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NOVEMBER 2021

The Making of Modern Law:

Landmark Records and Briefs of the U.S. Courts of Appeals, Part II: 1891–1950

 

 

  • Find out more

    This archive addresses questions concerning the administration of justice, the adversary process, and the developing relationship between law and the social sciences, humanities, and sciences. These records are interesting on the human level - they are not just abstracts on legal issues, they are valuable historical documents in their own right.

    This collection includes all circuits, including the major ones:

    • Second (New York) - enormously influential, especially for business and corporate law
    • DC (Washington, DC) – includes federal cases
    • Ninth (California) – a key circuit, particularly on western U.S. issues

     

    It aims to address questions such as: How much was the work of sociologists, psychologists, and historians cited? What attention did the courts pay to those citations? What nonlegal evidence was brought to court or cited? Did the court pay attention?

    Researchers will be able to gain insights into legal reasoning used by the parties in advocating their position and to identify the authorities used to support an argument.

    The briefs in this collection are not readily available - this is effectively a rescue operation, opening material that is inaccessible to many researchers. Law and humanities libraries that serve scholars and students in twentieth-century American social history and politics will find this archive of special interest.

    The variety of information in the records and briefs includes:

    • Cases on wartime issues raised during both World Wars and cases affecting conscientious objectors to the internment of Japanese Americans
    • Decisions that focused on American Indian rights with respect to land claims, treaty enforcement, and other matters of critical interest to Indigenous communities
    • Briefs related to federal economic and labor regulations, such as reviews of decisions of the Interstate Commerce Commission as well as the work of those agencies created by the New Deal
    • Rulings that reflect changes in criminal law, with the expansion in the scope of federal crimes and enforcement of laws related to censorship, sedition (resistance against lawful authority), Prohibition, and more
    • Cases that address the changing state of labor relations as new laws at the state and federal levels came into effect with respect to child labor, union organising, and worker safety
  • New functionality in this archive

    The collection features briefs (appellants’, appellees’, reply, amicus), appendices, memoranda, petitions, transcripts, and more from all Courts of Appeals, including these major circuits:

    • Second Circuit, New York—one of the most influential, often cited in business and copyright law rulings
    • District of Columbia Circuit, Washington, D.C.—especially relevant to cases on constitutional and administrative law
    • Ninth Circuit, California—regarded as the most liberal of circuit courts

    The circuits/collections are the same for Part I and Part II, since there are only 10 circuits plus the District of Columbia circuit. All new content has been added to the existing circuits/collections.

     

    REVIEW OF KEY FEATURES

    To support the research needs of legal scholars, we have built support for the following search fields:

    • Case Name: Searches for any word or words in the case name
    • Brief Name: Searches for any word or words in the brief name
    • Reporter Citation: Searches for documents for a case matching specific Federal Reporter citation.
      • For example: 425 F.2d 853
    • Docket Number: Searches for documents for a case matching specific court Docket Number.
      • For example: 711510

     

    • Circuit: Limits your search to documents for cases that were heard by specific circuit court. 
    • File Date: Limits your search to documents for cases that were filed on a specific date or within a range of dates. 
    • Opinion Date: Limits your search to documents for cases for which an opinion was issued by the court on a specific date or within a range of dates. 

     

     

    Researchers can also:

    • Browse Circuits: Browse content by circuit court.
    • Browse Cases: Browse an alphabetical list of all available court cases in the database. Select a case to see all of its associated documents.
    • Browse Authors: Browse an alphabetical list of authors (counsel) and authoring bodies. Select an author to see all of their associated documents.

     

     

     

Gale Digital Scholar Lab Enhancements

  • What are the latest updates to the Gale Digital Scholar Lab?

    This release is part of our ongoing enhancements to the user experience - and we are sharing a Preview Experience within the current interface.

    The updated tools offer new functionality to address user feedback, focusing on the need to move between distant and close reading. This includes interactive visualizations and inspect panels that allow the examination of high-level patterns across content sets, and then the ability to drill down to both grouped and individual documents for close reading. For example, a new Parts of Speech group by capability lets customers compare parts of speech across authors, content types, document types, publishers, and source libraries in a customizable column layout.

    With this release, the following tools and sections will join Sentiment Scores, NER, and Ngrams tools in the Preview Experience that is still under development:

     

    Document Clustering

     

    Topic Modeling: Topics and Topic Proportions

     

    Parts of Speech

     

Archives of Sexuality and Gender: L’Enfer de la Bibliothèque nationale de France

Get under the covers of some of the world’s most forbidden works.

The Enfer (“hell”) collection from the Bibliothèque nationale de France is one of the most storied and sought-after private case collections in the world. First created in the 1830s, it contains erotic content dating from 1531 to 2012 that was considered contrary to public morality.

Historically restricted access to the collection means the material is well preserved and can now be accessed digitally worldwide, allowing in-depth study of what was once considered the darker side of gender and sexuality.

Hear from Marie-Françoise Quignard, Honorary Curator of the collection, as she explains the name "Enfer," provides a deep dive into some of the fascinating texts, comments on how the collection (and attitudes towards it) have evolved over time, and finishes by explaining why this collection is of such interest and value to researchers.

 

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE VIDEOS

Our first Learning Centers are available now!

We are pleased to announce the launch of the first phase of Learning Centers for Gale Primary Sources. Now available in 12 products, the Learning Centers support teaching and learning with digital primary sources.

Built with the student researcher in mind, the goal of the Learning Centers is to orient new users with the content and topics available in our unique digital archives; spark inspiration for new research topics; and provide guidance and best practices for searching, browsing, citing, and reusing primary sources. The Learning Centers provide an all-in-one instructional tool that helps students get acclimated with a primary source database.

  • Find out more

    You can access the Learning Centers in these products from the main toolbar:

    Workflow steps are based on the learning objectives outlined in the ACRL/SAA Guidelines for Primary Source Literacy:

    1. Conceptualize
    2. Find
    3. Read
    4. Use

    • Content is tailored to each unique archive and was developed in-house by product experts
    • Sample searches help students to see search queries in action
    • Scaffolding questions encourage critical thinking and engagement with topics
    • Translate all Learning Center content in over 40 languages
    • Add to LMS with “Get Link”

  • Which archives are they in?

    Crime, Punishment, and Popular Culture, 1790–1920

    Daily Mail Historical Archive, 1896–2016

    International Herald Tribune Historical Archive 1887–2013

    Mirror Historical Archive, 1903–2000

    Public Health Archives: Public Health in Modern America, 1890–1970

    Punch Historical Archive, 1841–1992

    Refugees, Relief, and Resettlement: Forced Migration and World War II

    Religions of America

    Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection

    Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Nichols Newspapers Collection

    The Telegraph Historical Archive, 1855–2016

    The Times Digital Archive, 1785–2019

Promoting your Gale Primary Sources

Download sets of digital assets and print files to help you raise awareness of the archives available at your library. Digital assets are downloaded as a .zip folder, and print files are downloaded individually*. For customers who wish to order the print resources, contact your local representative to check availability.

For archives that consist of multiple parts, you can download the assets for the overall series, or for the individual parts that are currently available at your library.

 

DIGITAL: Social media images  |  HD display screen  |  Announcement copy (editable) and header image for internal communications | QR code

PRINT: A3 and slimline posters   |   A6 Postcards   |   Bookmarks

 

DOWNLOAD THE FILES HERE

 

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SEPTEMBER 2021

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  • Find out more about this new archive

    Covering the second half of the nineteenth century, Part II of China and the Modern World: Imperial China and the West completes the Foreign Office series of general correspondence relating to China (FO 17) and offers an unparalleled level of insight into Anglo-Chinese relations, the roles of China, Britain and other Western Powers in the wider Asian context, and the beginning of the end of China's final Imperial dynasty, the Qing.

    As the Western Powers competed to extend their influence in China, building railways and mines, providing ships and weapons and granting loans to the Chinese government while conducting hugely profitable trade from the busy ports of Canton, Shanghai, Amoy, Ningpo, Chefoo and more, the Qing dynasty faced challenges, both internal and external, to their position as a great Power in Asia.
     

    The Foreign Office correspondence within Part II illustrates the wide range of issues that concerned the British in China, as well as major events in the region, covering the Chinese role against the French in Tonkin (northern Vietnam), disputes over Korea and Taiwan, the development of the First Sino-Japanese war and the Treaty of Shimonoseki, as well as the Boxer Rebellion and the siege of the international Legations in Beijing. The British representatives throughout the region provide valuable reports and opinions, and of particular interest are the volumes of correspondence to and from the British representatives at Seoul. Alongside the hundreds of volumes (FO 17/873–1768) of correspondence in FO 17, Part II also contains several volumes of Law Officers’ reports to the Foreign Office focused on China, held separately in series FO 83.

    These hand-written documents have been opened up to scholars with the use of Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technology, as well as item-level information drawn from the Foreign Office Indexes in series FO 605 or newly created for Imperial China and the West. Researchers will also find Foreign Office indexing from series FO 566, FO 804 and FO 738.

    Major historical events and topics are covered in the archive, including;

    • The Sino-Soviet Ili crisis and the Treaty of St Petersburg (1881)
    • The training of Chinese naval officers in the UK
    • The First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895)
    • King Gojong of Korea takes refuge in Russian Legation
    • The Boxer Rebellion and the signing of the Peking Protocol (1900)
    • Railway Development and international competition
    • Piracies in the China Seas 
    • The Panthay Rebellion
    • Chinese emigration
  • NEW ARCHIVES UNBOUND RELEASES
    • American Urban Life and Health, 1883-1914
    • Etiquette and Advice, 1631-1969
    • Records of the U.S. State Department: Subject Files of the Office of Special Political Affairs and the Creation of the United Nations Organization, 1940-1946
    • Service Lists and Reports of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service and Whangpoo Conservancy Board
    • Shanghai International Settlement: Shanghai Municipal Council Reports, Minutes of Ratepayers Meetings, and Shanghai Volunteer Corps
    • Shanghai International Settlement: Urban Planning and Development
    • United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967: Study Prepared by the Department of Defense (The Pentagon Papers)

     

    DOWNLOAD THE ARCHIVES UNBOUND NEW RELEASES CATALOGUE (JUNE - DECEMBER 2021)

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Gale Primary Sources Learning Centres

 

Launching in a selection of Gale’s archives in autumn 2021, Gale Primary Sources Learning Centers will bring a new level of support for students and instructors looking to get the most out of using primary sources, both in their research and in the classroom. Shaped by feedback from Gale Primary Sources users, the Learning Centers are intuitive, all-in-one instructional resources that are designed to orient users with the content in our archives, spark inspiration for research and act as a best practice guide when it comes to skills like searching, citing and using primary sources.

 

FIND OUT MORE ON THE GALE REVIEW BLOG

NEW CONTEXTUAL ESSAY

An Introduction to Rare Titles from the American Antiquarian Society, 1820‒1922

Elizabeth Watts Pope | Curator of Books and Digital Collections at the American Antiquarian Society

The Top 7 Blogs of the Year (So Far)

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JULY 2021

  • Product Overview: Archives of Sexuality and Gender: L’Enfer de la Bibliothèque nationale de France

    Archives of Sexuality and Gender l'Enfer Banner Image

    The fifth part of Gale’s Archives of Sexuality and Gender series, L’Enfer de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, provides access to one of the most storied and sought-after private case collections in the world. The name alone invokes visions of damnation and moral ruin. L’Enfer (which translates as “Hell” or “Inferno”) refers to the shelf mark given to the collection which was created in the 1830s to protect and isolate works that were considered contrary to the morals of the time. As with other private cases, the entire collection was kept in a locked section of the library because of the erotic or pornographic character of the works, as well as their rarity and value. 

    While the content in the collection was withheld from many readers in the past, the creation of this private case is to society’s benefit today, as it meant the content, dating from the 1530s to 2010s, was safeguarded for posterity. Today, L’Enfer is one of the most famous Private Case collections in the world.

     

    COLLECTION CONTENTS

    L’Enfer is made up of more than 2,400 printed works. Around 950 additional items come from an appendix to l’Enfer called Flagellation. Between the 1880s and the 1930s, an editorial subgenre flourished in France: the novel de flagellation, a specialised branch of erotic literature. In this context, "passionate flogging" is a sexual perversion consisting of experiencing an erotic pleasure to be whipped. The Flagellation collection in this archive consists of literary works on spanking, caning, and whipping.

     

    LANGUAGES

    Documents will mainly be in French, with some titles in English, German, Spanish, and a smattering of other languages.

     

    VALUE OF THE ARCHIVE

    As one of the premier private case collections in the world, l’Enfer is much sought after. In an article about an exhibition of l’Enfer at the BnF, Elaine Sciolino of the New York Times wrote the following about the significance of these items:

    “The handwritten manuscript of the Marquis de Sade’s novel “Les Infortunes de la Vertu” (“The Misfortunes of Virtue”) is under glass here, as are seventeenth-century French engravings of “erotic postures”; English “flagellation novels” exported to France in the late nineteenth century; Japanese prints; Man Ray photographs; and a police report from 1900 that compiles the addresses of Paris’s houses of prostitution and what they charged. Sadism, masochism, bestiality, inflated genitalia and the most imaginative sexual fantasies and athletic poses are given their due.”

    The ability to digitally cross-search and compare l’Enfer with the British Library’s Private Case (the third part of Gale’s Archives of Sexuality and Gender series) will be of significant benefit to researchers. Both private cases are extremely important to this research area, expanding our understanding of sexual history, developing views on sexuality, the policing of sexuality and the nature of titillation throughout history.

  • Product Overview: China and the Modern World: Imperial China and the West Part I, 1815–1881

    British Foreign Office correspondence from China on commercial, political, diplomatic, military and legal matters in nineteenth century Anglo-Chinese relations.

     

    MPK_1_37_0029In this, the first of two parts of British Foreign Office correspondence from China, scholars will find material relating to the internal politics of China and Britain, their relationship, and the relationships between other Western powers keen to benefit from the growing trading ports of the Far East. 

    From Lord Amherst’s mission at the start of the nineteenth century, through the trading monopoly of the Canton System, and the Opium Wars of 1839-42 and 1856-60, Britain and other foreign powers gradually gained commercial, legal and territorial rights in China. These files provide correspondence from the Factories of Canton (modern Guangzhou) and from the missionaries and interpreters who entered China in the early nineteenth century, as well as from the later Consulates and Legation and from the envoys and missions sent to China from Britain.

    After 1842 when the Treaty of Nanking was signed, the precedence of Canton declined as the treaty ports of Shanghai, Ningpo (Ningbo), Foochow (Fuzhou) and Amoy (Xiamen) were established. These were later joined by more trading posts, with British merchants and Consuls established at Swatow (Shantou), Chefoo (Yantai), Formosa (Taiwan) and more.

    As well as matters of trade and commerce, the correspondence in this archive covers local uprisings including anti-foreign riots and the Tientsin Massacre of 1870, piracy, judicial and legal matters, and the activities of Russia, the US, France and other Western powers in the region. It also covers British interests and ambition in Japan, Thailand, Burma (Myanmar), Malaya (Malaysia) and Korea (particularly Seoul).

    These hand-written documents have been opened up to scholars with the use of Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technology, as well as item-level information drawn from the Foreign Office Indexes in series FO 605.

     

    SUBJECTS COVERED

    • Asian Studies
    • Chinese Studies
    • Colonialism
    • History
    • Political Science & Diplomatic Studies

     

    ADVISORS:

    STEPHEN R. PLATT, Professor of History, University of Massachusetts at Amherst

    DAVID FAURE, Professor of History and Director of Center for China Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong

    EIICHI MOTONO, Professor of Economic History, Waseda University

    EI MURAKAMI, Associate Professor of Economic History, Kyoto University

    HANS VAN DE VEN, Professor of Modern Chinese History, Cambridge University

    HUANG KO-WU, Distinguished Research Professor, Institute of Modern History, Academic Sinica, Republic of China (Taiwan)

    ISABELLA JACKSON, Assistant Professor in Chinese History, Trinity College Dublin

  • Product Overview: Declassified Documents Online: Twentieth-Century British Intelligence, An Intelligence Empire

    Various source media, Declassified ocuments Online, Brtisih Intelligence

    From the international machinery of espionage and twentieth-century warfare to personal surveillance and Cold War intelligence, this uniquely broad view of the interests of the British government, her allies and her enemies is sourced from five government departments and totals around 500 000 pages.

    Twentieth-Century British Intelligence, An Intelligence Empire brings together files from the UK National Archives covering intelligence and security matters from 1905-2002. Material has been sourced from the UK Ministry of Defence, the Cabinet Office, the Colonial Office, MI5 (British Domestic Security Service) and the SOE (Special Operations Executive), reflecting an intelligence network that reached from the UK and Europe to Africa, the Middle East, Canada, Asia and Australia during a century of global conflicts, high-stakes diplomacy and political upheaval. These documents cover the development of British intelligence and its impact on policy from its earliest days, through Room 40 in the First World War and the activities of the Security Services throughout the British Empire during WWII, to the geopolitics of the Cold War and decolonisation.

    Intelligence files, previously closed to scholars, represent an under-studied aspect of our recent past and provide exciting opportunities for new research. 

    Declassified Documents Online: Twentieth Century British Intelligence, An Intelligence Empire brings together files from five UK government departments to provide researchers with access to detailed, previously classified information on the intelligence services of Britain and her Empire throughout the twentieth century.

    The Security Service (MI5): KV 2, KV 3 & KV 4

    Personal, Subject and Policy files dating from 1905-1978. MI5 handled intelligence gathering within the British Empire and the Commonwealth. The selected subseries of KV 2 holds personal files on subjects of Secret Service enquiries, whilst KV 3 contains subject files on espionage activities of groups or other intelligence organisations, including the only subject files known to have survived from the First World War period. KV 4 holds section histories and policy files.

    The Ministry of Defence: Communications and Intelligence Records: DEFE 21, DEFE 26, DEFE 28, DEFE 31, DEFE 41, DEFE 44, DEFE 60, DEFE 62, DEFE 63 & DEFE 64

    These series include registered files, reports and memoranda of the Directorate of Scientific Intelligence, the Defence Intelligence Staff and the Defence Signals Staff focused on the technical and scientific interests of the British government from the Second World War to the decades of the Cold War and the Atomic Age. The intelligence assessments and reports include those gathered post-war in Allied-occupied Germany, such as interviews with German scientists. With files dating from 1912-2002, these series bring the coverage up to the end of the twentieth century, and include defence records on the Falklands, the Middle East, UFO incidents and details of Soviet weapon systems.

    The Special Operations Executive: HS 7 & HS 8

    These are records of the Ministry of Economic Warfare and the Special Operations Executive (SOE), which functioned during WWII to promote sabotage and subversion, and assist resistance groups in enemy occupied territory, famously directed by Winston Churchill to ‘set Europe ablaze!’. Records date from 1935-1988 and include histories & war diaries in HS 7, and headquarters records in HS 8.


    The Colonial Office: Intelligence and Security Departments: Registered Files (ISD Series): CO 1035
    This series contains registered files of the Colonial Office relating to the security of British colonies, and intelligence on colonial matters and decolonisation, including reports by Security Intelligence Advisors throughout the British Empire, and assessments from the Joint Intelligence Committee. Running from 1954-1966, these files represent a vital piece of the intelligence picture of the global Cold War and decolonisation at the end of Empire.

    The Cabinet Office: CAB 56, CAB 121, CAB 176 & CAB 301

    The material in these series dates from 1936-1974 and shows how intelligence matters were considered, analysed, and processed through the Cabinet Office. Records from the Joint Intelligence Committee appear alongside Policy and Strategy files from the Special Secret Information Centre, and selected intelligence material from the Cabinet Secretary’s Miscellaneous Papers held in CAB 301.

    The study of Intelligence and security casts light on international relations and politics, on social conditions and personal experiences in a time of conflict and shifting global alliances, on the running and dismantling of Empire and on the secret operations and planning of global conflicts. The politics of today are a direct result of the events of the twentieth century, and the depth and breadth of information gathered by British intelligence agencies revealed in this product, from British communists to African independence leaders and German Abwehr agents, allows scholars to follow the decisions and events that formed the world we live in. 

  • Making of the Modern World, Part IV: 1800-1890



     

    The Making of the Modern World: Part IV offers definitive coverage of the “Age of Capital,” the industrial revolution, and the High Victorian Era, when the foundations of modern-day capitalism and global trade were established. It includes unique material at the Senate House Library, University of London, that was not previously available; subsequent library acquisitions have broadened the scope of the Goldsmiths' Library of Economic Literature beyond economics. The core of the collection – 1850s – 1890 – offers rich content in the high Victorian period, the apogee of the British Empire. It is especially strong in “grey literature” and nonmainstream materials rarely preserved by libraries—including pamphlets, plans, ephemera, and private collections.

    With access to all four of The Making of the Modern World modules users will have the world’s greatest economic literature collection at their desktops.

    This is a major collection of rare and unique items that support a range of research and teaching topics in the 19th century, including slavery & abolition, the growth of capitalism, and the emergence of new political thinking such as nationalism and Marxism. The material that has been newly scanned from this period also includes the rise of the United States and Germany as economic powerhouses.

    Part IV also captures the hard-to-reach formats such as plans and pamphlets. This technically challenging material is now surfacing and offering original study resources to researchers. Grey literature, private publications, flyers, broadsheets, and ephemera are the focus of much modern scholarship precisely because it is non-mainstream, hard to find in libraries, physically vulnerable to damage, loss, and misfiling, and of huge value.

  • Product Overview: Political Extremism and Radicalism: Far-Right Groups in America

    Political Extremsim Far Right in America Banner

     

    This archive explores the role and development of a variety of conservative political movements and groups by showcasing unique materials that examine right-wing ideology. Building on the successful platform created by Part I, this next installment gives researchers access to more essential materials that support the study of extreme political viewpoints throughout history. Sourced from eminent libraries, including the University of California, Santa Barbara; the University of California, Davis; the University of Iowa, Idaho State University; and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Far-Right Groups in America provides scholars with a better understanding of American conservative political movement from multiple angles.

     

    DATE RANGE:
    1850–2010

    DOCUMENT TYPES:
    monographs, manuscripts,  periodicals, pamphlets, and ephemera

    SOURCE LIBRARIES:
    University of California, Santa Barbara; University of California, Davis; University of Iowa; Idaho State University; and The Federal Bureau of Investigation

    SUBJECTS SUPPORTED:
    history, politics, American history, sociology, anthropology, social history, social sciences, and government

  • Product Overview: Women’s Studies Archive: Rare Titles from the American Antiquarian Society, 1820-1922

    Various source media, Women's Studies Archive

    The third module in Gale’s Women’s Studies Archive series, Rare Titles from the American Antiquarian Society, 1820-1922, gives researchers unprecedented access to over one million pages of female-authored work across a diverse range of both fiction and non-fiction. Sourced from and curated by the American Antiquarian Society, the pre-eminent collector of pre-twentieth century Americana, this archive includes around 5,700 monographs published between 1820 and 1922 in the United States and authored by women.

    An official bibliography of female-authored texts published in the United States during this period does not exist. In its absence, this assembly of monographs, expertly curated by the American Antiquarian Society, serves this purpose for scholars.

