Dates: 1500-1700
Document Types: Court Records; Annotated Editions; Government Documents; Commonplace Books; Family Papers; Correspondence; Diaries; Administrative Records; Financial Documents; Manuscript
Description: Primary source documents covering the everyday lived experience in England from 1500-1700. Includes legal records, family correspondence, administrative records, wills, inventories and commonplace books, and images of everyday objects used in early modern households.
Also includes contextual essays by leading academics, as well as an interactive chronology.
Dates: 1550-1850
Document Types: Correspondence; Itinerary; Manuscript; Journal; Rare book; Sketchbook; Newsletter; Travel Diary
Description: Collection of primary and secondary resources, including writings, artworks, photographs, and maps for the study of travel, c. 1550-1850.
The Grand Tour was a rite-of-passage for many aristocratic and wealthy young men of the eighteenth century: a phenomenon which shaped the creative and intellectual sensibilities of some of the eighteenth century’s greatest artists, writers and thinkers. These accounts of the English abroad, c.1550-1850, highlight the influence of continental travel on British art, architecture, urban planning, literature and philosophy.
The Grand Tour includes the travel writings and works of some of Britain’s artists, writers and thinkers, revealing how interaction with European culture shaped their creative and intellectual sensibilities. It also includes many writings by forgotten or anonymous travelers, including many women, whose daily experiences offer an insight into the experience and practicalities of travel over the centuries.
Dates: 1654-1954
Document Types: Correspondence; Scrapbooks; Autobiographies; Notebooks; Rare books; Pamphlets
Description: Explore the history of Jewish communities in America from the arrival of the first Jews in the 17th century right through to the mid-20th century.
Includes access to the entirety of six major organisational collections and twenty-four collections of personal papers from the American Jewish Historical Society in New York. Themes covered include: business, industry and enterprise; civil rights and liberties; culture, literature and the arts; early Jewish experience; everyday life: personal and family narratives; immigration and settlement; politics and the law; reflections on the Jewish experience; religion, tradition and community; war, conflict and persecution; and Welfare, health and education.
Dates: 1600s-1700s
Document Types: Manuscripts; Correspondence; Commonplace Books; Scrapbooks; Personal Papers
Description: Offers complete facsimile images of 190 manuscripts of 17th and 18th century verse held in the Brotherton Collection at the University of Leeds.
The database includes first lines, last lines, attribution, author, title, date, length, verse form, content and bibliographic references for over 6,600 poems within the collection. Additional features include interactive essays, biographies, a palaeography section with transcriptions and alphabets, and a large selection of color images demonstrating over 320 examples of 17th and 18th century English handwriting .
Dates: 1858-1925
Document Types: Correspondence; Diaries; Research Files; Drawings; Lecture Notes; Scrapbooks; Manuscripts; Printed media
Description: Contains content from the Edward Sylvester Morse collection from the Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum.
Edward Sylvester Morse went to Japan on a scientific expedition in 1877 and was eventually made Chair of Zoology at the new Imperial University of Tokyo. In addition to preserving the household records of a samurai family and many accounts of the tea ceremony, Morse made notes on subjects as diverse as shop signs, fireworks, hairpins, agricultural tools, artists’ studios, music, games, printing, carpentry, the Ainu, gardens, household construction, art and architecture.