers from the Home Office and Metropolitan police, illustrated writings on anatomy, midwifery, art and fashion, manuscript journals, poetry, novels, ballads, drama, receipt books, literary manuscripts, and travel writing. It has five thematic sections:
Section I: Conduct and Politeness
Section II: Domesticity and the Family
Section III: Consumption and Leisure
Section IV: Education and Sensibility
Section V: The Body
Canadiana Online Early Canadiana Online (ECO) is a digital library thousands of primary sources in Canadian history from the first European contact to the early 20th century.The collection is particularly strong in literature, women's history, travel and exploration, native studies and the history of French Canada.
U.K. Parliamentary PapersU.K. Parliamentary Papers constitutes a major resource for the historical record of Britain, its former colonies including Canada and the United States, and the wider world. It facilitates researchers’ exploration of the British perspective on historical and contemporary events through a vast and authoritative archive of official government documents from 1801to the present. Through U.K. Parliamentary Papers, researchers can seamlessly access the 19th, 20th and 21st century papers, plus the Hansard parliamentary debates.
House of Commons Parliamentary Papers (HCPP) includes digital versions of these sessional papers for the 19th century forward. They fall into the following three categories:
• Bills - drafts of legislation, to be reviewed through various parliamentary stages. If the Bill passes through these stages, it will become an Act of Parliament.
• House Papers - documents resulting from the work of the House and its Committees.
• Command Papers - Government papers (from Ministers) conveying information or decisions the Government wishes to draw to the attention of the House, presented by Command of Her Majesty .
• Hansard - Official Report of debates in Parliament, from both the House of Commons and House of Lords, from 1803 to 2005.
HCPP does not include the House of Commons Journal, or daily business papers, such as Order papers and Votes and Proceedings.
The University Library has purchased and provides access to collections:
19th century (1801-1900)
20th century (1901-2003/04 session)
21st century module 1 (2004/05 – 2009/10 sessions)
21st century module 2 (2010/12 – 2013/14 sessions)
Hansard (1803-2005)
Black Thought and Culture Black Thought and Culture will provide approximately 100,000 pages of monographs, essays, articles, speeches, and interviews written by leaders within the black community from the earliest times to 1975. The collection is intended for research in black studies, political science, American history, music, literature, and art. Contains monographs, essays, articles, speeches, and interviews written by leaders within the black community in the United States from the earliest times to the present (795 sources with 434 authors).
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Manuscripts
These resources (print and microform) catalogue many English literary manuscripts, with information on their contents, provenance, and location. (Not directly available during campus closures. Some material may still be accessible; click here for more information.)
Primary materials can be found in library collections, archives, museums, and private collections around the world. Some institutions make materials available digitally. See the list below for some examples. Contact your research supervisor or your subject librarian for help finding more primary resources outside our collection.