    Composed of rare and unique titles and covering over a century of female writing, the collection will enable new scholarship into feminist perspectives and the discovery of female-authored works that have been previously overlooked. Providing users with a canon of women’s literature, the archive helps to answer questions about women’s cultural contributions, provides insight into the female experience, and represents exciting new opportunities for the digital humanities. Although several of the authors found within will be highly recognisable, such as George Eliot and Louisa May Alcott, many of them will be completely unknown, allowing scholars to make new connections as well as rediscovering lost or ignored works from the past. The vast majority of monographs have never been scanned before and are not available on the open web.

     

    ARCHIVE CONTENT

    Curated by the American Antiquarian Society, the monographs in this archive were selected from across the library’s collection, primarily because they were authored or edited by women, to provide users with a canon of women’s literature. By maintaining a wide scope in the selection of material, this artificial collection supports a diverse variety of research areas, both answering questions on women’s cultural contributions and providing insight into the day-to-day lives of both upper-class and working-class women.

    Encompassing more than one hundred years of female authorship, the material in Rare Titles from the American Antiquarian Society, 1820-1922  includes a diversity of fiction genres and non-fiction subjects such as poetry, personal letters, recipe books, memoirs, histories, pamphlets, leaflets, instructional guides on domesticity and etiquette, biographies, autobiographies, personal papers, children’s literature, commentaries on fashion, diaries, religious tracts, legal accounts, oration, political ephemera and fiction, although there is no overlap with Gale’s American Fiction archive.  These titles are united in that they are all texts written by women, not just documents about them, with the wide variety of genres supporting multiple avenues of research into women’s history, in women’s own voices.

    A de-duplication analysis has been conducted and none of the content overlaps with other Gale archives, and there is a minimal amount available via open access platforms.

     

    A MULTIDISCIPLINARY ARCHIVE

    The deliberately broad nature of the selected titles included in Rare Titles from the American Antiquarian Society, 1820-1922 means it contains a wide variety of materials that will appeal to a range of disciplines, such as:

    • Women’s History
    • Gender Studies
    • American Literature
    • Cultural Studies
    • Critical Theory and Analysis
    • History / American and Canadian History
    • Media and Journalism
    • Politics
    • Sociology

     

    OPPORTUNTIES FOR DIGITAL SCHOLARSHIP

    As an archive of exclusively female-authored works, Rare Titles from the American Antiquarian Society, 1820-1922 presents an exciting opportunity for text and data mining. By providing a unique corpus of material that has clear definition and boundaries, the module forms a perfect data set for digital humanities research, enabling new scholarship into feminist perspectives.

    DATE RANGE:
    1820-1922

    DOCUMENT TYPE:
    Monographs

    SOURCE LIBRARY:
    American Antiquarian Society

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

GALE DIGITAL SCHOLAR LAB AND NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY

We were delighted to work with Newcastle University in 2021 to help incorporate Gale Digital Scholar Lab into a 2nd year English Literature module for undergraduate students. Read about how and why the teaching team decided to introduce it and the positive impact it had on learning outcomes.

  • Public Health in Modern America: A Research Experience

    User note: Boldfaced terms within paragraphs deliver search results.

    Heaven sent! Is that too strong a descriptor to use? That, at least, is what Public Health in Modern America (PHMA) affords students, researchers, and faculty across multiple disciplines. It is an enormously useful digital library for the discovery of primary source materials on hundreds of topics related to the history of public health as practiced in the United States.

    As a public historian and health sciences librarian, I regularly answer reference questions on the history of the health sciences, prepare public exhibits on the history of medicine, and work in concert with faculty, undergraduate and graduate students associated with the University of Wisconsin in Madison’s Department of Medical History and Bioethics.

    Such work with students and faculty includes targeted resource workshops that incorporate the rich primary print collections within the Rare Books and Special Collections division of the University of Wisconsin’s Ebling Library, as well as the fine-tuning of their navigation skills with our campus’s primary and secondary full-text databases. It is not uncommon to provide resource instruction that has been heavily informed by the syllabi of requesting faculty members, who routinely ask their students to investigate the development of public health in America. Course work then will focus on studying the clinical and ethical issues, as well as gender and race concerns characteristic of the evolution of medical, pharmaceutical, and health care enterprises as we know them today.

    Students produce research papers on complementary subjects, regularly incorporating primary documents into their research. Along the way, students meet with me, one on one, for tips on which print and online resources to use, how to optimize the available databases, and how to uncover the unheard “voices,” so often difficult to locate in conventional sources.

    Based on the collection of materials that it brings together in one place, Public Health in Modern America widens the door for these students by delivering access to previously hard-to-find resources and presenting full-text searchable content not available anywhere outside of a small handful of institutions.  The breadth and depth of the collection is represented through the four thoughtfully indexed digital collections that have been brought together:

    • the records of the U.S. Children's Bureau, with its focus on maternal and child health from the years 1912 to 1969;
    • the work of the Committee on Public Health of the New York Academy of Medicine, and its dedicated collection of correspondence and reports;
    • the remarkable Library of Social and Economic Aspects of Medicine from Michael M. Davis, a lifelong public health researcher, advocate and collector, who had been intimately involved in the campaign for a national health care plan;
    • and a selection of publications on public health—all rare pamphlets unavailable from another digital source—from the New York Academy of Medicine.

     

    In my own review of the four collections, my search on the role of race and public health made clear right away that there was not to be any sort of pre-designed subset on the topic—not as a eugenically informed ideal or as a collection of content amassed specifically around the issue of patients and practitioners of color and their relationship to the delivery of health care services, disease occurrence and treatment, or preventive care. Nor did any of the collections specifically supply a dedicated subset on gender and its relationship (whether as practitioner or patient) to health care or disease occurrence.

    Counterintuitively, the very fact that such subsets are not so readily found is exactly what makes Public Health in Modern America so valuable. An essay prepared for the Ebling Library’s exhibit Staggering Losses: World War 1 and the Influenza Pandemic of 1918 notes how commonly surveys of U.S. history skip over the involvement, the contributions, or concerns of people of color or women. Over the last 40 years, historical treatments have included the unheralded, unacknowledged, oppressed, or maligned place of people of color and women in the making of a modern America. The occurrence of provocative topics like eugenics and racially informed health care decision-making are evident throughout the digitized resources assembled in Public Health in Modern America.

    Within this digital archive, one can experience a far more representative version of the historical place of marginalized groups. It offers a more complete narrative, one that points out the marginalization or disenfranchisement of women even as it highlights the influential contributions people of color and women nonetheless made as patients and professionals

    Through vigorous indexing and the power of the platform’s search engine, it is far easier to look up heretofore hidden subjects and themes, even when those subjects are not immediately evident from the title of the resource. Researchers and students can pose questions—and get answers—about people of color and health care delivery, from public health education within the African American community to disease demographics with respect to America’s many communities of color.

    So for a study of the prevention of tuberculosis among African Americans, a long list of results appears when a search is properly run. Doing so requires using the advanced search and entering the period-specific term colored (or negro) and tuberculosis. Public Health in America will retrieve over 200 “monograph” publication (all rare pamphlets) result and 806 “manuscript” (each one a folder’s worth of content) results. Among the monographs—all from the sub-collection “Selected Publications on Public Health from the New York Academy of Medicine”—the first title The Movement against Tuberculosis in Washington, D.C. (1907) includes no mention of people of color in the pamphlet title.  But a search within the document on the word “colored” delivers 10 relevant page results. Of particular interest on page 14 (“relevant page 16” in the digitized version) are the lectures that the Associated Charities presented on tuberculosis prevention to both white and black teachers. Here is the paragraph in full:

     

    Lectures.—These have been found especially effective in this field. During the first season forty-four public meetings were held, at most of which the subject was illustrated by stereopticon views, besides forty meetings in connection with the Associated Charities, through all of which more than 20,000 people received some knowledge of the nature of tuberculosis. Similar courses have been kept up since, though there has seemed to be less demand for them this last season; and talks on the subject have also been given to all teachers, both white and colored, as well as in all the high schools, and to labor organizations, one of which showed its appreciation by sending the Committee a substantial check. [Italics added.]

     

    This 1907 publication by William H. Baldwin (and published by the Journal of the Outdoor Life) is not available from the Ebling Library or elsewhere at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In fact, only two copies are available in the United States (one of them the copy from the New York Academy of Medicine digitized here). The work does not appear on Google Books, the Hathi Trust Digital Library, or the Internet Archive.  Without this digital copy, there is no knowing if such is even worth the obtaining through interlibrary loan, if available at all by that means. And even if available, why run the risk of handling a potentially fragile document when it is already part of the Public Health in America?

    But leaving questions of access aside, the uncovering of this document—and even the topic within it—is no small matter. This little, but not insignificant paragraph, helps me and my students identify one publication, with one entity (Associated Charities) from which they can start to build a historical inquiry.

    Once they have such an inquiry in hand, they can then proceed to other monographs or manuscripts within PHMA, looking for additional mentions of Associated Charities (29 monographs; 40 manuscripts), other incidences of adopting teachers within a public health movement (school teachers delivers 108 monograph and 426 manuscript results), other public health initiatives with black patients (negro patients provides 11 monograph and 108 manuscript results) to educate them about any number of topics, including tuberculosis prevention (a search on negroes and spitting offers 9 monograph and 28 manuscript results, many related to preventing tuberculosis within the Black community).  Public Health in Modern America can thus serve as a springboard as students look further afield among other sources like contemporary newspapers, education journals, social hygiene publications—all from the unearthing made possible by the small mention in a previously obscure publication.

    But let’s change gears. After recent work assembling an exhibit at the Ebling Library on World War I, I decided to pursue the topic of women health care providers. A search on women and physicians produced 800 monograph and over 2,000 manuscript items. I then narrowed the search to dates of publication to the years when World War I raged from 1914 to 1918 (even though America’s direct participation would not occur until April 1917).  Once filtered down to 98 monograph and 47 manuscript results, I then scrolled the list of available titles, each more thought-provoking than the next. Consider An Appeal to the Men and Women Engaged in Medical Practice and the Advancement of Medical Sciences (1915) from the Medical Brotherhood, just five years after the “Flexner Report” on medical education by Abraham Flexner (researchers can find a 33-page folder devoted to Abraham Flexner in the Michael Davis collection) and the eventual closing of many women’s medical colleges. Would this document mention Flexner’s report? Might it address the many physicians then heading to Europe to help in the war effort and the women who remained behind to take care of patients?

    While neither subject is directly addressed, this appeal nonetheless offers a fascinating glimpse into wartime sentiment regarding medical men and women (physicians, nurses, researchers) and their role as stalwart, upstanding volunteers. It includes a call for them to be part of “The Medical Brotherhood for the Furtherance of International Morality” and “to sign their names as (moral) humanitarians.” Women as part of the Brotherhood?  How unusual!  And then there are the several notable women medical doctors whose names appear among the committees presumably affiliated with the Brotherhood. From here, one might begin to research those women and their roles. They include, for example, S. Josephine Baker (11 monograph and 27 manuscript results) and Alice Hamilton (14 monograph and 108 manuscript results).

    Those of us who have worked as librarians and historians for decades have seen the pendulum swing from print to online in ways that can sometimes seem alarming. Limiting one’s research in print, particularly within a single institution, may see pivotal primary materials missed. On the other hand, sticking to just online resources can prove as limiting. Responsible researchers ideally use print and online resources in concert to craft definitive arguments, especially in previously unmined territory.

    In either case, the goal is to have access to resources—those documents with their tables, images, footnotes, references, and names of pivotal players in the public health arena—that can provide scholars with hints and clues for further research. This domino effect in the gathering of evidence for any study, whether an article intended for publication or a term paper, is what makes searchable digital primary source collections like Public Health in Modern America so valuable. The “rabbit holes” that graduate students so often worry about are often what shine a light on new corners of research.  Such necessary rabbit holes are spread throughout Public Health in Modern America, making the possibilities for research in the history of public health endless.

    CITATION

    Sullivan-Fowler , Micaela: “Public Health in Modern America: A Research Experience”, Public Health Archives: Gale, a Cengage Company (2021)

  • Central British Fund for World Jewish Relief: An Introduction to and Overview of Its First Ten Years

    This essay originally appears in 1989 with publication of finding aid to the microfilm edition of Jewish People from Holocaust to Nationhood, Series 1: Archives of the Central British Fund for World Jewish Relief, 1933, 1960. This essay is reproduced with the permission of World Jewish Relief.

    The Central British Fund for World Jewish Relief (CBF), known variously in the 1930s as the Central British Fund for German Jewry in 1933, as the Council for German Jewry in 1936 and the Central Council for Jewish Refugees in 1939, was founded in the early months of 1933 by a group of Anglo-Jewish communal leaders who represented the breadth of the liturgical spectrum and who held widely diverse political loyalties. Among them were Anthony G. and Lionel de Rothschild, bankers to the CBF, Sir Edward S. Baron, Sir R. W. Cohen, Sir Osmond E. d’Avigdor Goldsmid, Lord Erleigh, K.C., (on the death of his father, Lord Reading, in 1936, Lord Erleigh succeeded to the title), Neville J. Laski, K.C., Lord Simon Marks, Leonard G. Montefiore, Sir Isadore Salmon, Otto M. Schiff and Philip S. Waley. They were moved to organise the CBF in response to the threatened position of Jews in Germany following President von Hindenburg’s appointment of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933.

     

    Early Discriminatory Legislation in Nazi Germany

    Hitler’s National Socialist [Nazi] Party had been elected to the Reichstag on a political platform of anti-Semitism. Despoliation and persecution were its mandate, annihilation its ultimate goal. To these ends, legislation was enacted to deprive Jews and other non-Aryans (persons one of whose parents or grandparents was Jewish) of employment, citizenship, and property. A statutory basis for the cumulative body of discriminatory legislation, ordinances, and decrees of the next few years, the Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums, was enacted on 7 April 1933. This law for the “Reconstruction of the Civil Service” provided that Jews and non-Aryans, with few exceptions related to pre-1914 civil service and frontline army experience in the First World War, be summarily dismissed from employment or involuntarily retired.

    The statute was soon extended, and before the end of 1935 German law provided for the dismissal of Jewish and non-Aryan university professors, school teachers, scientists, employees of national and municipal departments, members of the judiciary, doctors, dentists, lawyers, public health and welfare officers and employees in commercial enterprises. The Jewish press was banned. Jews and non-Aryans were not permitted to bring lawsuits in courts of law. Many fled to neighbouring countries hopeful that the political situation would soon change. Some sought refuge in the United Kingdom; others a temporary haven there until they were able to immigrate to a third country.

     

    Otto Schiff and the First Asylum Seekers

    CBF records indicate that the earliest refugees who sought aid from Anglo-Jewish sources arrived in London in March 1933. Those without relatives or friends able to provide housing for them were cared for at the Jews Temporary Shelter in the East End of London, an institution established early in the century to assist Jews fleeing persecution in Russia. Otto Schiff, long known to the Home Office for his work with World War I refugees from Europe, was its president. Schiff enlisted some friends with whom he organised the Jewish Refugees Committee (JRC), which for several months operated from the shelter where a ready-made social service support network was at hand. Schiff continued in his leadership position in the JRC and membership of the CBF Executive until 1949.

    The 1930s were years of economic depression and high unemployment in the United Kingdom. In 1933 the number of refugees reaching England was not yet large, but possibly to avoid stirring anti-Semitism at home and to forestall action that might result in their numbers being contained by government regulation, Schiff, representing the CBF, led a deputation that included Neville Laski, President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Lionel L. Cohen, K.C., Chairman of the Board’s Law and Parliamentary Committee, and Leonard G. Montefiore, President of the Anglo-Jewish Association, to the Home Office to assure the government that no refugee admitted to Britain would be permitted to become a public charge. This pledge was honoured up to the end of 1939 when as a result of the war, substantial financial contributions from public appeals could no longer be secured.

     

    Austria’s Annexation and Kristallnacht

    A massive and panicked exodus followed Germany’s annexation of Austria in March 1938, a movement fueled further later that year by the nationally organised pogrom of 9-10 November, known as Kristallnacht. When areas of Czechoslovakia were absorbed into the German Reich in March 1939, ‘Bloomsbury House’, the appellation by which the Jewish Refugees Committee now operating from that address in London was known, was deluged as it tried to cope with as many as one thousand hapless visitors a day. This influx of refugees from almost all the countries of Europe was halted only after war was declared.

     

    Political Pressures within Jewish Communities

    The CBF’s administrative records hold an almost unbroken series of minutes of its Executive meetings dating from 16 May 1933.

    The Executive Committee met on a regular basis. During emergency situations it was convened weekly or even daily, and minutes make evident the fact that its members were in constant contact with each other and with third persons upon whose expertise they could call. The records paint a picture of ongoing policy making, of fund allocations to the JRC for assistance to refugees in transit or those hoping to rebuild their lives in the United Kingdom, of grants to community agencies in Europe and of ongoing allocations to Zionist organisations for agricultural training, the purchase of tools and equipment, assistance for immigration to Palestine and the construction of housing there. Also revealed is the CBF’s handling of political and religious pressure groups within Anglo-Jewry and representatives of European Jewish communities, as well as the relationship with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJDC), a philanthropic organisation created in 1914 for the relief of Jews in Russia and in Palestine. In post- World War II years, the AJDC would become the world’s major Jewish philanthropic organisation, raising hundreds of millions of dollars for the relief and rehabilitation of Jews in need. However, the record reveals that in the years from 1933 to 1939 the CBF was the world’s major Jewish fundraising agency for assistance to Jews in Germany and the one to which refugees and communities caring for them turned.

    Within days of its inception in May 1933, the Allocations Committee of the CBF set aside funds for the Jewish Refugees Committee to aid refugees reaching the United Kingdom and allocated monies to German Jewish communal agencies for the vocational training of young people and the retraining of adults, for immigration assistance, and for the provision of housing for immigrants to Palestine in accordance with its emerging policy: priority funding for emigration. In addition, funds were made available to the non-sectarian academic Assistance Council, whose appeal for funds was headed by Sir William Beveridge. The CBF’s Academic Committee, forerunner of the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning, held its first meeting 4 May 1933. That Committee’s minute book lists a number of distinguished academics, Jews and non-Jews alike, who served as members in helping to place their refugee peers in British institutions of higher learning.

     

    Palestine: Major Hope for Resettlement

    Evident from minutes of the CBF’s Executive Committee is a very early appreciation of the political situation affecting Jews in Germany and a realisation that resettlement in Palestine was German Jewry’s only hope of large-scale immigration. An undated memorandum relating to the organisation of the first fundraising appeal in 1933 addresses the special position of the Zionists and makes clear how Anglo-Jewry’s leaders were able to set aside personal political biases and respond in a meaningful way to help Jews in Germany immigrate to Palestine. Nonetheless, the strong Zionist influence of Chaim Weizmann and Nahum Sokolow and of Simon Marks on the Executive Committee is especially evident and was doubtlessly a major factor in the rescue and resettlement in Palestine of numbers far greater than might otherwise have been achieved.

    The minutes of the 1930s suggest that this kind of synergy was sorely lacking among Jewish organisations in the United States. Distance from Europe appears to have dulled American Jewry’s early recognition of the tragedy besetting German Jewry.

     

    International Jewish Conference: The Gravest Problem

    A conference for the relief of German Jewry attended by representatives of Jewish communities throughout the world was held in London from 29 October to 1 November 1933. The entire proceedings have been preserved among the CBF’s records. A statement of CBF’s activities for the year are succinctly outlined in Document No. 2 of the conference. It is one of several submitted by a variety of organisations in the United Kingdom and overseas. Reports, resolutions and recommendations issued by the Conference emphasised the determination of participants to cooperate ‘to meet the gravest problem which has faced (Jews] for centuries’.

    The CBF maintained close contact with communities in Europe whenever possible. Several members of the Executive and others nominated to do so visited Germany, Austria, France, Belgium, and Holland and returned to London with firsthand knowledge of conditions and needs. In pre-war years, their concern was that monies be raised locally in Europe to cover the cost of relief and organisational administration so that funds allocated from Britain could be used in their entirety for training, retraining and emigration. The Executive did not wish the CBF to serve Europe as a relief agency, but rather as one offering constructive alternatives for those forced to flee their homes.

     

    CBF Seeks Help from the Dominions

    Norman Bentwich and Sir Wyndham Deedes were appointed Honorary Directors of the CBF. Wyndham Deedes was a non-Jew active on behalf of non-Aryan Christians. Both men had seen service in the government of Palestine under Sir Herbert Samuel. At the request of the Executive they travelled to the Dominions of Australia and South Africa to apprise Jewish communities there of the deteriorating situation in Europe and to urge greater fundraising efforts on their behalf. These communities were also asked to approach their governments with a view to securing entry permits for refugees. But Dominion governments were not disposed to respond positively to such requests. Landing permits for Australia continued to be issued only on an individual basis to persons sponsored by relatives or friends. South Africa was even less cooperative. A meeting on immigration held in London on 13 January 1938 to discuss worldwide possibilities makes poignantly clear the paucity of opportunity for Jewish refugees.

    On his visit to the United States in 1936, Sir Herbert Samuel met U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and requested that consuls in Germany be instructed to speed visa issuance to eligible applicants. From available evidence it may be assumed that no such change was effected. Other countries responded no differently as evident from the individual country files and from minutes of the Executive. Over the years a number of immigration schemes were proposed, but because of their cost, location, or the advent of war, they proved abortive.

    The file for Austria, for example, holds two detailed reports submitted by Norman Bentwich on conditions in Vienna following his visit there in 1938 and again in August 1939 shortly before war was declared. On the second occasion, Bentwich met with Hauptmann Adolf Eichmann, and his report carries their discussions regarding future emigration. Also in the Austria file are applications from older persons seeking emigration assistance. They are rated on a points system: those with children overseas, with funds available, with employable skills or other assets were given a greater number of preferential points, a grim reminder of desperate choices that were made.

     

    The Nuremberg Laws, September 1935

    In September 1935 Germany enacted the ‘Nuremberg Laws’, which deprived Jews of all civil rights. The need to speed immigration to countries of safety was now paramount. The CBF’s Executive concluded that although the board of the AJDC in New York was kept fully advised on events in Europe and its representatives were invited to attend Executive and Allocations Committee meetings whenever they were in London, a delegation should proceed to the United States to heighten awareness on the part of the AJDC and anyone else who would listen, of the gravity of the situation in Germany and seek cooperation from the AJDC for a coordinated rescue effort.

    To this end, Sir Herbert Samuel, Simon Marks, and Lord Bearsted travelled to the United States in January 1936. On his return to London, Sir Herbert reported to the Executive that they had visited Chicago, Illinois; St Louis, Missouri; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Washington, DC; and New York. They had made thirty speeches, five of which were broadcast by radio. As noted earlier, This was when Samuel met Roosevelt, as well as Frances Perkins, the U.S. Secretary of Labor; James G. McDonald, then High Commissioner for Refugees; and representatives of non­Jewish agencies, all of whom, Samuel reported, had shown concern for the position of Jews in Germany.

     

    Council for German Jewry

    As a result of this visit to the United States, the AJDC agreed to join forces with the CBF in forming a new organisation, the Council for German Jewry (CGJ). Its members were the CBF, AJDC and the American United Palestine Appeal (UPA). It was hoped that the CGJ, which was to meet in London, would serve to coordinate activities between the tripartite agencies and provide evidence worldwide of the solidarity of effort among major Jewish philanthropic organisations on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States at this time fundraising was conducted separately by the AJDC and the United Palestine Appeal, whereas in the United Kingdom this political division affecting fundraising had been resolved when the CBF was first organised in 1933. At that time, the Zionist organisations agreed to raise funds with the CBF, an arrangement maintained until early in the war. Chaim Weizmann was appointed a member of CBF’s Executive. Lavy Bakstansky, appointed a joint secretary to the CBF with Meyer Stephany, was nominated by the Zionists.

    A major thrust of the Council for German Jewry was the training and orderly emigration from Germany over a three-year period of 80,000 to 100,000 young adults and children, a majority of whom would go to Palestine. Provision was to be made for training suitable emigrants within Germany and in Holland, France, and Belgium. Resettlement overseas and loans and relief, where necessary, would be accomplished through the machinery of existing agencies. Much discussion ensued on whether Jews still in Germany or those already outside its borders should be the first recipients of available certificates for Palestine. A sense of urgency in regard to emigration remained paramount throughout these exchanges.

     

    American Support for CBF Emigration Plan Disappointing

    It was envisaged that to achieve the CGJ’s goals $5,000,000 would be subscribed in Europe and $10,000,000 in the United States and other countries around the world. Representatives of the AJDC attended meetings of the Executive of the CGJ in London, but despite hopes of its British members for financial cooperation from the AJDC, none was forthcoming. In the end the CBF was to prove the major contributor to programmes undertaken. Dr. Stephen Wise and Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, representatives of the American United Palestine Appeal, attended several meetings of the CGJ’s Executive. Great disappointment was recorded following their report to the Executive of monies which might be expected from the UPA. The emigration goal set for young persons in Germany could not be achieved at this level of support. Minutes of the Executive suggest that political rather than humanitarian considerations were paramount among American Jewish lay leaders. Only after the ‘Anschluss’ of Austria in 1938, did the AJDC agree to work more closely with the CBF for the benefit of Austrian Jews.

    Throughout 1936 members of the CGJ travelled abroad to encourage fundraising efforts in support of its programme of rescue. They also visited agricultural training sites in Germany, France, Holland, and Belgium, to which funds were allocated through communal agencies. Wyndham Deedes and Peter Scott, the latter a member of the Society of Friends, an agency that worked closely with the CBF in its rescue efforts, were asked by the Council to accompany Norman Bentwich on his visit to Germany, where they would review agricultural training programmes and report to London on their progress. Peter Scott was an expert in the field of agriculture. The report on training would emphasise the gravity of the situation confronting Jews in Germany and the need to hasten emigration.

     

    Activities of the Jewish Refugees Committee

    Until early in 1936 the JRC’s several committees responsible for meeting the varying needs of the refugees were able to function in a relatively orderly manner. Friends and relatives in the United Kingdom were approached by or made contact with the Emigration Committee in regard to provision of guarantees of support for individuals or families seeking entry into the United Kingdom that the Committee helped to secure. On arrival, refugees received assistance in obtaining third country visas and outbound shipping; the Welfare Committee found placement for students in British institutions of higher learning and apprenticeships were obtained for young men in skilled trades and for agricultural pursuits. The Resettlement Committee, which operated throughout the period under review, provided a large number of loans to businessmen after their ventures had received Home Office approval, and the Professional Committee secured employment for professional men and women. The Domestic Bureau meanwhile secured job placements for women, some of whom were accompanied by a child, and occasionally for married couples. The Bureau’s records testify that several thousand refugees were able to secure entry visas to the United Kingdom in the immediate pre-war period as a result of its efforts.

    At a meeting of the Executive of the CGJ in 1936, Otto Schiff noted that in earlier years refugees generally had sufficient funds with which to support themselves, but that since passage of the Nuremberg laws in September 1935, those entering the United Kingdom were often in need of financial assistance. At the same meeting Schiff reported that the Home Office had ruled that German children would no longer be admitted for educational purposes unless a Home Office-approved family  in the United Kingdom guaranteed that they would not become a public charge. In this regard Wyndham Deedes was already at work to organise a committee that would assist such children.  The CGJ made a substantial grant to this agency, the Inter-Aid Committee for Children from Germany, which helped all children regardless of religious affiliation.

     

    Aid Continues Despite Financial Crisis

    Calls upon the funds of the CGJ and services of its constituent agencies by unprecedented numbers of refugees reached a breaking point in the spring of 1939. The Executive reported that its funds were exhausted. No alternative remained to the Executive but to authorise substantial bank overdrafts so that the work of rescue could continue. The CGJ’s position was so desperate that for the first time since its inception, approaches to the government for possible loans to the JRC were considered.

    The Executive thus agreed that in view of the financial crisis and the dire situation of Jews in Europe a delegation should call upon Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Lord Bearsted, who led the deputation, asked that the Government request that facilities be made available in countries of the British Empire for immigration of refugees from Germany and Austria. In response, Chamberlain observed that his government was already investigating immigration possibilities outside of the United Kingdom. Bearsted then stressed the tremendous financial burden the refugees reaching the United Kingdom were placing on the limited resources of the Anglo-Jewish community and suggested that if emigration on a larger scale were to ensue, government funding for voluntary agencies activities would be needed. In reply, Chamberlain stated that these matters would be placed before the conference at Evian. Bearsted requested also that the Prime Minister authorise unaccompanied children be granted less restrictive entry to the United Kingdom.

    Chamberlain noted that this last request was a matter for the Home Secretary, but he would support any programme that the Home Office department approved. Thus, another deputation, one led by Lord Samuel of the CGJ’s Executive, together with representatives of the Inter-Aid Committee, the Society of Friends, and JRC called on the Home Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare. Following their presentation Hoare agreed to lift earlier Home Office restrictions on accommodation for children and allow entry to all of those for whom maintenance was guaranteed, either by individuals or by voluntary agencies.

     

    Birth of the Refugee Children’s Movement

    A major easing of the documentation of children was assured when Hoare ruled that unaccompanied children no longer had to secure national passports in Europe or entry visas from British consuls; they would be granted entry on the basis of identity cards, which the Inter-Aid Committee was authorised to issue. This was a major breakthrough. Children who might otherwise not have been rescued were saved by this ruling. The Inter-Aid Committee and JRC then agreed to coordinating their efforts in the interest of children and together established the Refugee Children’s Movement (RCM). Despite its precarious financial position, the CGJ agreed to sponsor the movement to Britain of a first contingent of 5,000 children with others to follow.

    The RCM’s goals were widely publicised and offers of hospitality for children poured in from concerned persons throughout the United Kingdom. Members of the Society of Friends helped Jewish communal organisations select children in Berlin and in Vienna. As a result of all these efforts 9,354 children, almost a thousand of whom were Christian non-Aryans, found refuge in Britain, the last of them being allowed to land a few days after war was declared. Records of the RCM divulge a myriad of problems with which the agency was called upon to cope, some of which multiplied when children were evacuated from London and other strategic areas when war was declared. Concern for the religious education of children and realities of proselytization efforts among non-Jewish hosts was also a continuing theme and source of concern in the RCM records.

     

    The Plight of Austrian Jewry

    In March 1938 when Germany annexed Austria, funds of the Israelitischen Kultusgemeinde Wien (literally Jewish Community in Vienna), where a majority of Austrian Jews lived, were impounded and its buildings occupied. CGJ Executive minutes and other materials provide detailed reports on the incarceration, spoliation, and resulting desperate situation of Jews in Vienna. Not only were Austrian Jews now in dire straits, others fleeing Czechoslovakia or expelled from Burgenland (an eastern state in Austria that bordered the western edge of Hungary)  swelled their numbers. The Reichsvertretung der Deutsche Juden (the Reich Representation of German Jews) in Berlin sent individuals to Vienna to render assistance. It is evident that Jews in Berlin still had some freedom of movement whereas action against those in Austria was immediate and vicious.

    AJDC representatives in Vienna were authorised by the CGJ to spend monies on their behalf and between the two agencies they fed thousands of the destitute at soup kitchens. Drs. Loewenthal and Alois Rothenberg of the Kultusgemeinde came to London to report to the Executive on the situation in Vienna and to request additional financial aid, especially for young persons in agricultural training centres preparing to depart to Palestine. The Executive agreed also to send a representative to Vienna for a three-month period to assist the community and Captain B.M. Woolf, secretary of the West London Synagogue, was given leave of absence to take this assignment.

     

    Evian-Les-Bains, July 1938

    The United States had distanced itself from Europe and showed no signs of easing its own restrictive immigration laws. Nonetheless, President Roosevelt convened a conference on emigration and refugees for July 1938 at Evian-les-Bains, France. Although it was clear at the outset that no government was to be asked to change its immigration laws or to finance the movement of refugees, the conference was viewed with hope, and Norman Bentwich was asked to attend at Evian as CGJ observer.

    Much time at Executive meetings was spent in discussion on how to present the plight of German and Austrian Jews at the conference. It was agreed that the CGJ and the AJDC would submit a joint statement on their concerns to the Secretary General of the Intergovernmental Committee on Emigration and Refugees, at the American Embassy in London. The statement supplements several memoranda presented to the conference at Evian. It outlined the work of the two agencies on behalf of German and more recently Austrian Jews and reminded the Secretary General of the desperate situation of Jews in those countries. In the aftermath of the conference it was obvious that hope in its deliberations had been misplaced. None of the participating countries agreed to modify their stance on immigration and alleviate the plight of refugees.

     

    S.S. St. Louis, June 1939

    In June 1939, Otto Schiff, Paul Baerwald, and Harold Lindner, the latter two representatives of the AJDC on the Council for German Jewry, called at the Home Office to seek permission for three hundred passengers aboard the S.S. St. Louis to land in the United Kingdom. They were part of a complement of 907 passengers destined for Cuba whose landing permits had been revoked by that country’s government after the ship set sail from Hamburg, Germany, in May. No country in the Americas was prepared to offer sanctuary to those aboard, even though substantial financial guarantees for their support had been assured by philanthropic agencies. The alternative was for them to be returned to Germany.

    While en route to Europe, Belgium, Holland, and France together agreed to take two thirds of the passengers. At the Home Office, Baerwald and Lindner added the assurance of the AJDC to Schiff’s on behalf of the CGJ that those admitted to the United Kingdom would not be allowed to become a public charge. Despite government misgivings related to security, permission was granted for the passengers to disembark in the United Kingdom. A number were able to secure visas and leave for the United States before war was declared.

     

    Refugees and Transmigrants after Kristallnacht

    The growing numbers of refugees arriving at the JRC’s offices following Kristallnacht in November 1938 again created a dilemma for the CGJ and its constituent agencies. The guarantee given to the Home Office in 1933 that no refugees would become a public charge was backfiring. Refugee numbers were now very much greater and their economic condition more dire than could possibly have been anticipated six years earlier. Those reaching the United Kingdom as transmigrants without means had to be supported when war was declared and shipping to countries overseas was curtailed.

    The men among them were housed in a disused army camp at Richborough, Kent, rented by the CGJ, which was then home to several thousand teenage and adult men while they awaited shipping to overseas countries. Earlier in the year a number of men released from the concentration camp at Dachau had been accommodated there. In the early days of the war many at Richborough, and others in the community, were interned on the Isle of Man as enemy aliens; some were deported to Australia and Canada. Most were later released and many served in the British armed forces, while others served on the land, in industry, medicine and science. As shipping became available, even during the war years, a number were able to join relatives and friends overseas. From 1933 to 1939 some 20,000 were able to emigrate from the United Kingdom.

     

    Financial Guarantees and Appeals

    Throughout the latter months of 1939, the Executive held discussions and meetings with government officials on the future financial support for refugees. Funds of the CGJ were depleted and a massive loan had been secured in August, on the guarantee of Nathan Mayer Rothschild and Marcus Samuel (of Samuel & Co.), against expected income from government tax refunds and covenants. This infusion of cash helped only for a few months. In Executive meetings fear was expressed that if the JRC allowed refugees to become a charge on local rates, such action would stir anti-Semitism. Members of the Executive of the Central Council for Jewish Refugees (CCJR), the name by which the CGJ came to be known after war was declared, were under great strain. It took much persuasion, including threats that the JRC would cease operating, to convince the government that the refugees were not solely a Jewish problem and that the Anglo-Jewish community alone could no longer shoulder responsibility for their welfare. The Christian Council for Refugees from Germany and Central Europe added its voice in support of the CCJR in meetings with government officials. Tangible evidence of this is seen in a substantial short-term loan to the CCJR to help it continue to finance the JRC during the period of negotiation.

    A transcript of minutes of a meeting of Anglo-Jewry called in February 1940 by the Central Council for Jewish Refugees to launch an emergency appeal for financial support reveals some of the anxiety felt in the immediate pre-war period and the need to find means of support for refugees when war was declared. Anthony de Rothschild expressed appreciation to the Christian Council for the loan, which had enabled CCJR’s work to continue until, with their support, the government had agreed to share the financial burden.

     

    Rome Office Financial Support

    Closure of the CCJR’s operations was averted at the last moment when the government agreed to a series of grants-in-aid shared in part by the Christian Council. At a later date the Home Office undertook the total cost of support for those refugees whose jobs had been lost as a result of the war. A major part of the administrative costs of the voluntary agencies was also underwritten by the government. A Central Committee for Refugees was appointed by the Home Office to distribute and supervise expenditure of the months provided in accordance with government guidelines. Its members were representatives of the several Jewish and Christian refugee agencies. Sir Herbert Emerson, High Commissioner for Refugees, was appointed chairman. A Central Office for Refugees, co-chaired by Anthony de Rothschild and the Reverend Henry Carter, head of the Christian Council, served as the principal channel of communication between government departments and refugee organisations throughout the country. It also provided contact between them and served as a bureau of general information on refugee matters. The Committee’s Executive included representatives of the Central Council for Jewish Refugees, the Christian Council, and the Refugee Children’s Movement. A substantial body of material pertaining to these agencies, including minutes, correspondence and financial activity, is preserved in the CBF archives, providing a view of voluntary agency administration of government funds.

    The provision of partial funding by the government of the CCJR in 1940 relieved tensions, enabling the Executive to continue its policy making role. Almost £3,000,000 in cash had been raised by the CBF and its successor organisations since 1933 and former Prime Minister Earl Stanley Baldwin’s national appeal in 1938 had provided a further £250,000, most of which financed the rescue and care of children. When war was finally declared, it was estimated that 65,000 refugees, many thousands of whom were awaiting shipping to third countries, had found asylum in the United Kingdom.

     

    The Young, The Old and the Frail

    All during the war the CCJR, the JRC and the RCM continued to carry responsibility for the well-being of refugees. Some who were aged or mentally ill were placed in sheltered housing for their lifetime. Representation by the JRC to the government was ongoing on behalf of internees, deportees, persons seeking employment and others. Contact was maintained with young adults trained in agriculture who joined various branches of the armed forces and with others who took up nursing and essential war work while awaiting immigration to Palestine.

     

    Jewish Committee for Relief Abroad, 1943

    Although the CBF had been created in response to the plight of German Jews, it was with prescience and an unflinching sense of responsibility that the Executive of the CCJR agreed to finance the activities of a new organisation, the Jewish Committee for Relief Abroad (JCRA), established in 1943.

    Its purpose was to recruit suitably qualified persons who would volunteer their services to travel overseas and care for concentration camp and other Jewish survivors when they were liberated by Allied armies. The JCRA joined major voluntary agencies in the United Kingdom under the umbrella of the Council of British Societies for Relief Abroad (COBSRA).

    Almost two hundred volunteers including doctors, nurses and social workers served in Europe. During the war some of them in Egypt, destined to enter southern Europe, helped care for several thousand Yugoslav women and children evacuated from the Dalmatian coast. Others entered liberated towns and concentration camps on the heel of Allied armies with whom they worked for the benefit of survivors. Reports and correspondence in the records of the JCRA provide in graphic detail descriptions of conditions in Europe at the time of liberation and the service rendered by volunteers to survivors and nascent Jewish communities in the years from 1944 until the JCRA’s closure in 1952.

    In 1944 with knowledge that there were Jews in hiding in occupied Europe and in the hope that they and others would survive incarceration in concentration camps, the Central Council for Jewish Refugees underwent a name change to the Central British Fund for Relief and Rehabilitation. Anglo-Jewry was now committed to aid all Jews who survived the Holocaust in Europe. That same year, with government approval, monies were made available to the High Commissioner for Refugees for transmittal to Jews in occupied Europe.

     

    Liberation, Rescue and Rebuilding

    As countries in Europe were liberated, the CBF gave encouragement and financial support to emerging communal leaders in their efforts to re-establish Jewish institutions. In an effort to learn of problems facing Jewish communities in Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, Greece, Holland, Poland, and Switzerland, a meeting of representatives from these countries was held in London in August 1945. All those present noted that anti­Semitism remained a key issue. They all expressed concern for the future of Jewish children who had survived the war in the care of non-Jews and who were now in danger of being lost to the Jewish community altogether. They asked that assistance be provided to enable survivors to join relatives overseas. While help in this regard was forthcoming, the reuniting of families took many years. Countries that had not welcomed refugees during the war years still had not changed their stance in the aftermath of war.

    The CBF made funds available for treatment in sanatoria of survivors who had contracted tuberculosis. Together with the Society of Friends, permission was obtained to bring to the United Kingdom as many as one thousand children who had survived incarceration in concentration camps. 732 children became wards of the CBF. Some eventually joined relatives overseas, while others were adopted. Minutes and correspondence of the Committee for the Care of Children from the Camps provide information over a number of years on the diverse activities on behalf of these children.

    Other survivors aided by the JRC included a thousand ‘distressed persons’, individuals with close relatives in the United Kingdom for whom in November 1945 the government granted the right of entry on special ‘Q’ visas. In addition, a small number of Jews living in displaced persons camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy were also resettled in Great Britain.

    The Kultusgemeinde in Vienna was again a centre of activity and a recipient of financial and personnel aid following the Hungarian uprising in 1956. Two thousand of the Jews who fled to Vienna were granted visas for the United Kingdom, where the JRC assisted them in completing plans to join relatives overseas. Stateless Jews living in Egypt were given asylum in the United Kingdom when the CBF guaranteed that they would not become a public charge.

     

    Restitution

    As early as 1939, comments in Executive Committee minutes relate to restitution to those spoliated when they were forced to flee Germany. During the latter part of the war restitution of property and compensation to refugees took on greater significance.

    It is fitting that the records hold minutes and correspondence of the Jewish Trust Corporation, which was created in 1948 by the CBF, AJDC and Jewish Agency for Palestine to cover identifiable heir-less property of victims of the Nazis and of former Jewish communities. Monies received from the sale of such properties was used to provide housing and sheltered accommodations, synagogues and schools for former refugees and their progeny. The task of recovering property was undertaken by teams of lawyers, many of them German Jews, working within restitution laws enacted in Germany. The laws ensured that an attempt was made to uphold principles of morality and those for which the war had been fought.

    CITATION

    Gottleib, Amy Zahl: “Central British Fund for World Jewish Relief: An Introduction to and Overview of Its First Ten Years”, Refugees, Relief, Resettlement: Gale, a Cengage Company (2021)

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Archives of Sexuality and Gender: L’Enfer de la Bibliothèque national de France

Various source media, Archives of Sexuality and Gender, Part V: L'Enfer

L’Enfer de la Bibliothèque national de France is one of the most sought-after private case collections in the world. The books included are more than just erotica, they offer intriguing social commentaries and criticisms and the opportunity to delve into the fascinating lives and histories of the authors and artists themselves, as well as the social and cultural movements they represented.

Exploring Early Modern Erotica and Social History in L’Enfer de la Bibliothèque nationale de France

Exploring Twentieth-Century Art and Social History in Erotica from L’Enfer de la Bibliothèque nationale de France

The Making of the Modern World: Part IV, 1800 - 1890

The latest part in the series offers definitive coverage of the “Age of Capital,” the industrial revolution, and the High Victorian Era, when the foundations of modern-day capitalism and global trade were established. The collection includes hard-to-reach formats such as plans and pamphlets. This technically challenging material is now surfacing and offering original study resources to researchers.

Women’s Studies Archive: Rare Titles from the American Antiquarian Society, 1820-1922

Various source media, Women’s Studies Archive: Rare Titles from the American Antiquarian Society

With the release of Women’s Studies Archive: Rare Titles from the American Antiquarian Society, 1820-1922 we have added a new feature to the series – an Author Gender Limiter for monographs. In this essay, Series Editor Rachel Holt explains the reasons for, considerations and potential of this filter, from allowing scholars to focus their research on a corpus of female-authored work, to addressing the diversity of gender and our commitment to actively review the gender options included in the filter.

  • Read the essay

    With the launch of the third part of our award-winning Women’s Studies Archive series, Rare Titles from the American Antiquarian Society, 1820-1922 Gale is proud to announce a unique new search functionality, the Author Gender Limiter. The addition of this new product feature opens a world of possibilities for undergraduate study and scholarship in the fields of women’s history, gender studies and beyond.


    What is the Author Gender Limiter?

    As the name might suggest, the Author Gender Limiter tool limits your search to monographs that are authored by a person(s) of the selected gender.

    The four limiters currently available within this series are:

    • Female
    • Male
    • Unknown [Alias]
    • Unknown

    The metadata required to enable this function was initially created by running the author names through software to identify whether the author was Female, Male or Unknown, based on their name and/or epithet. This was an efficient approach to gathering the data, and created a preliminary list, but the process understandably led to some incorrect attributions. For example, well-known pseudonyms, such as George Eliot, were frequently misidentified by the software. As such, Gale manually went through the data set created and checked for any anomalies. Names were checked against our internal database of terms, alongside additional searches, to ensure that the data was as accurate as possible before being included in the archive.

    At this stage we also added an additional category called Unknown: [Alias]. Unknown [Alias] is here used to indicate authors that we believe are likely to be artificial constructs created by the publisher. Unlike pseudonyms (such as George Eliot) which are often intended to disguise the author’s identity, Unknown [Alias] is used to give artificial credibility to the writer, or group of writers, often by assuming a specific gender or role. Good examples of this are agony aunt columns, where the title ‘Aunt’ is used to denote comfort and female wisdom and the same name might endure through multiple authors – becoming, in effect, a brand name as much as an Alias. A modern example of this is Slate’s Dear Prudence, where the persona of Prudence covers the work of multiple writers of different genders. We felt that these formed an interesting subset in their own right, and that making them easily identifiable would be beneficial to researchers, particularly those working within the digital humanities.

    For the time being, the Author Gender Limiter is only applicable to monographs within Women’s Studies Archive: Voice and Vision as well as within the Rare Titles from the American Antiquarian Society, 1820-1922, although there are hopes to extend this functionality beyond this resource and content type to other Gale digital archive resources.

     

    How Does it Address the Diversity of Gender Identities?

    Gale is aware that these limiters currently present a binary approach to gender. Gale is a supporter of the LGBTQIA+ community, and we strive always to be inclusive. However, after much discussion, this decision was taken because it best reflects the nature of the material itself, which currently only includes, as far as we have been able to identify, authors who have self-identified as or otherwise historically been attributed to a particular gender based on known information about them. In an effort to prevent non-viable searches we have not included non-binary, gender non-conforming, genderfluid, intersex, or agender limiters at this point in time. We felt that including limiters that yielded no results would be misleading to users and to the people we strive to support. In Gale products where a gender limiter is provided we will actively review the limiter options offered to ensure they encompass all author genders identified in the material.

    If you notice that an author has been incorrectly classified based on known information about that person, please do let us know. We endeavour to make the Women’s Studies Archive an accurate and inclusive resource and are very happy to make changes to both our metadata and our limiter options to ensure that this remains the case.

     

    It is important to recognise however that silences in the archives are meaningful in themselves and can allude to a hidden, historical narrative. Whilst examples of gender non-conformity can be found in cultures worldwide since ancient times, it has not always been possible to live openly as a non-binary person, or with any gender expression/identity that varies from what a person was assigned at birth. The Women’s Studies Archive primarily concerns eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century materials, predominantly from western societies where gender nonconformity could lead to ridicule, violence, or incarceration. It is possible that non-binary individuals exist within the archive, but they were not identified or catalogued as such. Terminology to define non-binary people can sometimes be fairly modern, with many terms originating from the 1980s onwards, so binary genders may have been inappropriately assigned due
    to an inappropriate vocabulary at that time. It is also conceivable that non-binary authors were discriminated against and their works were not published or collected by traditional avenues. Whether these are the reasons for a lack of non-binary authors in the Women’s Studies Archive is hard to ascertain, but it is important to address why they are not represented. Lack of representation of minorities is an issue for many, if not most, archives and it is important to recognise why the gaps occur so that scholars, teachers, and students can encourage a wider conversation on such issues.

     

    Why is the Author Gender Limiter Important for Undergraduate Study, Postgraduate Scholarship and Teaching?

    The decision to build the Author Gender Limiter was driven by repeated requests from librarians and instructors to Gale’s editorial team for the ability to identify an authors’ gender within our resources. There is a clear research need for this functionality in the fields of women’s history and gender studies to further empower learning and research.

    One of the primary goals of the Women’s Studies Archive is to provide female narratives which have historically been underrepresented. The tradition of women’s writing has often been ignored due to the perceived inferior position that women have held in patriarchal societies. It is still common to find anthologies, taught on courses at Higher Education institutions around the world, in which women are outnumbered by male writers or even entirely absent.

    The ability to search within the Women’s Studies Archive using one or more key words and then limit the search by authors of a particular gender enables users to gain a gendered perspective on a particular topic. For instance, a user interested in women and the First World War could do a basic search using the key word “war” and then filter results by the appropriate date range, 28 July 1914 to 11 November 1918, as well as by the authors’ gender so that only female writers appear in the results. Although this is likely to throw up some irrelevant results (e.g. a female author writing about ancient wars, or using the word “war” to describe a campaign they are championing etc.) this should supply the user with a corpus of primary sources that provide a female perspective of the First World War.

    Why is studying a topic from the female perspective important? Because women's history is human history. We cannot understand our past if we cut out the experience, viewpoint, and contribution of half the world’s population. For much of history there has been a wider trend of historians not including women in their accounts of the past. For centuries, history has not only been recorded, told, and taught from a male perspective but women’s part in it has often been downplayed, ignored, or recast to fit a male agenda. Primary sources provide a window into the past by giving insight into how an individual or group experienced the times they were living in, hence why the ability to locate female authored works is so important. Greater access to, and discoverability of, the works of women writers allows for a new viewpoint of history.

     

    What Implications Does it Have for Digital Humanities?

    Digital Humanities is an area of scholarship applying computer-based technology in the humanities. For researchers, digital humanities scholarship is fuelling new ways of interrogating content, analysing insights, and outputting discoveries. The Author Gender Limiter offers further exciting possibilities, especially the development of feminist digital humanities.

    The ability to create a data set of female-authored works within a precise date range or surrounding a particular topic enables greater opportunities to explore women’s writing in new ways. As well as providing a female perspective on a specific event (wars, technological advancements, governments etc.), time periods or topics (education, health and medicine) such data sets support the ability to track the development of female language and ideas.

    It is also not as difficult or inaccessible as you might first think. Undergraduate students or early career researchers can easily use Gale Primary Sources inbuilt tools to interrogate this data further. Researchers can use the Term Frequency tool to see the frequency of search terms within sets of content to begin identifying central themes and assessing how individuals, events, and ideas interact and develop over time. For instance, a user interested in women’s role in the abolition of slavery could search Women’s Studies Archive for the word “slave,” use the Author Gender Limiter to limit the search to women authors and then apply the Term Frequency tool.

    This not only shows that women were talking about slavery but creates a visualisation of when this was most and least prevalent, and for how long. For instance, in 1876 the word “slavery” appears the most in women’s writing so students looking to write a paper or researchers doing in depth analysis may focus in on those materials. They may also want to consider what else was going on at that time which might have caused this spike, as 1876 experienced not only a presidential election but a summer of race riots in South Carolina.

    Users seeking a new angle on a topic for a paper or article can utilise the Topic Finder tool. By grouping commonly occurring themes, this tool reveals hidden connections within search terms—helping to shape research by integrating diverse content with relevant information. If we run the same search again for the word “slave,” limiting results to only women authors and then apply the Topic Finder tool the user is supplied with multiple related themes.

    For instance, “women’s rights,” “suffrage” and “woman’s worth” all come up as linking to “slave,” so an undergraduate might consider writing a paper or article on the relationship between abolitionism and the women's rights movement.

    Digital humanists wanting to take their research even further can do so by importing women-author data sets into the Gale Digital Scholar Lab which enables users to make further discoveries. For instance, by using the Sentiment Analysis tool users can answer questions such as what sentiments were connected to use of the word “slave” across women’s writing over the last hundred years. Was women’s writing largely for or against slavery and how did sentiments change over time?

    Another way the Author Gender Limiter could potentially be used by digital humanists could be identifying women’s writing. Locating lost female authors is a common objective of many scholars in women’s history. Women, more than men, historically wrote anonymously or under pseudonyms. It has been suggested that studying the linguistic patterns of known women authors in a specific era might enable researchers to identify whether an anonymous writer was likely female or even to identify a specific woman author.

    Women’s impact or societal contributions have traditionally been seen as secondary to men but how much of this is due to history being predominantly told from a male perspective? Digital humanities facilitates the ability to re-evaluate accepted histories and review the role and significance of women from the past.

    About the Author

    Rachel Holt has worked in a variety of roles across the publishing industry and joined the Gale Primary Sources acquisition team in 2017, taking on responsibility for the Women’s Studies Archive programme. Although women’s history is a personal passion, her other area of focus is fringe politics and Rachel also manages Gale’s Political Extremism and Radicalism archive series.

     

RECENT RELEASES

  • Product Overview: China and the Modern World: Imperial China and the West Part I, 1815–1881

    British Foreign Office correspondence from China on commercial, political, diplomatic, military and legal matters in nineteenth century Anglo-Chinese relations.

     

    MPK_1_37_0029In this, the first of two parts of British Foreign Office correspondence from China, scholars will find material relating to the internal politics of China and Britain, their relationship, and the relationships between other Western powers keen to benefit from the growing trading ports of the Far East. 

    From Lord Amherst’s mission at the start of the nineteenth century, through the trading monopoly of the Canton System, and the Opium Wars of 1839-42 and 1856-60, Britain and other foreign powers gradually gained commercial, legal and territorial rights in China. These files provide correspondence from the Factories of Canton (modern Guangzhou) and from the missionaries and interpreters who entered China in the early nineteenth century, as well as from the later Consulates and Legation and from the envoys and missions sent to China from Britain.

    After 1842 when the Treaty of Nanking was signed, the precedence of Canton declined as the treaty ports of Shanghai, Ningpo (Ningbo), Foochow (Fuzhou) and Amoy (Xiamen) were established. These were later joined by more trading posts, with British merchants and Consuls established at Swatow (Shantou), Chefoo (Yantai), Formosa (Taiwan) and more.

    As well as matters of trade and commerce, the correspondence in this archive covers local uprisings including anti-foreign riots and the Tientsin Massacre of 1870, piracy, judicial and legal matters, and the activities of Russia, the US, France and other Western powers in the region. It also covers British interests and ambition in Japan, Thailand, Burma (Myanmar), Malaya (Malaysia) and Korea (particularly Seoul).

    These hand-written documents have been opened up to scholars with the use of Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technology, as well as item-level information drawn from the Foreign Office Indexes in series FO 605.

     

    SUBJECTS COVERED

    • Asian Studies
    • Chinese Studies
    • Colonialism
    • History
    • Political Science & Diplomatic Studies

     

    ADVISORS:

    STEPHEN R. PLATT, Professor of History, University of Massachusetts at Amherst

    DAVID FAURE, Professor of History and Director of Center for China Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong

    EIICHI MOTONO, Professor of Economic History, Waseda University

    EI MURAKAMI, Associate Professor of Economic History, Kyoto University

    HANS VAN DE VEN, Professor of Modern Chinese History, Cambridge University

    HUANG KO-WU, Distinguished Research Professor, Institute of Modern History, Academic Sinica, Republic of China (Taiwan)

    ISABELLA JACKSON, Assistant Professor in Chinese History, Trinity College Dublin

  • Product Overview: Declassified Documents Online: Twentieth-Century British Intelligence, An Intelligence Empire

    Various source media, Declassified ocuments Online, Brtisih Intelligence

    From the international machinery of espionage and twentieth-century warfare to personal surveillance and Cold War intelligence, this uniquely broad view of the interests of the British government, her allies and her enemies is sourced from five government departments and totals around 500 000 pages.

    Twentieth-Century British Intelligence, An Intelligence Empire brings together files from the UK National Archives covering intelligence and security matters from 1905-2002. Material has been sourced from the UK Ministry of Defence, the Cabinet Office, the Colonial Office, MI5 (British Domestic Security Service) and the SOE (Special Operations Executive), reflecting an intelligence network that reached from the UK and Europe to Africa, the Middle East, Canada, Asia and Australia during a century of global conflicts, high-stakes diplomacy and political upheaval. These documents cover the development of British intelligence and its impact on policy from its earliest days, through Room 40 in the First World War and the activities of the Security Services throughout the British Empire during WWII, to the geopolitics of the Cold War and decolonisation.

    Intelligence files, previously closed to scholars, represent an under-studied aspect of our recent past and provide exciting opportunities for new research. 

    Declassified Documents Online: Twentieth Century British Intelligence, An Intelligence Empire brings together files from five UK government departments to provide researchers with access to detailed, previously classified information on the intelligence services of Britain and her Empire throughout the twentieth century.

    The Security Service (MI5): KV 2, KV 3 & KV 4

    Personal, Subject and Policy files dating from 1905-1978. MI5 handled intelligence gathering within the British Empire and the Commonwealth. The selected subseries of KV 2 holds personal files on subjects of Secret Service enquiries, whilst KV 3 contains subject files on espionage activities of groups or other intelligence organisations, including the only subject files known to have survived from the First World War period. KV 4 holds section histories and policy files.

    The Ministry of Defence: Communications and Intelligence Records: DEFE 21, DEFE 26, DEFE 28, DEFE 31, DEFE 41, DEFE 44, DEFE 60, DEFE 62, DEFE 63 & DEFE 64

    These series include registered files, reports and memoranda of the Directorate of Scientific Intelligence, the Defence Intelligence Staff and the Defence Signals Staff focused on the technical and scientific interests of the British government from the Second World War to the decades of the Cold War and the Atomic Age. The intelligence assessments and reports include those gathered post-war in Allied-occupied Germany, such as interviews with German scientists. With files dating from 1912-2002, these series bring the coverage up to the end of the twentieth century, and include defence records on the Falklands, the Middle East, UFO incidents and details of Soviet weapon systems.

    The Special Operations Executive: HS 7 & HS 8

    These are records of the Ministry of Economic Warfare and the Special Operations Executive (SOE), which functioned during WWII to promote sabotage and subversion, and assist resistance groups in enemy occupied territory, famously directed by Winston Churchill to ‘set Europe ablaze!’. Records date from 1935-1988 and include histories & war diaries in HS 7, and headquarters records in HS 8.


    The Colonial Office: Intelligence and Security Departments: Registered Files (ISD Series): CO 1035
    This series contains registered files of the Colonial Office relating to the security of British colonies, and intelligence on colonial matters and decolonisation, including reports by Security Intelligence Advisors throughout the British Empire, and assessments from the Joint Intelligence Committee. Running from 1954-1966, these files represent a vital piece of the intelligence picture of the global Cold War and decolonisation at the end of Empire.

    The Cabinet Office: CAB 56, CAB 121, CAB 176 & CAB 301

    The material in these series dates from 1936-1974 and shows how intelligence matters were considered, analysed, and processed through the Cabinet Office. Records from the Joint Intelligence Committee appear alongside Policy and Strategy files from the Special Secret Information Centre, and selected intelligence material from the Cabinet Secretary’s Miscellaneous Papers held in CAB 301.

    The study of Intelligence and security casts light on international relations and politics, on social conditions and personal experiences in a time of conflict and shifting global alliances, on the running and dismantling of Empire and on the secret operations and planning of global conflicts. The politics of today are a direct result of the events of the twentieth century, and the depth and breadth of information gathered by British intelligence agencies revealed in this product, from British communists to African independence leaders and German Abwehr agents, allows scholars to follow the decisions and events that formed the world we live in. 

  • Product Overview: Political Extremism and Radicalism: Far-Right Groups in America

    Political Extremsim Far Right in America Banner

     

    This archive explores the role and development of a variety of conservative political movements and groups by showcasing unique materials that examine right-wing ideology. Building on the successful platform created by Part I, this next installment gives researchers access to more essential materials that support the study of extreme political viewpoints throughout history. Sourced from eminent libraries, including the University of California, Santa Barbara; the University of California, Davis; the University of Iowa, Idaho State University; and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Far-Right Groups in America provides scholars with a better understanding of American conservative political movement from multiple angles.

     

    DATE RANGE:
    1850–2010

    DOCUMENT TYPES:
    monographs, manuscripts,  periodicals, pamphlets, and ephemera

    SOURCE LIBRARIES:
    University of California, Santa Barbara; University of California, Davis; University of Iowa; Idaho State University; and The Federal Bureau of Investigation

    SUBJECTS SUPPORTED:
    history, politics, American history, sociology, anthropology, social history, social sciences, and government

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

International Impact of Covid-19

“With our trusted archives closed as a result of the South African lockdown, some students felt they were left with no option but to make do with secondary sources – but a historian without an archive is like an artist without paints.”

Hear from students at the University of Johannesburg and University of Helsinki on how students were impacted by the pandemic, and how remote working may impact student mental health.

 

The Impact of the Pandemic on Students at the University of Johannesburg

The University Experience – Before, During and After the Pandemic (Helsinki)

Teaching with Digital Primary Sources: ECCO

Many of the recent upgrades to Eighteenth Century Collections Online focused on enhancing ECCO’s user-friendliness as a teaching and learning resource. With more student learning moving online, what can be learned from past use of ECCO as a teaching tool, and how can this be applied in a remote learning environment?

 

Teaching with Eighteenth Century Collections Online

Using Gale Digital Scholar Lab to make DH less daunting

Gale Ambassador and PhD student at the University of Oxford, Jagyoseni Mandal, was not previously experienced with Digital Humanities, but found the Gale Digital Scholar Lab made DH less daunting. Better still, it’s accessible remotely, and indicated additional research pathways that could also be followed remotely, whilst unable to reach her university.

 

How The Gale Digital Scholar Lab Made Digital Humanities Less Daunting

New Contextual Essays

  • Central British Fund for World Jewish Relief: An Introduction to and Overview of Its First Ten Years

    This essay originally appears in 1989 with publication of finding aid to the microfilm edition of Jewish People from Holocaust to Nationhood, Series 1: Archives of the Central British Fund for World Jewish Relief, 1933, 1960. This essay is reproduced with the permission of World Jewish Relief.

    The Central British Fund for World Jewish Relief (CBF), known variously in the 1930s as the Central British Fund for German Jewry in 1933, as the Council for German Jewry in 1936 and the Central Council for Jewish Refugees in 1939, was founded in the early months of 1933 by a group of Anglo-Jewish communal leaders who represented the breadth of the liturgical spectrum and who held widely diverse political loyalties. Among them were Anthony G. and Lionel de Rothschild, bankers to the CBF, Sir Edward S. Baron, Sir R. W. Cohen, Sir Osmond E. d’Avigdor Goldsmid, Lord Erleigh, K.C., (on the death of his father, Lord Reading, in 1936, Lord Erleigh succeeded to the title), Neville J. Laski, K.C., Lord Simon Marks, Leonard G. Montefiore, Sir Isadore Salmon, Otto M. Schiff and Philip S. Waley. They were moved to organise the CBF in response to the threatened position of Jews in Germany following President von Hindenburg’s appointment of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933.

     

    Early Discriminatory Legislation in Nazi Germany

    Hitler’s National Socialist [Nazi] Party had been elected to the Reichstag on a political platform of anti-Semitism. Despoliation and persecution were its mandate, annihilation its ultimate goal. To these ends, legislation was enacted to deprive Jews and other non-Aryans (persons one of whose parents or grandparents was Jewish) of employment, citizenship, and property. A statutory basis for the cumulative body of discriminatory legislation, ordinances, and decrees of the next few years, the Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums, was enacted on 7 April 1933. This law for the “Reconstruction of the Civil Service” provided that Jews and non-Aryans, with few exceptions related to pre-1914 civil service and frontline army experience in the First World War, be summarily dismissed from employment or involuntarily retired.

    The statute was soon extended, and before the end of 1935 German law provided for the dismissal of Jewish and non-Aryan university professors, school teachers, scientists, employees of national and municipal departments, members of the judiciary, doctors, dentists, lawyers, public health and welfare officers and employees in commercial enterprises. The Jewish press was banned. Jews and non-Aryans were not permitted to bring lawsuits in courts of law. Many fled to neighbouring countries hopeful that the political situation would soon change. Some sought refuge in the United Kingdom; others a temporary haven there until they were able to immigrate to a third country.

     

    Otto Schiff and the First Asylum Seekers

    CBF records indicate that the earliest refugees who sought aid from Anglo-Jewish sources arrived in London in March 1933. Those without relatives or friends able to provide housing for them were cared for at the Jews Temporary Shelter in the East End of London, an institution established early in the century to assist Jews fleeing persecution in Russia. Otto Schiff, long known to the Home Office for his work with World War I refugees from Europe, was its president. Schiff enlisted some friends with whom he organised the Jewish Refugees Committee (JRC), which for several months operated from the shelter where a ready-made social service support network was at hand. Schiff continued in his leadership position in the JRC and membership of the CBF Executive until 1949.

    The 1930s were years of economic depression and high unemployment in the United Kingdom. In 1933 the number of refugees reaching England was not yet large, but possibly to avoid stirring anti-Semitism at home and to forestall action that might result in their numbers being contained by government regulation, Schiff, representing the CBF, led a deputation that included Neville Laski, President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Lionel L. Cohen, K.C., Chairman of the Board’s Law and Parliamentary Committee, and Leonard G. Montefiore, President of the Anglo-Jewish Association, to the Home Office to assure the government that no refugee admitted to Britain would be permitted to become a public charge. This pledge was honoured up to the end of 1939 when as a result of the war, substantial financial contributions from public appeals could no longer be secured.

     

    Austria’s Annexation and Kristallnacht

    A massive and panicked exodus followed Germany’s annexation of Austria in March 1938, a movement fueled further later that year by the nationally organised pogrom of 9-10 November, known as Kristallnacht. When areas of Czechoslovakia were absorbed into the German Reich in March 1939, ‘Bloomsbury House’, the appellation by which the Jewish Refugees Committee now operating from that address in London was known, was deluged as it tried to cope with as many as one thousand hapless visitors a day. This influx of refugees from almost all the countries of Europe was halted only after war was declared.

     

    Political Pressures within Jewish Communities

    The CBF’s administrative records hold an almost unbroken series of minutes of its Executive meetings dating from 16 May 1933.

    The Executive Committee met on a regular basis. During emergency situations it was convened weekly or even daily, and minutes make evident the fact that its members were in constant contact with each other and with third persons upon whose expertise they could call. The records paint a picture of ongoing policy making, of fund allocations to the JRC for assistance to refugees in transit or those hoping to rebuild their lives in the United Kingdom, of grants to community agencies in Europe and of ongoing allocations to Zionist organisations for agricultural training, the purchase of tools and equipment, assistance for immigration to Palestine and the construction of housing there. Also revealed is the CBF’s handling of political and religious pressure groups within Anglo-Jewry and representatives of European Jewish communities, as well as the relationship with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJDC), a philanthropic organisation created in 1914 for the relief of Jews in Russia and in Palestine. In post- World War II years, the AJDC would become the world’s major Jewish philanthropic organisation, raising hundreds of millions of dollars for the relief and rehabilitation of Jews in need. However, the record reveals that in the years from 1933 to 1939 the CBF was the world’s major Jewish fundraising agency for assistance to Jews in Germany and the one to which refugees and communities caring for them turned.

    Within days of its inception in May 1933, the Allocations Committee of the CBF set aside funds for the Jewish Refugees Committee to aid refugees reaching the United Kingdom and allocated monies to German Jewish communal agencies for the vocational training of young people and the retraining of adults, for immigration assistance, and for the provision of housing for immigrants to Palestine in accordance with its emerging policy: priority funding for emigration. In addition, funds were made available to the non-sectarian academic Assistance Council, whose appeal for funds was headed by Sir William Beveridge. The CBF’s Academic Committee, forerunner of the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning, held its first meeting 4 May 1933. That Committee’s minute book lists a number of distinguished academics, Jews and non-Jews alike, who served as members in helping to place their refugee peers in British institutions of higher learning.

     

    Palestine: Major Hope for Resettlement

    Evident from minutes of the CBF’s Executive Committee is a very early appreciation of the political situation affecting Jews in Germany and a realisation that resettlement in Palestine was German Jewry’s only hope of large-scale immigration. An undated memorandum relating to the organisation of the first fundraising appeal in 1933 addresses the special position of the Zionists and makes clear how Anglo-Jewry’s leaders were able to set aside personal political biases and respond in a meaningful way to help Jews in Germany immigrate to Palestine. Nonetheless, the strong Zionist influence of Chaim Weizmann and Nahum Sokolow and of Simon Marks on the Executive Committee is especially evident and was doubtlessly a major factor in the rescue and resettlement in Palestine of numbers far greater than might otherwise have been achieved.

    The minutes of the 1930s suggest that this kind of synergy was sorely lacking among Jewish organisations in the United States. Distance from Europe appears to have dulled American Jewry’s early recognition of the tragedy besetting German Jewry.

     

    International Jewish Conference: The Gravest Problem

    A conference for the relief of German Jewry attended by representatives of Jewish communities throughout the world was held in London from 29 October to 1 November 1933. The entire proceedings have been preserved among the CBF’s records. A statement of CBF’s activities for the year are succinctly outlined in Document No. 2 of the conference. It is one of several submitted by a variety of organisations in the United Kingdom and overseas. Reports, resolutions and recommendations issued by the Conference emphasised the determination of participants to cooperate ‘to meet the gravest problem which has faced (Jews] for centuries’.

    The CBF maintained close contact with communities in Europe whenever possible. Several members of the Executive and others nominated to do so visited Germany, Austria, France, Belgium, and Holland and returned to London with firsthand knowledge of conditions and needs. In pre-war years, their concern was that monies be raised locally in Europe to cover the cost of relief and organisational administration so that funds allocated from Britain could be used in their entirety for training, retraining and emigration. The Executive did not wish the CBF to serve Europe as a relief agency, but rather as one offering constructive alternatives for those forced to flee their homes.

     

    CBF Seeks Help from the Dominions

    Norman Bentwich and Sir Wyndham Deedes were appointed Honorary Directors of the CBF. Wyndham Deedes was a non-Jew active on behalf of non-Aryan Christians. Both men had seen service in the government of Palestine under Sir Herbert Samuel. At the request of the Executive they travelled to the Dominions of Australia and South Africa to apprise Jewish communities there of the deteriorating situation in Europe and to urge greater fundraising efforts on their behalf. These communities were also asked to approach their governments with a view to securing entry permits for refugees. But Dominion governments were not disposed to respond positively to such requests. Landing permits for Australia continued to be issued only on an individual basis to persons sponsored by relatives or friends. South Africa was even less cooperative. A meeting on immigration held in London on 13 January 1938 to discuss worldwide possibilities makes poignantly clear the paucity of opportunity for Jewish refugees.

    On his visit to the United States in 1936, Sir Herbert Samuel met U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and requested that consuls in Germany be instructed to speed visa issuance to eligible applicants. From available evidence it may be assumed that no such change was effected. Other countries responded no differently as evident from the individual country files and from minutes of the Executive. Over the years a number of immigration schemes were proposed, but because of their cost, location, or the advent of war, they proved abortive.

    The file for Austria, for example, holds two detailed reports submitted by Norman Bentwich on conditions in Vienna following his visit there in 1938 and again in August 1939 shortly before war was declared. On the second occasion, Bentwich met with Hauptmann Adolf Eichmann, and his report carries their discussions regarding future emigration. Also in the Austria file are applications from older persons seeking emigration assistance. They are rated on a points system: those with children overseas, with funds available, with employable skills or other assets were given a greater number of preferential points, a grim reminder of desperate choices that were made.

     

    The Nuremberg Laws, September 1935

    In September 1935 Germany enacted the ‘Nuremberg Laws’, which deprived Jews of all civil rights. The need to speed immigration to countries of safety was now paramount. The CBF’s Executive concluded that although the board of the AJDC in New York was kept fully advised on events in Europe and its representatives were invited to attend Executive and Allocations Committee meetings whenever they were in London, a delegation should proceed to the United States to heighten awareness on the part of the AJDC and anyone else who would listen, of the gravity of the situation in Germany and seek cooperation from the AJDC for a coordinated rescue effort.

    To this end, Sir Herbert Samuel, Simon Marks, and Lord Bearsted travelled to the United States in January 1936. On his return to London, Sir Herbert reported to the Executive that they had visited Chicago, Illinois; St Louis, Missouri; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Washington, DC; and New York. They had made thirty speeches, five of which were broadcast by radio. As noted earlier, This was when Samuel met Roosevelt, as well as Frances Perkins, the U.S. Secretary of Labor; James G. McDonald, then High Commissioner for Refugees; and representatives of non­Jewish agencies, all of whom, Samuel reported, had shown concern for the position of Jews in Germany.

     

    Council for German Jewry

    As a result of this visit to the United States, the AJDC agreed to join forces with the CBF in forming a new organisation, the Council for German Jewry (CGJ). Its members were the CBF, AJDC and the American United Palestine Appeal (UPA). It was hoped that the CGJ, which was to meet in London, would serve to coordinate activities between the tripartite agencies and provide evidence worldwide of the solidarity of effort among major Jewish philanthropic organisations on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States at this time fundraising was conducted separately by the AJDC and the United Palestine Appeal, whereas in the United Kingdom this political division affecting fundraising had been resolved when the CBF was first organised in 1933. At that time, the Zionist organisations agreed to raise funds with the CBF, an arrangement maintained until early in the war. Chaim Weizmann was appointed a member of CBF’s Executive. Lavy Bakstansky, appointed a joint secretary to the CBF with Meyer Stephany, was nominated by the Zionists.

    A major thrust of the Council for German Jewry was the training and orderly emigration from Germany over a three-year period of 80,000 to 100,000 young adults and children, a majority of whom would go to Palestine. Provision was to be made for training suitable emigrants within Germany and in Holland, France, and Belgium. Resettlement overseas and loans and relief, where necessary, would be accomplished through the machinery of existing agencies. Much discussion ensued on whether Jews still in Germany or those already outside its borders should be the first recipients of available certificates for Palestine. A sense of urgency in regard to emigration remained paramount throughout these exchanges.

     

    American Support for CBF Emigration Plan Disappointing

    It was envisaged that to achieve the CGJ’s goals $5,000,000 would be subscribed in Europe and $10,000,000 in the United States and other countries around the world. Representatives of the AJDC attended meetings of the Executive of the CGJ in London, but despite hopes of its British members for financial cooperation from the AJDC, none was forthcoming. In the end the CBF was to prove the major contributor to programmes undertaken. Dr. Stephen Wise and Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, representatives of the American United Palestine Appeal, attended several meetings of the CGJ’s Executive. Great disappointment was recorded following their report to the Executive of monies which might be expected from the UPA. The emigration goal set for young persons in Germany could not be achieved at this level of support. Minutes of the Executive suggest that political rather than humanitarian considerations were paramount among American Jewish lay leaders. Only after the ‘Anschluss’ of Austria in 1938, did the AJDC agree to work more closely with the CBF for the benefit of Austrian Jews.

    Throughout 1936 members of the CGJ travelled abroad to encourage fundraising efforts in support of its programme of rescue. They also visited agricultural training sites in Germany, France, Holland, and Belgium, to which funds were allocated through communal agencies. Wyndham Deedes and Peter Scott, the latter a member of the Society of Friends, an agency that worked closely with the CBF in its rescue efforts, were asked by the Council to accompany Norman Bentwich on his visit to Germany, where they would review agricultural training programmes and report to London on their progress. Peter Scott was an expert in the field of agriculture. The report on training would emphasise the gravity of the situation confronting Jews in Germany and the need to hasten emigration.

     

    Activities of the Jewish Refugees Committee

    Until early in 1936 the JRC’s several committees responsible for meeting the varying needs of the refugees were able to function in a relatively orderly manner. Friends and relatives in the United Kingdom were approached by or made contact with the Emigration Committee in regard to provision of guarantees of support for individuals or families seeking entry into the United Kingdom that the Committee helped to secure. On arrival, refugees received assistance in obtaining third country visas and outbound shipping; the Welfare Committee found placement for students in British institutions of higher learning and apprenticeships were obtained for young men in skilled trades and for agricultural pursuits. The Resettlement Committee, which operated throughout the period under review, provided a large number of loans to businessmen after their ventures had received Home Office approval, and the Professional Committee secured employment for professional men and women. The Domestic Bureau meanwhile secured job placements for women, some of whom were accompanied by a child, and occasionally for married couples. The Bureau’s records testify that several thousand refugees were able to secure entry visas to the United Kingdom in the immediate pre-war period as a result of its efforts.

    At a meeting of the Executive of the CGJ in 1936, Otto Schiff noted that in earlier years refugees generally had sufficient funds with which to support themselves, but that since passage of the Nuremberg laws in September 1935, those entering the United Kingdom were often in need of financial assistance. At the same meeting Schiff reported that the Home Office had ruled that German children would no longer be admitted for educational purposes unless a Home Office-approved family  in the United Kingdom guaranteed that they would not become a public charge. In this regard Wyndham Deedes was already at work to organise a committee that would assist such children.  The CGJ made a substantial grant to this agency, the Inter-Aid Committee for Children from Germany, which helped all children regardless of religious affiliation.

     

    Aid Continues Despite Financial Crisis

    Calls upon the funds of the CGJ and services of its constituent agencies by unprecedented numbers of refugees reached a breaking point in the spring of 1939. The Executive reported that its funds were exhausted. No alternative remained to the Executive but to authorise substantial bank overdrafts so that the work of rescue could continue. The CGJ’s position was so desperate that for the first time since its inception, approaches to the government for possible loans to the JRC were considered.

    The Executive thus agreed that in view of the financial crisis and the dire situation of Jews in Europe a delegation should call upon Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Lord Bearsted, who led the deputation, asked that the Government request that facilities be made available in countries of the British Empire for immigration of refugees from Germany and Austria. In response, Chamberlain observed that his government was already investigating immigration possibilities outside of the United Kingdom. Bearsted then stressed the tremendous financial burden the refugees reaching the United Kingdom were placing on the limited resources of the Anglo-Jewish community and suggested that if emigration on a larger scale were to ensue, government funding for voluntary agencies activities would be needed. In reply, Chamberlain stated that these matters would be placed before the conference at Evian. Bearsted requested also that the Prime Minister authorise unaccompanied children be granted less restrictive entry to the United Kingdom.

    Chamberlain noted that this last request was a matter for the Home Secretary, but he would support any programme that the Home Office department approved. Thus, another deputation, one led by Lord Samuel of the CGJ’s Executive, together with representatives of the Inter-Aid Committee, the Society of Friends, and JRC called on the Home Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare. Following their presentation Hoare agreed to lift earlier Home Office restrictions on accommodation for children and allow entry to all of those for whom maintenance was guaranteed, either by individuals or by voluntary agencies.

     

    Birth of the Refugee Children’s Movement

    A major easing of the documentation of children was assured when Hoare ruled that unaccompanied children no longer had to secure national passports in Europe or entry visas from British consuls; they would be granted entry on the basis of identity cards, which the Inter-Aid Committee was authorised to issue. This was a major breakthrough. Children who might otherwise not have been rescued were saved by this ruling. The Inter-Aid Committee and JRC then agreed to coordinating their efforts in the interest of children and together established the Refugee Children’s Movement (RCM). Despite its precarious financial position, the CGJ agreed to sponsor the movement to Britain of a first contingent of 5,000 children with others to follow.

    The RCM’s goals were widely publicised and offers of hospitality for children poured in from concerned persons throughout the United Kingdom. Members of the Society of Friends helped Jewish communal organisations select children in Berlin and in Vienna. As a result of all these efforts 9,354 children, almost a thousand of whom were Christian non-Aryans, found refuge in Britain, the last of them being allowed to land a few days after war was declared. Records of the RCM divulge a myriad of problems with which the agency was called upon to cope, some of which multiplied when children were evacuated from London and other strategic areas when war was declared. Concern for the religious education of children and realities of proselytization efforts among non-Jewish hosts was also a continuing theme and source of concern in the RCM records.

     

    The Plight of Austrian Jewry

    In March 1938 when Germany annexed Austria, funds of the Israelitischen Kultusgemeinde Wien (literally Jewish Community in Vienna), where a majority of Austrian Jews lived, were impounded and its buildings occupied. CGJ Executive minutes and other materials provide detailed reports on the incarceration, spoliation, and resulting desperate situation of Jews in Vienna. Not only were Austrian Jews now in dire straits, others fleeing Czechoslovakia or expelled from Burgenland (an eastern state in Austria that bordered the western edge of Hungary)  swelled their numbers. The Reichsvertretung der Deutsche Juden (the Reich Representation of German Jews) in Berlin sent individuals to Vienna to render assistance. It is evident that Jews in Berlin still had some freedom of movement whereas action against those in Austria was immediate and vicious.

    AJDC representatives in Vienna were authorised by the CGJ to spend monies on their behalf and between the two agencies they fed thousands of the destitute at soup kitchens. Drs. Loewenthal and Alois Rothenberg of the Kultusgemeinde came to London to report to the Executive on the situation in Vienna and to request additional financial aid, especially for young persons in agricultural training centres preparing to depart to Palestine. The Executive agreed also to send a representative to Vienna for a three-month period to assist the community and Captain B.M. Woolf, secretary of the West London Synagogue, was given leave of absence to take this assignment.

     

    Evian-Les-Bains, July 1938

    The United States had distanced itself from Europe and showed no signs of easing its own restrictive immigration laws. Nonetheless, President Roosevelt convened a conference on emigration and refugees for July 1938 at Evian-les-Bains, France. Although it was clear at the outset that no government was to be asked to change its immigration laws or to finance the movement of refugees, the conference was viewed with hope, and Norman Bentwich was asked to attend at Evian as CGJ observer.

    Much time at Executive meetings was spent in discussion on how to present the plight of German and Austrian Jews at the conference. It was agreed that the CGJ and the AJDC would submit a joint statement on their concerns to the Secretary General of the Intergovernmental Committee on Emigration and Refugees, at the American Embassy in London. The statement supplements several memoranda presented to the conference at Evian. It outlined the work of the two agencies on behalf of German and more recently Austrian Jews and reminded the Secretary General of the desperate situation of Jews in those countries. In the aftermath of the conference it was obvious that hope in its deliberations had been misplaced. None of the participating countries agreed to modify their stance on immigration and alleviate the plight of refugees.

     

    S.S. St. Louis, June 1939

    In June 1939, Otto Schiff, Paul Baerwald, and Harold Lindner, the latter two representatives of the AJDC on the Council for German Jewry, called at the Home Office to seek permission for three hundred passengers aboard the S.S. St. Louis to land in the United Kingdom. They were part of a complement of 907 passengers destined for Cuba whose landing permits had been revoked by that country’s government after the ship set sail from Hamburg, Germany, in May. No country in the Americas was prepared to offer sanctuary to those aboard, even though substantial financial guarantees for their support had been assured by philanthropic agencies. The alternative was for them to be returned to Germany.

    While en route to Europe, Belgium, Holland, and France together agreed to take two thirds of the passengers. At the Home Office, Baerwald and Lindner added the assurance of the AJDC to Schiff’s on behalf of the CGJ that those admitted to the United Kingdom would not be allowed to become a public charge. Despite government misgivings related to security, permission was granted for the passengers to disembark in the United Kingdom. A number were able to secure visas and leave for the United States before war was declared.

     

    Refugees and Transmigrants after Kristallnacht

    The growing numbers of refugees arriving at the JRC’s offices following Kristallnacht in November 1938 again created a dilemma for the CGJ and its constituent agencies. The guarantee given to the Home Office in 1933 that no refugees would become a public charge was backfiring. Refugee numbers were now very much greater and their economic condition more dire than could possibly have been anticipated six years earlier. Those reaching the United Kingdom as transmigrants without means had to be supported when war was declared and shipping to countries overseas was curtailed.

    The men among them were housed in a disused army camp at Richborough, Kent, rented by the CGJ, which was then home to several thousand teenage and adult men while they awaited shipping to overseas countries. Earlier in the year a number of men released from the concentration camp at Dachau had been accommodated there. In the early days of the war many at Richborough, and others in the community, were interned on the Isle of Man as enemy aliens; some were deported to Australia and Canada. Most were later released and many served in the British armed forces, while others served on the land, in industry, medicine and science. As shipping became available, even during the war years, a number were able to join relatives and friends overseas. From 1933 to 1939 some 20,000 were able to emigrate from the United Kingdom.

     

    Financial Guarantees and Appeals

    Throughout the latter months of 1939, the Executive held discussions and meetings with government officials on the future financial support for refugees. Funds of the CGJ were depleted and a massive loan had been secured in August, on the guarantee of Nathan Mayer Rothschild and Marcus Samuel (of Samuel & Co.), against expected income from government tax refunds and covenants. This infusion of cash helped only for a few months. In Executive meetings fear was expressed that if the JRC allowed refugees to become a charge on local rates, such action would stir anti-Semitism. Members of the Executive of the Central Council for Jewish Refugees (CCJR), the name by which the CGJ came to be known after war was declared, were under great strain. It took much persuasion, including threats that the JRC would cease operating, to convince the government that the refugees were not solely a Jewish problem and that the Anglo-Jewish community alone could no longer shoulder responsibility for their welfare. The Christian Council for Refugees from Germany and Central Europe added its voice in support of the CCJR in meetings with government officials. Tangible evidence of this is seen in a substantial short-term loan to the CCJR to help it continue to finance the JRC during the period of negotiation.

    A transcript of minutes of a meeting of Anglo-Jewry called in February 1940 by the Central Council for Jewish Refugees to launch an emergency appeal for financial support reveals some of the anxiety felt in the immediate pre-war period and the need to find means of support for refugees when war was declared. Anthony de Rothschild expressed appreciation to the Christian Council for the loan, which had enabled CCJR’s work to continue until, with their support, the government had agreed to share the financial burden.

     

    Rome Office Financial Support

    Closure of the CCJR’s operations was averted at the last moment when the government agreed to a series of grants-in-aid shared in part by the Christian Council. At a later date the Home Office undertook the total cost of support for those refugees whose jobs had been lost as a result of the war. A major part of the administrative costs of the voluntary agencies was also underwritten by the government. A Central Committee for Refugees was appointed by the Home Office to distribute and supervise expenditure of the months provided in accordance with government guidelines. Its members were representatives of the several Jewish and Christian refugee agencies. Sir Herbert Emerson, High Commissioner for Refugees, was appointed chairman. A Central Office for Refugees, co-chaired by Anthony de Rothschild and the Reverend Henry Carter, head of the Christian Council, served as the principal channel of communication between government departments and refugee organisations throughout the country. It also provided contact between them and served as a bureau of general information on refugee matters. The Committee’s Executive included representatives of the Central Council for Jewish Refugees, the Christian Council, and the Refugee Children’s Movement. A substantial body of material pertaining to these agencies, including minutes, correspondence and financial activity, is preserved in the CBF archives, providing a view of voluntary agency administration of government funds.

    The provision of partial funding by the government of the CCJR in 1940 relieved tensions, enabling the Executive to continue its policy making role. Almost £3,000,000 in cash had been raised by the CBF and its successor organisations since 1933 and former Prime Minister Earl Stanley Baldwin’s national appeal in 1938 had provided a further £250,000, most of which financed the rescue and care of children. When war was finally declared, it was estimated that 65,000 refugees, many thousands of whom were awaiting shipping to third countries, had found asylum in the United Kingdom.

     

    The Young, The Old and the Frail

    All during the war the CCJR, the JRC and the RCM continued to carry responsibility for the well-being of refugees. Some who were aged or mentally ill were placed in sheltered housing for their lifetime. Representation by the JRC to the government was ongoing on behalf of internees, deportees, persons seeking employment and others. Contact was maintained with young adults trained in agriculture who joined various branches of the armed forces and with others who took up nursing and essential war work while awaiting immigration to Palestine.

     

    Jewish Committee for Relief Abroad, 1943

    Although the CBF had been created in response to the plight of German Jews, it was with prescience and an unflinching sense of responsibility that the Executive of the CCJR agreed to finance the activities of a new organisation, the Jewish Committee for Relief Abroad (JCRA), established in 1943.

    Its purpose was to recruit suitably qualified persons who would volunteer their services to travel overseas and care for concentration camp and other Jewish survivors when they were liberated by Allied armies. The JCRA joined major voluntary agencies in the United Kingdom under the umbrella of the Council of British Societies for Relief Abroad (COBSRA).

    Almost two hundred volunteers including doctors, nurses and social workers served in Europe. During the war some of them in Egypt, destined to enter southern Europe, helped care for several thousand Yugoslav women and children evacuated from the Dalmatian coast. Others entered liberated towns and concentration camps on the heel of Allied armies with whom they worked for the benefit of survivors. Reports and correspondence in the records of the JCRA provide in graphic detail descriptions of conditions in Europe at the time of liberation and the service rendered by volunteers to survivors and nascent Jewish communities in the years from 1944 until the JCRA’s closure in 1952.

    In 1944 with knowledge that there were Jews in hiding in occupied Europe and in the hope that they and others would survive incarceration in concentration camps, the Central Council for Jewish Refugees underwent a name change to the Central British Fund for Relief and Rehabilitation. Anglo-Jewry was now committed to aid all Jews who survived the Holocaust in Europe. That same year, with government approval, monies were made available to the High Commissioner for Refugees for transmittal to Jews in occupied Europe.

     

    Liberation, Rescue and Rebuilding

    As countries in Europe were liberated, the CBF gave encouragement and financial support to emerging communal leaders in their efforts to re-establish Jewish institutions. In an effort to learn of problems facing Jewish communities in Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, Greece, Holland, Poland, and Switzerland, a meeting of representatives from these countries was held in London in August 1945. All those present noted that anti­Semitism remained a key issue. They all expressed concern for the future of Jewish children who had survived the war in the care of non-Jews and who were now in danger of being lost to the Jewish community altogether. They asked that assistance be provided to enable survivors to join relatives overseas. While help in this regard was forthcoming, the reuniting of families took many years. Countries that had not welcomed refugees during the war years still had not changed their stance in the aftermath of war.

    The CBF made funds available for treatment in sanatoria of survivors who had contracted tuberculosis. Together with the Society of Friends, permission was obtained to bring to the United Kingdom as many as one thousand children who had survived incarceration in concentration camps. 732 children became wards of the CBF. Some eventually joined relatives overseas, while others were adopted. Minutes and correspondence of the Committee for the Care of Children from the Camps provide information over a number of years on the diverse activities on behalf of these children.

    Other survivors aided by the JRC included a thousand ‘distressed persons’, individuals with close relatives in the United Kingdom for whom in November 1945 the government granted the right of entry on special ‘Q’ visas. In addition, a small number of Jews living in displaced persons camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy were also resettled in Great Britain.

    The Kultusgemeinde in Vienna was again a centre of activity and a recipient of financial and personnel aid following the Hungarian uprising in 1956. Two thousand of the Jews who fled to Vienna were granted visas for the United Kingdom, where the JRC assisted them in completing plans to join relatives overseas. Stateless Jews living in Egypt were given asylum in the United Kingdom when the CBF guaranteed that they would not become a public charge.

     

    Restitution

    As early as 1939, comments in Executive Committee minutes relate to restitution to those spoliated when they were forced to flee Germany. During the latter part of the war restitution of property and compensation to refugees took on greater significance.

    It is fitting that the records hold minutes and correspondence of the Jewish Trust Corporation, which was created in 1948 by the CBF, AJDC and Jewish Agency for Palestine to cover identifiable heir-less property of victims of the Nazis and of former Jewish communities. Monies received from the sale of such properties was used to provide housing and sheltered accommodations, synagogues and schools for former refugees and their progeny. The task of recovering property was undertaken by teams of lawyers, many of them German Jews, working within restitution laws enacted in Germany. The laws ensured that an attempt was made to uphold principles of morality and those for which the war had been fought.

    CITATION

    Gottleib, Amy Zahl: “Central British Fund for World Jewish Relief: An Introduction to and Overview of Its First Ten Years”, Refugees, Relief, Resettlement: Gale, a Cengage Company (2021)

  • Public Health in Modern America: A Research Experience

    User note: Boldfaced terms within paragraphs deliver search results.

    Heaven sent! Is that too strong a descriptor to use? That, at least, is what Public Health in Modern America (PHMA) affords students, researchers, and faculty across multiple disciplines. It is an enormously useful digital library for the discovery of primary source materials on hundreds of topics related to the history of public health as practiced in the United States.

    As a public historian and health sciences librarian, I regularly answer reference questions on the history of the health sciences, prepare public exhibits on the history of medicine, and work in concert with faculty, undergraduate and graduate students associated with the University of Wisconsin in Madison’s Department of Medical History and Bioethics.

    Such work with students and faculty includes targeted resource workshops that incorporate the rich primary print collections within the Rare Books and Special Collections division of the University of Wisconsin’s Ebling Library, as well as the fine-tuning of their navigation skills with our campus’s primary and secondary full-text databases. It is not uncommon to provide resource instruction that has been heavily informed by the syllabi of requesting faculty members, who routinely ask their students to investigate the development of public health in America. Course work then will focus on studying the clinical and ethical issues, as well as gender and race concerns characteristic of the evolution of medical, pharmaceutical, and health care enterprises as we know them today.

    Students produce research papers on complementary subjects, regularly incorporating primary documents into their research. Along the way, students meet with me, one on one, for tips on which print and online resources to use, how to optimize the available databases, and how to uncover the unheard “voices,” so often difficult to locate in conventional sources.

    Based on the collection of materials that it brings together in one place, Public Health in Modern America widens the door for these students by delivering access to previously hard-to-find resources and presenting full-text searchable content not available anywhere outside of a small handful of institutions.  The breadth and depth of the collection is represented through the four thoughtfully indexed digital collections that have been brought together:

    • the records of the U.S. Children's Bureau, with its focus on maternal and child health from the years 1912 to 1969;
    • the work of the Committee on Public Health of the New York Academy of Medicine, and its dedicated collection of correspondence and reports;
    • the remarkable Library of Social and Economic Aspects of Medicine from Michael M. Davis, a lifelong public health researcher, advocate and collector, who had been intimately involved in the campaign for a national health care plan;
    • and a selection of publications on public health—all rare pamphlets unavailable from another digital source—from the New York Academy of Medicine.

     

    In my own review of the four collections, my search on the role of race and public health made clear right away that there was not to be any sort of pre-designed subset on the topic—not as a eugenically informed ideal or as a collection of content amassed specifically around the issue of patients and practitioners of color and their relationship to the delivery of health care services, disease occurrence and treatment, or preventive care. Nor did any of the collections specifically supply a dedicated subset on gender and its relationship (whether as practitioner or patient) to health care or disease occurrence.

    Counterintuitively, the very fact that such subsets are not so readily found is exactly what makes Public Health in Modern America so valuable. An essay prepared for the Ebling Library’s exhibit Staggering Losses: World War 1 and the Influenza Pandemic of 1918 notes how commonly surveys of U.S. history skip over the involvement, the contributions, or concerns of people of color or women. Over the last 40 years, historical treatments have included the unheralded, unacknowledged, oppressed, or maligned place of people of color and women in the making of a modern America. The occurrence of provocative topics like eugenics and racially informed health care decision-making are evident throughout the digitized resources assembled in Public Health in Modern America.

    Within this digital archive, one can experience a far more representative version of the historical place of marginalized groups. It offers a more complete narrative, one that points out the marginalization or disenfranchisement of women even as it highlights the influential contributions people of color and women nonetheless made as patients and professionals

    Through vigorous indexing and the power of the platform’s search engine, it is far easier to look up heretofore hidden subjects and themes, even when those subjects are not immediately evident from the title of the resource. Researchers and students can pose questions—and get answers—about people of color and health care delivery, from public health education within the African American community to disease demographics with respect to America’s many communities of color.

    So for a study of the prevention of tuberculosis among African Americans, a long list of results appears when a search is properly run. Doing so requires using the advanced search and entering the period-specific term colored (or negro) and tuberculosis. Public Health in America will retrieve over 200 “monograph” publication (all rare pamphlets) result and 806 “manuscript” (each one a folder’s worth of content) results. Among the monographs—all from the sub-collection “Selected Publications on Public Health from the New York Academy of Medicine”—the first title The Movement against Tuberculosis in Washington, D.C. (1907) includes no mention of people of color in the pamphlet title.  But a search within the document on the word “colored” delivers 10 relevant page results. Of particular interest on page 14 (“relevant page 16” in the digitized version) are the lectures that the Associated Charities presented on tuberculosis prevention to both white and black teachers. Here is the paragraph in full:

     

    Lectures.—These have been found especially effective in this field. During the first season forty-four public meetings were held, at most of which the subject was illustrated by stereopticon views, besides forty meetings in connection with the Associated Charities, through all of which more than 20,000 people received some knowledge of the nature of tuberculosis. Similar courses have been kept up since, though there has seemed to be less demand for them this last season; and talks on the subject have also been given to all teachers, both white and colored, as well as in all the high schools, and to labor organizations, one of which showed its appreciation by sending the Committee a substantial check. [Italics added.]

     

    This 1907 publication by William H. Baldwin (and published by the Journal of the Outdoor Life) is not available from the Ebling Library or elsewhere at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In fact, only two copies are available in the United States (one of them the copy from the New York Academy of Medicine digitized here). The work does not appear on Google Books, the Hathi Trust Digital Library, or the Internet Archive.  Without this digital copy, there is no knowing if such is even worth the obtaining through interlibrary loan, if available at all by that means. And even if available, why run the risk of handling a potentially fragile document when it is already part of the Public Health in America?

    But leaving questions of access aside, the uncovering of this document—and even the topic within it—is no small matter. This little, but not insignificant paragraph, helps me and my students identify one publication, with one entity (Associated Charities) from which they can start to build a historical inquiry.

    Once they have such an inquiry in hand, they can then proceed to other monographs or manuscripts within PHMA, looking for additional mentions of Associated Charities (29 monographs; 40 manuscripts), other incidences of adopting teachers within a public health movement (school teachers delivers 108 monograph and 426 manuscript results), other public health initiatives with black patients (negro patients provides 11 monograph and 108 manuscript results) to educate them about any number of topics, including tuberculosis prevention (a search on negroes and spitting offers 9 monograph and 28 manuscript results, many related to preventing tuberculosis within the Black community).  Public Health in Modern America can thus serve as a springboard as students look further afield among other sources like contemporary newspapers, education journals, social hygiene publications—all from the unearthing made possible by the small mention in a previously obscure publication.

    But let’s change gears. After recent work assembling an exhibit at the Ebling Library on World War I, I decided to pursue the topic of women health care providers. A search on women and physicians produced 800 monograph and over 2,000 manuscript items. I then narrowed the search to dates of publication to the years when World War I raged from 1914 to 1918 (even though America’s direct participation would not occur until April 1917).  Once filtered down to 98 monograph and 47 manuscript results, I then scrolled the list of available titles, each more thought-provoking than the next. Consider An Appeal to the Men and Women Engaged in Medical Practice and the Advancement of Medical Sciences (1915) from the Medical Brotherhood, just five years after the “Flexner Report” on medical education by Abraham Flexner (researchers can find a 33-page folder devoted to Abraham Flexner in the Michael Davis collection) and the eventual closing of many women’s medical colleges. Would this document mention Flexner’s report? Might it address the many physicians then heading to Europe to help in the war effort and the women who remained behind to take care of patients?

    While neither subject is directly addressed, this appeal nonetheless offers a fascinating glimpse into wartime sentiment regarding medical men and women (physicians, nurses, researchers) and their role as stalwart, upstanding volunteers. It includes a call for them to be part of “The Medical Brotherhood for the Furtherance of International Morality” and “to sign their names as (moral) humanitarians.” Women as part of the Brotherhood?  How unusual!  And then there are the several notable women medical doctors whose names appear among the committees presumably affiliated with the Brotherhood. From here, one might begin to research those women and their roles. They include, for example, S. Josephine Baker (11 monograph and 27 manuscript results) and Alice Hamilton (14 monograph and 108 manuscript results).

    Those of us who have worked as librarians and historians for decades have seen the pendulum swing from print to online in ways that can sometimes seem alarming. Limiting one’s research in print, particularly within a single institution, may see pivotal primary materials missed. On the other hand, sticking to just online resources can prove as limiting. Responsible researchers ideally use print and online resources in concert to craft definitive arguments, especially in previously unmined territory.

    In either case, the goal is to have access to resources—those documents with their tables, images, footnotes, references, and names of pivotal players in the public health arena—that can provide scholars with hints and clues for further research. This domino effect in the gathering of evidence for any study, whether an article intended for publication or a term paper, is what makes searchable digital primary source collections like Public Health in Modern America so valuable. The “rabbit holes” that graduate students so often worry about are often what shine a light on new corners of research.  Such necessary rabbit holes are spread throughout Public Health in Modern America, making the possibilities for research in the history of public health endless.

    CITATION

    Sullivan-Fowler , Micaela: “Public Health in Modern America: A Research Experience”, Public Health Archives: Gale, a Cengage Company (2021)

MARCH 2021

OUT NOW

Various source media, Declassified Documents Online: Twentieth-Century British Intelligence, An Intelligence Empire

Declassified Documents Online: Twentieth-Century British Intelligence, An Intelligence Empire

  • Product Overview: Declassified Documents Online: Twentieth-Century British Intelligence, An Intelligence Empire

    Various source media, Declassified ocuments Online, Brtisih Intelligence

    From the international machinery of espionage and twentieth-century warfare to personal surveillance and Cold War intelligence, this uniquely broad view of the interests of the British government, her allies and her enemies is sourced from five government departments and totals around 500 000 pages.

    Twentieth-Century British Intelligence, An Intelligence Empire brings together files from the UK National Archives covering intelligence and security matters from 1905-2002. Material has been sourced from the UK Ministry of Defence, the Cabinet Office, the Colonial Office, MI5 (British Domestic Security Service) and the SOE (Special Operations Executive), reflecting an intelligence network that reached from the UK and Europe to Africa, the Middle East, Canada, Asia and Australia during a century of global conflicts, high-stakes diplomacy and political upheaval. These documents cover the development of British intelligence and its impact on policy from its earliest days, through Room 40 in the First World War and the activities of the Security Services throughout the British Empire during WWII, to the geopolitics of the Cold War and decolonisation.

    Intelligence files, previously closed to scholars, represent an under-studied aspect of our recent past and provide exciting opportunities for new research. 

    Declassified Documents Online: Twentieth Century British Intelligence, An Intelligence Empire brings together files from five UK government departments to provide researchers with access to detailed, previously classified information on the intelligence services of Britain and her Empire throughout the twentieth century.

    The Security Service (MI5): KV 2, KV 3 & KV 4

    Personal, Subject and Policy files dating from 1905-1978. MI5 handled intelligence gathering within the British Empire and the Commonwealth. The selected subseries of KV 2 holds personal files on subjects of Secret Service enquiries, whilst KV 3 contains subject files on espionage activities of groups or other intelligence organisations, including the only subject files known to have survived from the First World War period. KV 4 holds section histories and policy files.

    The Ministry of Defence: Communications and Intelligence Records: DEFE 21, DEFE 26, DEFE 28, DEFE 31, DEFE 41, DEFE 44, DEFE 60, DEFE 62, DEFE 63 & DEFE 64

    These series include registered files, reports and memoranda of the Directorate of Scientific Intelligence, the Defence Intelligence Staff and the Defence Signals Staff focused on the technical and scientific interests of the British government from the Second World War to the decades of the Cold War and the Atomic Age. The intelligence assessments and reports include those gathered post-war in Allied-occupied Germany, such as interviews with German scientists. With files dating from 1912-2002, these series bring the coverage up to the end of the twentieth century, and include defence records on the Falklands, the Middle East, UFO incidents and details of Soviet weapon systems.

    The Special Operations Executive: HS 7 & HS 8

    These are records of the Ministry of Economic Warfare and the Special Operations Executive (SOE), which functioned during WWII to promote sabotage and subversion, and assist resistance groups in enemy occupied territory, famously directed by Winston Churchill to ‘set Europe ablaze!’. Records date from 1935-1988 and include histories & war diaries in HS 7, and headquarters records in HS 8.


    The Colonial Office: Intelligence and Security Departments: Registered Files (ISD Series): CO 1035
    This series contains registered files of the Colonial Office relating to the security of British colonies, and intelligence on colonial matters and decolonisation, including reports by Security Intelligence Advisors throughout the British Empire, and assessments from the Joint Intelligence Committee. Running from 1954-1966, these files represent a vital piece of the intelligence picture of the global Cold War and decolonisation at the end of Empire.

    The Cabinet Office: CAB 56, CAB 121, CAB 176 & CAB 301

    The material in these series dates from 1936-1974 and shows how intelligence matters were considered, analysed, and processed through the Cabinet Office. Records from the Joint Intelligence Committee appear alongside Policy and Strategy files from the Special Secret Information Centre, and selected intelligence material from the Cabinet Secretary’s Miscellaneous Papers held in CAB 301.

    The study of Intelligence and security casts light on international relations and politics, on social conditions and personal experiences in a time of conflict and shifting global alliances, on the running and dismantling of Empire and on the secret operations and planning of global conflicts. The politics of today are a direct result of the events of the twentieth century, and the depth and breadth of information gathered by British intelligence agencies revealed in this product, from British communists to African independence leaders and German Abwehr agents, allows scholars to follow the decisions and events that formed the world we live in. 

Various source media, China and the Modern World: Imperial China, Part 1

China and the Modern World: Imperial China and the West, Part I

  • Highlights: China and the Modern World: Imperial China, Part I

    LORD AMHERST’S MISSION AND REVISIONIST SCHOLARSHIP

    As Gale has applied the revolutionary Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technology to the digitisation of this enormous archive, scholars around the world – especially new students and those from non-English-speaking regions – will be able to unlock the hidden value of this largely handwritten manuscript collection, allowing for new discoveries and revisionist scholarship, challenging and even subverting traditional views about some historical events like Lord Macartney’s embassy to China, the first (unsuccessful) British diplomatic attempt to open China for trade in the late 1790s.

    Two decades after Lord Macartney’s failed embassy, the British government made a second attempt in February 1816 by dispatching a new mission led by Lord Amherst to “encourage and promote that [commercial] intercourse [with China].” After nearly half a year of travel, the mission arrived at Tianjin in July of the same year, where Lord Amherst and the Chinese Mandarins dispatched to receive him entered into an intense argument about the protocol to be followed for the audience with the Chinese emperor Jiaqing. To the Chinese side’s insistence that the British ambassador extraordinary should practice the ceremony of making nine prostrations, Amherst followed his predecessor Lord Macartney by firmly refusing. As a result, the Amherst mission experienced even greater failure, being refused entry into Peking, let alone having an audience with the emperor. Based on his new knowledge gained in the process of communicating with the Chinese officials, Amherst concluded that he had been misled by all the official and personal accounts of Lord Macartney’s embassy. Among Amherst's reports is one written from Batavia to Lord Canning, governor-general of British India, on February 12, 1817, on his way back to Britain, in which he questioned the authenticity of the widely believed reason behind Macartney’s embassy’s failure—refusing to kowtow to the Chinese emperor: “I have since been given to understand that on an occasion subsequent to his first audience, Lord Macartney multiplied his bow nine times in conformity to the usual number of prostrations made by the Chinese.”

    WESTERN CHINESE-LANGUAGE EXPERTS: KARL GUTZLAFF AND THOMAS WADE

    Western missionaries, especially protestant missionaries, formed a unique yet active group of stakeholders in the history of China–West interactions. They played many different roles: evangelists, language and cultural interpreters, educators, doctors, and even spies. Karl Gutzlaff (郭士立; 1803–1851) is a case in point. As a pioneering sinologist, he was involved in the translation of the Bible into Chinese along with John Robert Morrison, Elijah Bridgeman, and Walter Henry Medhurst. However, at the same time, he did not hesitate to offer his translation services to Western merchants and even the British army during the first Opium War. He was one of the interpreters to the British Plenipotentiary Sir Henry Pottinger in negotiations leading eventually to the signing of the landmark Treaty of Nanking in 1842. He composed a series of reports to help the British government understand the inner workings of Chinese society and government. In this page extract , he introduced the Chinese government department for dealing with foreigners, the so-called 理藩院or Office of Foreign Affairs. This is a good example of the early intelligence-gathering activities carried out by the Western powers in China. 

    In the 19th century, Western Chinese-language experts or translators were made up of two groups—missionaries like Gutzlaff who picked up the Asian language to better spread the gospel among the Chinese, and diplomats who started their careers as low-ranking Chinese clerks, translators, or secretaries. Thomas Wade (威妥瑪; 1818–1895) belongs to the second group. During the second Opium War (1856–1860), he worked as the Chinese secretary for Lord Elgin, British High Commissioner and Plenipotentiary, and rendered Elgin’s letters into Chinese and Chinese officials’ letters into English, as shown by the page of  this letter from the Chinese imperial commissioner Kwei-liang (桂良) to Lord Elgin on the exchange of ratifications of the Treaty of Tientsin. Such rigorous training on the job laid the groundwork for him to become a prominent sinologist after retiring from his diplomatic career—better known as Cambridge University’s first professor of Chinese and inventor of the Wade-Giles romanization system.

    CHINESE DIPLOMATS AND THE CHINESE-LANGUAGE DOCUMENTS

    As diplomatic communication is always bidirectional, it is natural to find a small number of Chinese-language files contained in this archive of largely English correspondence between British ministers and consuls in China and the Foreign Office in London. These Chinese documents usually take the form of letters from Chinese government officials or diplomats and are included in the correspondence as enclosures.

    China established her first overseas legation in London in 1875. Guo Songtao (郭嵩焘; Kuo Song-tao; 1818–1891) was appointed the first Chinese minister to Britain. As China’s diplomatic representative, Guo communicated with his British counterpart often to defend China’s national interests. In 1877, the British colonial government in India appointed Robert Shaw as the British Resident at Kashgar, located in the Tarim basin of Xinjiang. This came to the attention of Guo. To uphold China’s territorial integrity, he wrote a letter to the British Foreign Secretary the Earl of Derby on June 15, 1877, protesting that the appointment had violated the law of nations or international law as it implied British recognition of Kashgar’s independence from China. Elements of International Law (1836) by Henry Wheaton was translated by American missionary William A.P. Martin (丁韪良), at the suggestion of American minister to China Anson Burlingame, into Chinese as 万国公法and published in Peking in 1864. The book was widely circulated among Chinese officials and diplomats like Guo Songtao and played a part in the Chinese government’s efforts to defend its national interests in international negotiations.

    In his letter of protest, Guo argued that “Kashgar was originally Chinese territory and had a dully appointed governor. At the time, when internal [Taiping] rebellion raged in China, and finances to meet war expenses fell short, the Amir took the opportunity to seize the territory, causing for more than ten years uninterrupted commotion and great suffering to the people. Of late years, however, the rebellion has been suppressed and China is about to re-establish order and control in the regions beyond the Tarim. Kashgar is one of the regions of which China ought indisputably to regain possession, and nothing has been made known to the effect that the establishment of an [independent] nation has been consented to.”

    Guo’s letter can be viewed here, in Chinese and also with the English translation to the British Foreign Secretary on the issue of Kashgar, Xinjiang, FO 17/768

    Guo was recalled by the Chinese government in late 1878 and his replacement was Marquis Zeng Jize (曾紀澤; Tseng Chi-tse; 1839–1890) — the son of Zeng Guofan, a prominent high-ranking official of the late Qing period. While Zeng’s best-known diplomatic achievement was his success in renegotiating the infamous 1879 Treaty of Livadia with Russia and replacing it with the more favourable Treaty of Saint Petersburg, he had also been involved in numerous cases of protecting the rights of Chinese living overseas. In January 1881 there occurred an anti-Chinese riot in Lima, the capital of Peru and the Chinese community there suffered a lot. As there was no Chinese consul at the time, the Chinese merchants asked the British minister Sir Spencer St. John for help to forward a written account of their sufferings to Zeng. Upon receipt of the account forwarded by British Foreign Secretary Earl Granville on September 26, 1881, Zeng wrote a formal letter of thanks and explained why no Chinese consul was available in Peru. There is also an English translation of this letter in the archive. 

    THE ANTI-CHRISTIAN TIENTSIN MASSACRE IN THE PRESS

    Anti-Christian activities in China started in the 1860s after the signing of the Tientsin Treaty—which lifted all the restrictions on the movement of Western missionaries in China—and reached the first peak in the 1870s, as epitomized by the Tientsin Massacre of 1870, and eventually led to the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. In the tragic Tientsin Massacre many French Catholic priests and nuns were killed by a group of enraged Chinese misled by rumours of French missionaries kidnapping or purchasing children and “taking out their eyes for medicine.” Imperial China and the West Part I contains a clipping from the Hong Kong-based China Mail Extra, reporting on this tragedy. Such clippings form a small yet lively subset of this largely handwritten manuscript archive. 

    HISTORICAL MAPS OF CHINA

    In addition to the predominance of textual records, Imperial China and the West Part I contains a sizeable collection of colourful historical maps. These are all rescanned from the original source to help users fully appreciate their beauty. This example is a map of Shanghai in 1862. Here we can clearly see the American and British settlements and the French concession as well as the old Chinese walled city. After the first Opium War, China was forced to open five treaty ports for trade, including Shanghai. Given its strategic location and great potential, the Western powers flocked there to establish their consulates and enclaves. The British and American settlements were merged in 1863 into the International Settlement managed by the Shanghai Municipal Council while the French concession remained separate.

    Thanks to the unmatched advantages of railways over traditional means of transportation in facilitating trade in China, Britain and other Western powers had been eyeing the rights of railway construction in the country for a long time. China’s first railway line was constructed in 1876, but Britain started its planning well before that. Here is the China Railway Sketch Map drawn by China Railways Company (Limited)—a largely British-controlled company—in 1865. The map reveals an ambitious plan to build a vast network of railway lines connecting all the major cities in China, such as Peking, Shanghai, Hankow (Wuhan), and Canton (Guangzhou). At the same time, the company wanted to extend the network to the British colonies abutting China in the south and west—Burma and India. Moreover, the company also had a long-term plan to link Asia all the way to Europe and UK, building a railway-connected global empire. This somehow reminds us of China’s belt and road initiative today, aiming to promote the connectivity of all countries concerned.

  • Product Overview: China and the Modern World: Imperial China and the West Part I, 1815–1881

    British Foreign Office correspondence from China on commercial, political, diplomatic, military and legal matters in nineteenth century Anglo-Chinese relations.

     

    MPK_1_37_0029In this, the first of two parts of British Foreign Office correspondence from China, scholars will find material relating to the internal politics of China and Britain, their relationship, and the relationships between other Western powers keen to benefit from the growing trading ports of the Far East. 

    From Lord Amherst’s mission at the start of the nineteenth century, through the trading monopoly of the Canton System, and the Opium Wars of 1839-42 and 1856-60, Britain and other foreign powers gradually gained commercial, legal and territorial rights in China. These files provide correspondence from the Factories of Canton (modern Guangzhou) and from the missionaries and interpreters who entered China in the early nineteenth century, as well as from the later Consulates and Legation and from the envoys and missions sent to China from Britain.

    After 1842 when the Treaty of Nanking was signed, the precedence of Canton declined as the treaty ports of Shanghai, Ningpo (Ningbo), Foochow (Fuzhou) and Amoy (Xiamen) were established. These were later joined by more trading posts, with British merchants and Consuls established at Swatow (Shantou), Chefoo (Yantai), Formosa (Taiwan) and more.

    As well as matters of trade and commerce, the correspondence in this archive covers local uprisings including anti-foreign riots and the Tientsin Massacre of 1870, piracy, judicial and legal matters, and the activities of Russia, the US, France and other Western powers in the region. It also covers British interests and ambition in Japan, Thailand, Burma (Myanmar), Malaya (Malaysia) and Korea (particularly Seoul).

    These hand-written documents have been opened up to scholars with the use of Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technology, as well as item-level information drawn from the Foreign Office Indexes in series FO 605.

     

    SUBJECTS COVERED

    • Asian Studies
    • Chinese Studies
    • Colonialism
    • History
    • Political Science & Diplomatic Studies

     

    ADVISORS:

    STEPHEN R. PLATT, Professor of History, University of Massachusetts at Amherst

    DAVID FAURE, Professor of History and Director of Center for China Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong

    EIICHI MOTONO, Professor of Economic History, Waseda University

    EI MURAKAMI, Associate Professor of Economic History, Kyoto University

    HANS VAN DE VEN, Professor of Modern Chinese History, Cambridge University

    HUANG KO-WU, Distinguished Research Professor, Institute of Modern History, Academic Sinica, Republic of China (Taiwan)

    ISABELLA JACKSON, Assistant Professor in Chinese History, Trinity College Dublin

COMING SOON

  • Essay: L’Enfer at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Marie Françoise Quignard)

    This essay has been translated from the original French  |  DOWNLOAD ENGLISH VERSION HERE

    The choice of the term Enfer (‘Hell’) to refer to a part of a library’s collection is not insignificant. To begin with, it was used in 1652 at the Feuillants Convent in Paris, to set aside heterodox books, i.e. those not following Roman Catholicism.

    At the French royal library, the Enfer classification was accorded in the late 1830s to books considered “contrary to public morality”. Their relegation to this classification, which is everything it sounds like, was not a decision made by the political movers and shakers of the time, i.e. the July Monarchy, but was down to the institution, at a time when the library was opening to a wider audience.

    Unlike the Private Case at the British Library, Enfer is not a closed collection. It continues to grow, even if only now with the addition of a limited selection of erotic and pornographic publications, other classifications having taken over. In 2020, there were around 2000 volumes in the Enfer collection.

     

    Before Enfer

    In 1750, in the second volume of the Catalogue of books printed by the Bibliothèque du Roy (King’s Library), consisting solely of literary works, a small area was given over to licentious tomes at the end of the novels section. There were 34 of them. One-third were taken from the library of the bibliophile and collector Jean-Pierre Imbert Châtre de Cangé (1680-1746), acquired in full by the royal library in 1733. The volumes included a copy of the Histoire du prince Apprius… (Enfer 233), a satire against the Regent that could be read either as a perfectly innocuous novel about love affairs and war or as an extremely immoral text, from the point where the obscene equivalents of the characters’ names are revealed. Published in 1728, it symbolised the archetype of the licentious novel that, to thwart the censors, did not include the names of the author or printer and gave a fictitious place of publication.

    Later, the French Revolution provided an opportunity for the Bibliothèque to significantly increase its collections as a result of confiscations from the libraries of the clergy, émigrés and those who fell victim to the guillotine, brought together in book depositories from 1790, access to which was given to the Bibliothèque Nationale.

    The confiscated books included a copy of Boccaccio’s Decameron (Enfer 249), there because of its 12 licentious drawings, along with 116 others. The copies without these 12 engravings were not stigmatised the same way, as the text was not deemed sufficiently incendiary.

    In 1836, the rare and precious books put aside from 1795 by Joseph Van Praet, curator of the Department of Prints, were all put together in the same place, joined by more licentious works. From 1844, the reference “Enfer” appeared in the margin of this section, added to the original classification. One hundred and fifty books were included.

     

    What Enfer was like

    At that point, Enfer at the Réserve of the Prints department became the Prints collection classification where obscene works were kept, those reproached by morality. Unlike in other libraries, none of the Bibliothèque Nationale’s works were considered reprehensible for solely political or religious reasons. These were mostly imaginative books, more specifically novels where sex plays a major role, which were therefore forbidden, prosecuted and proscribed.

    Enfer is a relatively heterogeneous collection. Ancient and rare publications considered classics of erotic literature throughout the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries can be found alongside reprints and pamphlets of lesser interest. The Bibliothèque’s earliest books, acquired before Enfer was established, date back to the 16th and 17th centuries: copies of Ragionamenti de l’Arétin, made up of famous conversations between a former courtesan and her female friend, one of which displays the coat of arms of king Louis XIV (Enfer 221); La Cazzaria de lo Arsiccio Intronato, published around 1530 by Antonio Vignali, under the nom de plume Arsiccio Intronato, a priapic dialogue in a comic fashion, between the author and a young law student, urging him to examine everything in the name of philosophy, even the most filthy subjects (Enfer 566); Alcibiade fanciullo a Scola (1652), attributed either to the satirist Ferrante Pallavicino or to the theologian and philosopher Antonio Rocco: a dialogue between Alcibiades and his teacher, where the latter argues any way he can to justify pederasty and convince his pupil of his reasoning (Enfer 469). The characteristics of these works are the form of the dialogue and a lack of illustrations, as the language used is explicit enough.

    In France, as of the first three decades of the 18th century, erotic literature became a genre of its own and Enfer filled up with these libertine novels, which also came to be known as “philosophical books”. Among the classics that were continuously reprinted until the 20th century were the Histoire de Dom Bougre, portier des Chartreux (1741), La Tourière des carmélites (between 1741 and 1750) and Thérèse philosophe (1748). These works, passed on by the materialist philosophy of the time, were only intended for one purpose: to celebrate desire and enjoyment by presenting circles officially devoted to public morality, such as convents, boarding schools, and palaces, to bring them closer to places of debauchery like brothels. What they have in common with their predecessors is their small size so they could easily be concealed, slipped “under the coat” (“sous le manteau”) and published anonymously. In terms of the place of publication, it was either fake: London instead of Paris (Félicia ou mes fredaines, Enfer 446-449); far-fetched:

    Everywhere and nowhere (La Nuit merveilleuse, Enfer 722), or obscene, like the contents of the book: “À j’enconne, rue des Déchargeurs, aux dépens de la Gourdan” (Mémoires de Suzon, Enfer 705). In the 18th century, illustrations made an appearance and joined forces with the text. Inspired by the iconographic tradition of the Italian Renaissance, such as the continuation of Amours des dieux, they moved further and further away to comment on the events in the story. For example, the engravings accompanying Dom B…, portier des Chartreux (Enfer 326) and those in Thérèse philosophe (Enfer 402).

    In the 19th century, illegal booksellers, who most commonly settled in Belgium, specialised in the reprinting of erotic texts from the 17th and 18th centuries while also publishing more modern texts. Auguste Poulet-Malassis, convicted for publishing Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal in Paris in 1857, six of the poems in which were deemed “pornographic” and given his interest in reprinting libertine texts, went into exile in Brussels in 1862. Among the texts he published clandestinely were Serrefesse: tragédie-parodie by Louis Pine-à-l’envers… with a filthy frontispiece, drawn and engraved by S.P.Q.R. (Enfer 486). The text was written by Louis Protat, a member of the Bar at the Court of Appeal of Paris, accompanied by engravings by Félicien Rops, a prodigious producer of erotic works.

    In the 20th century, authors as disparate in their worlds and in the individuality of their style as Guillaume Apollinaire, Pierre Louÿs, Georges Bataille, Jean Genet and others added their secret works to Enfer.

     

    How Enfer developed

    During the Second Empire, Prince Louis-Napoléon restored the regime of press censorship as under Napoleon I and Enfer grew considerably. Jules Taschereau, the Director of the Bibliothèque from 1858 to 1870, scrupulously ensured that the prints and engravings seized by Customs, as well as the books and brochures discarded by the Post Office management, were regularly sent to his institution, not destroyed as may have been usual. 330 seized volumes were added to Enfer in 1865 and 1866. One of these became the talk of the town, having been taken in 1866 from the home of Alfred Bégis, trustee of bankruptcies from 1861 to 1882, but also a lawyer, historian and collector of manuscripts by the Marquis de Sade. He considered this seizure a veritable robbery and undertook a lengthy but failed lawsuit against the Bibliothèque for his property to be returned. Over 160 books and 23 engravings became part of the Bibliothèque’s collections this way. To name but a few: several editions of L’Académie des dames and La Fille de joye, 18th century editions of Dom Bougre, Thérèse philosophe, Félicia ou Mes fredaines (Enfer 446-449); the 1864 edition of Gamiani, a classic of erotic literature attributed to Alfred de Musset and published by Poulet-Malassis. This seizure was also responsible for the addition of the Marquis de Sade’s works to the Bibliothèque Nationale, including the 1795 edition of La Philosophie dans le boudoir (Enfer 535-536). Since then, Sade has become the author with the most works on these shelves.

    It has also been added to by the acquisition of entire libraries, some of the works of which were added to Enfer: the library of the bibliographer Adrien-Jean-Quentin Beuchot in 1851, who specialised in books by and inspired by Voltaire; Count Henri de La Bédoyère’s in 1864, made up almost exclusively of plays on the French Revolution, the Empire and the Restoration. For example, the lampoon Fureurs utérines de Marie-Antoinette, femme de Louis XVI, Au Manège et dans tous les bordels de Paris, 1791 (Enfer 653).

    In the late 19th century, the Bibliothèque began to acquire erotic books from booksellers. Until then, in most cases, Enfer was added to gradually by seizures and donations. In a request to booksellers, the Bibliothèque noted its interest in this collection that had been relatively poorly received compared to other works held in the Réserve des livres rares. Adolphe Labitte, a specialist in publications from French- speaking countries and a bookseller approved by the Bibliothèque provided them around 50 titles from Belgian publishers such as Jules Gay, Henry Kistemaekers and Auguste Poulet-Malassis. Notable examples include an 1882 edition of the Exercices de dévotion de M. Henri Roch avec Mme la duchesse de Condor, par feu l’abbé de Voisenon…, published by Gay and Doucet (Enfer 74), to complement the 1864 edition published by Poulet-Malassis, already included in Enfer. Apart from purchases here and there, other major additions include around 100 volumes in 1944 from the Giraud-Badin bookshop, one of which was Le théâtre érotique de la rue de la Santé…, illustrated by Félicien Rops (Enfer 1312).

    Prior to 1960, the Bibliothèque rarely acquired erotica at auction. Perhaps some kind of decency prevented them from doing so. Even so, in 1949 it took a first edition of Pybrac by Pierre Louÿs, published in 1927 by René Bonnel. It was not until the 1980s that this practice became commonplace.

    Donations or bequests were rare in the 19th century. Worth a mention are the actions of Louis Hubaud, a Marseille collector, who bequeathed in 1866 his works that were considered obscene, in his words to save them from destruction in case they fell into the hands of the prudish. These included the Recueil de pieces choisies rassemblées par les soins du cosmopolite, À Anconne, chez Uriel Bandant, à l’enseigne de la liberté, 1735 (Enfer 924). It should be noted however that most donors preferred to remain anonymous.

    Maurice Audéoud (1864-1907), a great art lover, bequeathed his library to the Bibliothèque nationale in 1909. 650 of his rare books were added to the Réserve collection and kept as the Z. Audéoud reserve. However, given their subject matter, 18 tomes were removed from this classification to be placed in Enfer. In the 1910s, authors such as Fernand Fleuret, Pascal Pia and Maurice Heine were regular donors, not only of their own works. A special mention must go to Auguste Lesouëf, a scholar and bibliophile (1829-1906). His considerable library, consisting of almost 30,000 books and over 18,000 drawings, was bequeathed by his nieces in 1913. It included a small Enfer of 34 volumes, kept on the sidelines of its ‘historical’ counterpart. One example is La Messaline française, 1789 (Smith-Lesouëf E. 33).

    Between 1877 and 1909, legal deposit became a significant source of additions, increasingly serving as a replacement for seizures. Purporting them to be scholarly, the publisher Isidore Liseux did not hesitate to openly publish, if in limited numbers, most of the major classic erotic texts, such as Les Kama Sutra de Vatsyayana, 1885 (Enfer 101).

    In 1947, the young publisher Jean-Jacques Pauvert started publishing all the works of the Marquis de Sade, not confidentially as before but to the general public, despite prosecutions against him and the proceedings that followed. These publicly published books joined the legal deposit collections on release and remained in Enfer until 1955. Examples: Histoire de Juliette in 1948; La Nouvelle Justine ou les Malheurs de la vertu in 1953, La Philosophie dans le boudoir and Les Infortunes de la vertu in 1954. Justine ou les Malheurs de la vertu received a preface by Georges Bataille in 1955. As an exception, in 1953 Les 120 Journées de Sodome ou l’École du libertinage was limited to 475 copies for subscribers only. The same went for texts by Georges Bataille and in 1954 for Histoire d’O by Pauline Réage. This novel, which became famous all over the world, was a response to men’s sadistic fantasies. Anne Desclos (pseudonyms Dominique Aury and Pauline Réage), the Secretary-General of the literary magazine La Nouvelle Revue Française, edited by Jean Paulhan, only publicly admitted she was its author in 1994, at the age of 86.

     

    The handling of Enfer

    In 1876, thanks to Léopold Delisle, alphabetical classification of all printed books replaced classification by topic. The Enfer holdings were then reclassified by author in alphabetical order, followed by anonymous works, taking format into account.

    Before this reclassification had been completed, books that came in after 1876 were entered first as they arrived and were given the lowest numbers, 1 to 199 for smaller formats, higher for larger books. Entry in order of arrival resumed after the inclusion of books that came in before 1876. There were 620 of these (597 in octavo, 6 in folio and 17 in quarto), almost half of which came from seizures. This rather complex classification confused many, including Pascal Pia, the author of 1978’s Les Livres de l’Enfer, stating that the first book in the collection and the one that marked its establishment was Les Ruses, supercheries, artifices et machinations des filles publiques pour tromper leurs amants (1871).

    The first open mentions of this collection were made by Guillaume Apollinaire, Fernand Fleuret and Louis Perceau, who published L’Enfer de la Bibliothèque Nationale, Editions du Mercure de France in 1913, undoubtedly with help from some of the institution’s staff. This publication could not be controlled by the Bibliothèque in any way. When it was released, they attempted to play it down, merely stating they had nothing to do with its publication. A handwritten catalogue of Enfer was compiled by William Viennot in the late 1880s. The first printed catalogue of the collection was published by Apollinaire, Fleuret and Perceau. It consisted of 825 numbers, the last of which was an excellent pastiche of a 17th century text by Fernand Fleuret. On top of these 825 numbers were another 6 reserved for large formats (901 to 906) and the 31 for medium formats (910 to 930), a total of 862. Between the release of the catalogue and the closure of Enfer in 1969, another 957 numbers were added. When looking through the list of the books in Enfer, it is impossible not to note a somewhat arbitrary nature in the classification of multi-volume editions. Either each volume or book in an edition is classified separately, which applies to almost all books that came in before 1876 (Enfer 200 to 797), or the entire edition is held together, followed by sub- classifications. Of course, there is therefore a discrepancy between the numbering, the number of volumes and the number of editions (complete and sometimes incomplete), especially as several copies of some books are included.

     

    Its communications

    Essentially, very few notifications were to be made about these books. Until 1977, it was necessary to apply with a very good reason to the Director-General, who would submit these applications to an advisory committee of curators. Permission was in fact granted more and more often, as long as a scientific interest was shown. Since then, a written application to the Head Curator at the Department of Prints has no longer been required and notifications on these works have been made according to the same rules as the other books in the Rare books collections (Réserve des livres rares).

     

    Books about flagellation: an appendix to Enfer

    These volumes were somewhat in fashion between 1880 and 1930. Certain publishers specialised in this branch of erotica, where the instrument of pleasure was a whip. One example is Charles Carrington’s Les Flagellants et les flagellés de Paris, 1902 (Reserve p. Y². 1000 [211]). Put on public sale with most coming in by legal deposit, these books were not strictly differentiated from other novels kept in the Réserve des livres rares. However, from the 1900s, they were given certain special classifications, including Reserve p. Y². 1000 followed by sub-classifications (1 to 368) in 1934. This classification was closed in 1960 and replaced in the Department of Prints (now the Department of Literature and Art) by classification 8° Y². 90000, which consisted of 2302 numbers when it was closed in 1996. From 1971, classification 4° Y². 10000 was established, which held 133 numbers until its closure in 1991.

     

    The closure of Enfer

    In September 1969, a note from the Directorate of the Bibliothèque stated that Enfer was due to close. The explanation was that public morality had changed and the anger that could have been aroused by this classification as a result of the “Apollinaire” exhibition held by the Bibliothèque Nationale in late 1969. The Réserve des livres rares then used this to remove from Enfer around 15 books authored, prefaced, or published as erotica by Guillaume Apollinaire, giving them a more respectable classification. The same happened to Verlaine and his erotic works, acquired at the time by the collection, which were classified elsewhere. However, licentious or pornographic works, considered as “low pornography” were classified under 8° Y². 90000 and 4. Y². 10000. Around 40 books initially classified in Enfer in the 1960s joined these two classifications.

    At that time, the biggest donor of erotic books was Paul Caron, who gave around 1000 books between 1968 and his death in 1985. The 340 books listed in the 1969 register of donations would wait several years to be processed. Lacking male staff, this task was assigned for the first time to a young woman, a librarian in the Office of Donations, simply because she was married and a mother. Most of these books were classified under 8° Y². 90000, including Passions de jeunes miss by Tap Tap, 1907 (8° Y². 90000 [1156]) or under 4° Y². 10000, such as Les Confessions de Miss Coote by Jean de Villiot, 1906 (4° Y². 10000 [43]). Some very rare volumes were kept in the Réserve des livres rares under the bookshelves used for novels and plays, or as a replacement for copies that had disappeared from Enfer.

     

    The reopening

    In 1983, a decision was made to reopen Enfer, at the request of researchers and librarians, not for the sake of morality but for practical reasons. Since then, only old editions received by

    donation or acquisition that had been proscribed or prosecuted in their time have been classified in Enfer. One example is an edition of Aline et Valcour, ou le Roman philosophique… by the Marquis de Sade, Paris, Veuve Girouard, 1795 (Enfer 2578 [1-4]), acquired at auction in 2008.

    From its reopening in 1983 until 2020, Enfer grew by 182 works, 100 of which have been acquired. More so than older texts, various editions of 20th- and 21st-century artists’ books from France and abroad have been classified there. For example, Le Grand ordinaire by André Thirion, surrealist compositions by Oscar Dominguez, 1934 [1943] (Enfer 2540), bought from a bookshop in 2000.

    In 2011, 18 books published between 1972 and 1982, previously classified under 8° Y². 90000, came into Enfer, not for their intrinsic qualities but due to the addition of a dust cover illustrated by the US artist Richard Prince. He produced these illustrations for his exhibition at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in 2011. At that time, the Réserve des livres rares decided to add to Enfer various publications from the New York counterculture of the 1960s.

    Since then, Enfer has become purposefully selective. It has lost its “hellish” aspect, shifting instead to the building of a rare book collection. The singular fact that a book is considered immoral, licentious, or obscene is no longer enough of a criterion for it to be sent to Enfer. It must be distinguished by its individuality and rarity, the same way as all volumes kept in the Réserve des livres rares.

     

    About the Author

    Marie-Françoise Quignard is Honorary Curator at the Réserve des livres rares, Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

    In 2001, she edited Revue de la Bibliothèque Nationale de France no. 7, (Érotisme et pornographie); in 2007/2008, she was co-curator with Raymond Josué Seckel of the L’Enfer de la Bibliothèque, Éros au secret exhibition; in 2007 she co- authored the catalogue with Raymond Josué Seckel and its new revised and supplemented edition in 2019.

    She has curated exhibitions on Antoni Tàpies (2001) and Pierre Alechinsky (2005).

    She was Co-curator of the 18th-century section of the 1000 m2 de deseo, arcquitectura y sexualidad exhibition, CCCB, Barcelona, 2016-2017.

    CITATION

    Quignard, Marie-Francoise: “L’Enfer at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.” Archives of Sexuality and Gender: L’Enfer at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Cengage Learning (EMEA) Ltd, 2021.

    © Cengage Learning 2021

Various source media, Archives of Sexuality and Gender

Archives of Sexuality and Gender, Part V: L’Enfer at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France

  • Product Overview: Archives of Sexuality and Gender: L’Enfer de la Bibliothèque nationale de France

    Archives of Sexuality and Gender l'Enfer Banner Image

    The fifth part of Gale’s Archives of Sexuality and Gender series, L’Enfer de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, provides access to one of the most storied and sought-after private case collections in the world. The name alone invokes visions of damnation and moral ruin. L’Enfer (which translates as “Hell” or “Inferno”) refers to the shelf mark given to the collection which was created in the 1830s to protect and isolate works that were considered contrary to the morals of the time. As with other private cases, the entire collection was kept in a locked section of the library because of the erotic or pornographic character of the works, as well as their rarity and value. 

    While the content in the collection was withheld from many readers in the past, the creation of this private case is to society’s benefit today, as it meant the content, dating from the 1530s to 2010s, was safeguarded for posterity. Today, L’Enfer is one of the most famous Private Case collections in the world.

     

    COLLECTION CONTENTS

    L’Enfer is made up of more than 2,400 printed works. Around 950 additional items come from an appendix to l’Enfer called Flagellation. Between the 1880s and the 1930s, an editorial subgenre flourished in France: the novel de flagellation, a specialised branch of erotic literature. In this context, "passionate flogging" is a sexual perversion consisting of experiencing an erotic pleasure to be whipped. The Flagellation collection in this archive consists of literary works on spanking, caning, and whipping.

     

    LANGUAGES

    Documents will mainly be in French, with some titles in English, German, Spanish, and a smattering of other languages.

     

    VALUE OF THE ARCHIVE

    As one of the premier private case collections in the world, l’Enfer is much sought after. In an article about an exhibition of l’Enfer at the BnF, Elaine Sciolino of the New York Times wrote the following about the significance of these items:

    “The handwritten manuscript of the Marquis de Sade’s novel “Les Infortunes de la Vertu” (“The Misfortunes of Virtue”) is under glass here, as are seventeenth-century French engravings of “erotic postures”; English “flagellation novels” exported to France in the late nineteenth century; Japanese prints; Man Ray photographs; and a police report from 1900 that compiles the addresses of Paris’s houses of prostitution and what they charged. Sadism, masochism, bestiality, inflated genitalia and the most imaginative sexual fantasies and athletic poses are given their due.”

    The ability to digitally cross-search and compare l’Enfer with the British Library’s Private Case (the third part of Gale’s Archives of Sexuality and Gender series) will be of significant benefit to researchers. Both private cases are extremely important to this research area, expanding our understanding of sexual history, developing views on sexuality, the policing of sexuality and the nature of titillation throughout history.

Various source media, Political Extremism and Radicalism: Far-Right Groups in America

Political Extremism and Radicalism: Far-Right Groups in America

  • Essay: The Trump Presidency and the Mainstreaming of Far-Right Politics

    Many breathed a sigh of relief on 20 January 2021, when Joe Biden officially became President of the United States, after a tumultuous few weeks between his election and inauguration. While the campaign was more subdued than had been anticipated, the #StopTheSteal movement, culminating in the storming of the Capitol on 6 January, demonstrated clearly that the threat of far-right insurrection was serious. On the whole, the alt-right’s trollish activities of 2016 seemed to be replaced by right-wing conspiratorial protests.

    Of course, it would be a mistake to think that Biden’s victory marks a return to ‘normal’ or even to what politics used to be before the 2016 earthquake. The election of a candidate like Donald Trump was not an unforeseen event – as we explore further – and his loss does not mean that those trends have fully receded; his support base remains considerable and his policy and political impact will take a real effort to dismantle. Addressing Trump’s legacy would only begin to address the issues of systemic racism the US has started grappling with in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests.

    In this context, Trump’s chaotic exit and the Capitol insurrection may act as a diversion away from the real roots of the problem. The illiberal, even fascist turn of events in January 2021 allowed many Republicans and public actors who had supported Trump’s appeal to the far right to distance themselves. Instead of addressing the deep roots of reaction within and around the Trump project, some Republicans were able to pretend the insurrectionists were extremists and outcasts: a happenstance and an extraordinary parenthesis outside of normality and with no links to the constant emboldening from mainstream Republican figures.

    Furthermore, Biden’s victory, whilst decisive both in terms of popular and electoral college vote, should not obscure the very clear and simple fact that after four years of Trump presidency, countless scandals and the centring of white supremacist discourse, the outgoing President increased his share of the popular vote by over eleven million. Of course, this pales in comparison to Biden’s tally, which topped Hillary Clinton’s 3-million popular vote lead by an extra 15 million. Yet despite borrowing significantly and consistently from far and extreme-right discourse and ideas, Trump’s support did not waver. Quite the contrary.

    To illuminate this, we will focus first on the difference between the 2016 and 2020 campaigns with regard to far and extreme-right politics. We will then analyse the current state of the far and extreme right, building carefully on its origins and its role in the most recent campaign. Finally, we will discuss how Trump’s 2020 defeat has not marked the end of far-right politics in the US, but instead confirmed the radicalisation of the Republican vote and the further mainstreaming of far-right politics. What we argue is that Trump’s campaigns, presidency and ultimate defeat have acted as a vector to mainstream far-right politics in the US, through the constant shifting between illiberal and liberal articulations of racism and the blurring of boundaries between both.

     

    2016: the rise of Trump, the alt-right and the resurgence of old demons?

    As in many other countries, the extreme right in the US found itself pushed to the margins in the aftermath of the Second World War. However, this process was neither straightforward nor definitive. Not only did racism remain systemic, but the history of the Ku Klux Klan, for example, shows that the organisation remained close to the mainstream until the 1960s, when a combination of Civil Rights struggle and wider political development forced it into decline. At the time, ‘the destruction of the Klan in this way allowed it to become symbolic of the end of racism, akin to an exorcism of an evil within the nation, as identified in post-racial narratives’ (Mondon & Winter 2020, 26-27). From then on, the Klan took an even more extremist turn as did a number of other organisations and militias. However, the marginalisation of the extreme right did not mean the end of racism, and more coded discourse remained within mainstream politics, particularly under the Nixon, Reagan and Bush administrations. Racial discrimination was coded into laws, institutionalised and maintained through implicit and explicit government policies and discourses.

    The 5th era of far-right activity saw groups go ‘underground and offline’ (Winter, 2019), regarding the internet as free from government oversight or control. The far right’s online presence was mixed, with innovation [1] dependent on the national context: a number of sites took advantage of the affordance of the internet to spread propaganda, expand networks, and connect previously scattered individuals. The online presence of the far right evolved with the internet, moving from bulletin boards, to websites and forums, to the social media platforms that have since come to dominate. Winter has noted how key events, such as the election of Obama in 2008, gave an initial boost to the far right as it provided a clear rallying call. Social media and the internet more generally helped the diffusion of propaganda and manifestos, such as in the case of Anders Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist who murdered 77 people in a series of attacks in 2011, including 69 young left-wing activists on the island of Utøya. This was also witnessed after the terrorist attack in 2019 in Christchurch, New Zealand, when Australian Brenton Tarrant murdered 51 Muslims at a mosque. His manifesto, as well as images of the numerous symbols drawn on his weapons, quickly spread across the Internet and resonated across far-right communities.

    In this context, Trump’s candidacy and campaign in 2016 allowed for the different strands of far and extreme right to converge under one banner, as he was not only the candidate of the Grand Old Party, but also closely allied with the new kid on the far-right block: the alt-right. Trump also received support from traditional extreme-right movements and actors such as David Duke, a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and the Proud Boys.

    The alt-right, a term first used in 2008 by white nationalist Richard Spencer, was initially seen as a new branding for a neo-conservative, explicitly racial reaction to traditional conservatism. For the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), this ‘new’ movement represented ‘a set of far-right ideologies, groups and individuals whose core belief is that “white identity” is under attack by multicultural forces using “political correctness” and “social justice” to undermine white people and “their” civilization’. Denying the racism of the movement, ‘members’ claimed to ‘simply’ be engaging with identity politics, victimised by ‘reverse racism’, demands for equality and political correctness. The alt-right did not represent a true movement with cohesive goals, membership or purpose. Instead, it is understood to be an amalgamation of beliefs, revolving around support for explicit white supremacist, nationalist, and fascist politics. As such, it operates more like a spectrum than a movement or party, as suggested by the term alt-lite used to define ‘less’ extreme actors.

    In 2016, the alt-right gained prominence through media interest and active engagement with the Presidential Election. One of the key alt-right spaces, r/the_donald on Reddit, even hosted a Question-and-Answer session[2] with a number of campaign staff, including Donald Trump. It became a space that reflected the President himself: a rejection of any semblance of reasonable political discussion. Anonymous swarms of alt-right trolls would swamp hashtags and dominate platforms with their messaging, attempting to drown out dissenting opinions. It is worth noting here that r/the_donald, and other similar threads, have since been shut down in an effort to counter extremism on social media platforms and head off controversy in advance of the 2020 election – what was acceptable in the lead up to Trump’s election has since become beyond the pale. This has led to more overtly far-right platforms, such as Parler, gaining the attention Reddit received in 2016.

    In 2016, the alt-right was a jubilant cheerleader for Trump, a candidate considered for a number of months to be somewhat of a joke, attracting many who claimed to have joined the movement ironically or subversively. As the campaign progressed, the alt-right fuelled and was fuelled by a venomous discourse of toxic masculinity and racism, epitomised by their branding of opposition conservatives as ‘cuckservatives’. Legitimising the connection, Trump ultimately hired alt-right individuals such as Steve Bannon, then editor of Breitbart. As such, its actors gained prominence in the campaign and access to government during the Trump presidency; alt-right discourse became mainstreamed, if not altogether mainstream. For example, it became increasingly common to hear adversaries, no matter how moderate, denounced as traitors to the nation trying to institutionalise Socialism and open borders.

    As the events that took place in Charlottesville in August 2017 demonstrated, the far and extreme-right threat was not just an online phenomenon. As neo-Nazis and other extreme-right activists took to the streets, the murder of anti-fascist Heather Heyer made clear that threats of violence were not ironic banter. Trump’s reaction to these events blurred the boundaries between the extreme and far right and the mainstream further, as he refused to outright condemn the fascist event, instead declaring that ‘you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides’. The false equivalence between fascists and the mythologised and misunderstood ‘Antifa’ would become a cornerstone of Trump’s discourse.

     

    2020: the fall of Trump and the alt-right?

    The 2020 campaign was markedly different from 2016, with the alt-right holding a much-reduced profile. This can be laid at the feet of a number of factors. The pandemic significantly impacted  public rallies, which Trump used to such effect in his first campaign and throughout his presidency. Moreover, his two most potent arguments – that he would Drain The Swamp and Build The Wall – failed to materialise. In advance of the election, a number of online spaces were closed to the alt-right, with Reddit deplatforming the largest community, and a number of far-right figures receiving bans on Twitter and Facebook (often for Covid-19-related violations). Instead, the alt-right moved to alt-tech platforms, such as thedonald.win, Parler, and Gab. Whilst this generated numerous headlines, it did not recreate the virality of 2016. Instead, the QAnon conspiracy took centre stage, valorising Trump as a hero fighting against a shadowy cabal, but with far less coherent ideological content and clarity than the movements that had assisted his rise.

    The Covid-19 pandemic was a central feature of the election. On 30 April 2020, protesters spilled onto the streets during the invasion of the Michigan State Capitol building as part of an ‘American Patriot Rally’. Mirroring the Capitol insurrection, heavily-armed protestors demanded access to the chambers. Their white supremacist ties were rendered visible during the coup attempt, #StopTheSteal, initiated by a rally the President held minutes before and supported in a later tweet of ‘LIBERATE MICHIGAN’. A plot aiming to kidnap the Michigan governor was later foiled and again linked to the galaxy of extreme right movements emboldened by Trump’s discourse. In September, when asked to condemn white supremacist groups such as the Proud Boys, Trump merely asked them to ‘stand back and stand by’.

    It should not have come as a surprise that the insidious normalisation of far-right discourse and the intersection of white supremacy, the far and extreme right, and Trump, was again highlighted during the January insurrection, when Trump incited his supporters to march on the Capitol to save the election from being ‘stolen’. While this fascist coup attempt was shocking in and of itself, it was just as striking to witness the unwavering support many Republican politicians continued to lend Trump despite the gravity of the situation. His legacy was therefore not limited to a resurgent and emboldened extreme right, but to the hold he appears to retain on the Republican party and its electorate.

    It would thus be a mistake to think of Trump’s 2016 election as a rupture and his 2020 defeat as a simple fix, since his 2016 victory was the result of a longer process of ‘radicalisation of the Republican electorate, with racism being increasingly normalised in American politics’ (Mondon & Winter 2019). While Trump’s electorate may have differed from John McCain’s and Mitt Romney’s, it was very similar to George W. Bush’s in 2004. Both appealed more to the working class than McCain and Romney, but the bulk of their vote remained with the wealthy, trends which appear to have accentuated in 2020:

     

    ‘Trump managed to appeal to a similar electorate than that which has underpinned the resurgence of the far right in Europe. This particular electorate feels insecure about its future, even though it remains in a relatively privileged position and is more interested about issues such as immigration and terrorism, than about the economy. Therefore, rather than a radical shift of the working class towards Trump, what we have witnessed is the development of a typical far right electorate by European standards. (Mondon & Winter 2020)’

     

    In the context of the radicalisation of both the discourse of the Republicans and their electorate, it is telling to see that almost two thirds of House Republicans supported the lawsuit that sought to overturn the election – support increased by 20 even after the case had been rejected by the Supreme Court on 11 December. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley acted as standard bearers of the conspiracy, defending Trump despite the latter’s attacks on Cruz in 2016. It was also striking to witness the rehabilitation of some Republicans who had previously been considered extreme themselves: in the face of Trump’s shameless extremism, even Mitt Romney and George W. Bush began to appear as the voice of moderation and reason, despite their legacy paving the way for the current context.

    This right-wing radicalisation of political discourse in the US was also witnessed in the way Joe Biden was successfully portrayed as a Socialist during the campaign. While the Biden-Harris ticket has been praised for its moderation in comparison to other more radical alternatives on the Democratic side, such as Bernie Sanders, it was telling that this did not change the narrative; that no matter how hard the Democrats tried, their distance from Trump meant they were simply too far to the left.

     

    Conclusion

    To conclude, it would be simplistic and dangerous to imagine that Biden’s arrival in the White House means a return to ‘normality’, as if the Trump presidency were only a parenthesis or some freak event in an otherwise reasonable polity. The democratic institutions remained strong, but the election highlighted attempts made to undermine them, not just by extreme-right outsiders, but by or through the support of members of the polity themselves. On the more extreme side of politics, the President’s flirting with the alt, far and extreme right and the legitimisation of many of their talking points has had a real impact on normalising much of their discourse. While threats and the reality of extreme-right violence have been growing for a long time now, these have become far more common and brazen. For example, few were surprised at the blockades of Trump supporters during the campaign. The growth and emboldening of a more organised proto-fascist constituency best represented today by the Proud Boys is also all too real, as exemplified by the demonstration that took place in Washington DC on 12 December.

    In his inauguration speech, Biden repeatedly called for unity and to ‘treat each other with dignity and respect’. However, there is a real risk such appeasement downplays the risks present in a political environment where far and extreme-right movements can receive support from the President. By proceeding through the 2016 and 2020 campaigns, this article has underlined how the evolving role of the alt, far and extreme right reflects the broader normalisation of far-right discourse. No longer the outrageous cheerleaders of 2016, 2020 saw the far-right discourse lose its shock factor, in the process migrating the Republicans further to the right. This migration is perhaps best highlighted by Trump’s own words to the insurrectionists: ‘We love you’, in defiance of the outrage.

     

    ENDNOTES

    [1] In this article, we borrow our terminology from Mondon and Winter (2020) and use far right to describe movements and parties that espouse a racist ideology, but do so in an indirect, coded and often covert manner, by focusing notably on culture and/or occupying the space between illiberal and liberal racisms, between the extreme and the mainstream. We use extreme right for movements and activists who express ‘illiberal’ articulations of racism and engage in violence, whether verbal or physical. Alt-right is used to describe the highly digital movement originating in the US, itself part of the extreme right.

    [2] See https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/27/donald-trump-reddit-ama

    CITATION

    Aurelien Mondon And Antonia Vaughan, ‘White Supremacist Extremism and the Far Right in the U.S.’, Political Extremism and Radicalism: Far-Right Groups in America, Cengage Learning (EMEA) Ltd, 2021.

    BIBLIOGRAPHY

    Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2012).

    Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without racists: Color-blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006).

    Pablo J. Boczkowski and Zizi Papacharissi (eds), Trump and the Media (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2018).  

    George Hawley, The Alt-Right: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

    Aurelien Mondon and Aaron Winter, Reactionary Democracy: How Racism and the Populist Far Right Became Mainstream (London: Verso, 2020).

    David Neiwert, Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in The Age of Trump (London: Verso, 2017).

    Southern Poverty Law Center. ‘Alt-Right’ https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist- files/ideology/alt-right

    Mike Wendling, Alt-Right: From 4chan to the White House (London: Pluto Press, 2018).

    Aaron Winter, ‘Online Hate: From the Far-Right to the ‘Alt-Right’, and from the Margins to the Mainstream’ in Online Othering: Exploring violence and discrimination on the Web, eds. Karen Lumsden and Emily Harmer. (London: Palgrave, 2019).

     
  • Essay: White Supremacist Extremism and the Far Right in the U.S.

    Defining the Far Right

    The far right is best understood as a spectrum of groups and individuals who are often at odds with one another but hold in common some combination of four elements: exclusionary and dehumanizing beliefs, antigovernment and antidemocratic practices and ideals, existential threats and conspiracy theories, and apocalyptic fantasies.[1] Exclusionary and dehumanizing beliefs are at the core of far-right ideologies through ideas about superiority and inferiority according to race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, religion, or sexuality.[2] White supremacism in the United States has been the primary – although not the only – form of exclusionary ideology and is therefore especially key to understanding the American far right. But there is overlap across the spectrum of far-right groups with those whose primary focus is other issues, such as anti-government extremists, misogynistic groups, and Christian supremacy or nationalism. Far-right ideas are generally fundamentally opposed to the norms, values, and beliefs that underpin democratic practice across the globe, as evidenced through actions like promoting authoritarianism, threatening free and fair elections, challenging systems of checks and balances, or threatening the protection of individual freedom, the rule of law, or freedoms of the press, religion, speech, and assembly.[3] Far-right ideologies, individuals, and groups espouse beliefs that are antidemocratic, antiegalitarian, white supremacist, and are embedded in solutions like authoritarianism, ethnic cleansing or ethnic migration, and the establishment of separate ethno-states or enclaves along racial and ethnic lines.

    For far-right extremists, exclusionary beliefs are more than prejudicial attitudes toward an out-group. They are tied to the idea of an existential threat to the dominant group and then linked to emotional appeals to protect, defend, and take heroic action to restore sacred national space, territory, and homelands. The existential threat is often voiced in terms of a broader and orchestrated conspiracy theory, such as the ‘great replacement’, which is currently the leading far-right conspiracy theory of demographic change globally. The ‘great replacement’ argues that there is an intentional, global plan orchestrated by national and global elites – and led by Muslims or Jews – to replace white, Christian, or European populations with nonwhite, non-Christian ones.[4] In the U.S., the ‘great replacement’ conspiracy builds on the concept of ‘white genocide’ popularized by the American neo-Nazi David Lane, who argued that white populations face an existential threat because they are dying out demographically due to immigration, abortion, and violence against whites.[5]

    At the most-extreme fringe, far-right extremists not only believe that an existential threat exists, but also that an inevitable violent apocalypse is on its way, which will be followed by a period of restoration and re-birth for white civilization. These apocalyptic fantasies motivate violent action from a fringe part of extremists called ‘accelerationists’, who believe that the best and fastest way to reach the desired phase of restorative rebirth is to hurry up the path to the apocalypse by increasing polarization, chaos, and societal fighting as a way of undermining overall social stability.[6] Accelerationism is not unique to the far right, but violent far-right extremists’ adoption of it as a strategy is relatively recent, and reflects a major shift from the realm of apocalyptic fantasies into direct action, through a celebration of violence that will bring about an end-times collapse and subsequent restoration of a new white civilization.[7]

     

    History and Development of the Far Right in the U.S.

    White supremacism has been foundational in the United States, from the earliest arrival of Europeans and the eventual genocide of Native Americans to the reliance on institutionalized slavery to build the nation’s economy. An ideology based on racist ideas came together in the U.S. in the mid-1800s, initially oriented around the defense of slavery but eventually fixated on opposition to equality for African Americans.[8] The Ku Klux Klan (KKK), likely the best-known historical U.S. white supremacist extremist group, was founded at the end of slavery. The KKK was made up of violent vigilante groups who enacted a reign of brutal terror against freed Black people through the use of rape, lynching, torture and mutilation.[9] A resurgence of Klan activity in the 1920s led to the KKK having several million members across the U.S.[10] Uniquely American variations on white supremacy emerged over time, including Christian-identity groups who believe whites are God’s chosen people, white-supremacist prison gangs like the Aryan Brotherhood, and groups inspired by overseas ideologies, including neo-Nazis and racist skinheads.[11] Like the KKK, other far-right groups and ideas in the U.S. have often emerged in reaction to civil rights movements or progress toward racial equity.[12] In 2020, for example, some U.S. antigovernment extremist groups mobilized in reaction to Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests, harassing protesters in multiple cities and calling on ‘patriots’ to protect business owners’ property.[13]

    What we think of today as the modern white supremacist movement in the U.S. began in the 1970s, fueled in part by the return of disgruntled Vietnam veterans, who the white supremacist Louis Beam mobilized to participate in paramilitary training facilities and boot camps that were intended to create a white-separatist army to assume control of national and regional space and expel nonwhites, creating a white homeland.[14] These were typically separate camps in remote areas, which helped ensure they had relatively limited reach.[15] Later, the breadth and reach of far-right groups would expand dramatically as the internet facilitated engagement in ways no longer limited by geography.  

    After the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing by an anti-government extremist with white supremacist sympathies, the far right went underground in the U.S. for a few years. When the 9/11 attacks took place, the government and the public’s attention shifted to Islamist and international forms of extremism and terrorism, and white supremacist extremism and the far right received far less attention. Growth across the spectrum began in earnest after the first election of an African American U.S. President in 2008. In the years that followed that election, the country saw record-breaking numbers of hate groups emerge, as well as the founding of new militia groups and anti-government movements like the Oathkeepers and the three-percenters.[16] By the time Donald Trump was elected to the U.S. presidency in 2016 on a wave of populist nationalist and nativist rhetoric that was seen by many white supremacist extremists as a legitimation of their beliefs, the so-called ‘alt right’ and ‘alt lite’ was already emerging as the new face of the far right in the U.S., using youth culture to fuel the mainstreaming and growth of the far right and white supremacist extremist ideas.[17]

     

    Mainstreaming, Normalization, and Mobilization to Violence in the U.S. Far Right

    In the U.S., the most visible moment related to the mainstreaming of white supremacist extremism came in the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, where dozens of young men clad in pressed khakis and white polo shirts marched across the University of Virginia campus carrying flaming tiki torches and chanting ‘Jews will not replace us’. That rally made it clear to the American – and global – public that extremist ideas had seeped into everyday kinds of spaces and discourses in the U.S. Just over a year later, a Pennsylvania man allegedly killed eleven people in a Pittsburgh synagogue. Six months after that attack, 51 Muslim worshippers were killed in Christchurch, New Zealand by a white supremacist extremist, who livestreamed his attack and inspired copycat attacks in several places globally, including in El Paso, Texas, where 23 people died in a mass shooting targeting Latinos in a Walmart store. In the wake of these terrorist attacks, the U.S. government finally mobilized to take more significant action. Congress called multiple hearings in 2019 and 2020, where expert witnesses testified about a range of issues related to white supremacist extremism and terrorism. In October 2020, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued a threat assessment report declaring white supremacist extremists (WSEs) the ‘most persistent and lethal threat in the Homeland’, noting that 2019 was ‘the most lethal year for domestic violent extremism in the United States since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995’.[18]

    Within weeks of that report, however, millions of Americans would come to believe mass disinformation about a fraudulent election. Fueled by rapid growth in 2020 in QAnon conspiracy theories, anti-government militia movements, and the self-described ‘Western chauvinist’ Proud Boys, large numbers of American citizens began to mobilize in response to President Trump’s call to ‘Stop the Steal’. On January 6, 2021, as the U.S. Congress was gathering to certify the electoral college votes authenticating the election of Joe Biden, thousands of individuals comprising a toxic mix of militant far-right extremists and mobilized Trump voters stormed the U.S. Capitol in a violent insurrection, ultimately resulting in the deaths of five individuals that day, and two suicides of police officers in the days that followed.[19]

    At the time of this writing, the U.S. policy reaction to the U.S. Capitol attack is still emerging. Among other developments, revelations that a disproportionate percentage of veterans were among those arrested has helped bring renewed attention in the U.S. to the role of law enforcement, military, and veteran communities in far-right extremism. [20] This is not a new phenomenon, of course.[21] There have also been repeated examples of active armed forces or law enforcement engagement in the white supremacist fringe in the U.S. over the past several decades. In the 1990s, a white supremacist gang formed among soldiers stationed at Fort Bragg, and two members murdered a local Black couple.[22] A 2006 FBI bulletin described the ‘threat of white nationalists’ who might deliberately infiltrate the police, disrupt investigations, and try to recruit.[23] And of course, army veteran and white supremacist Timothy McVeigh was responsible for the worst domestic terrorism attack in U.S. history, taking the lives of 168 people in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.[24]

    But in the wake of the U.S. Capitol attack, calls for more data collection, accountability, and transparency from the U.S. Department of Defense and U.S. Department of Justice about the potential role of law enforcement and active-duty military in extremist groups began to gain steam. To protect the 2021 inauguration of President Joe Biden from potential ‘insider’ threats, the U.S. Department of Defense individually vetted all 25,000 National Guard troops assigned to secure the city and the inauguration ceremony, resulting in the removal of a dozen members of the National Guard – two for possible links to extremism.[25] In early February, the Pentagon announced plans for stand-downs, or pauses in regular activity, over a two-month period in order to address the issue of racism and extremism in the military.[26] The coming years in the U.S. are likely to bring new developments in these areas.

     

    The Current and Future Threat Landscape

    The fall 2020 U.S. Department of Homeland Security report declaring white supremacist extremism the most lethal and dangerous threat facing the nation was in many ways a turning point in the U.S. government’s acknowledgement of the problem of violent domestic extremism. The 2019 death numbers cited in that report had come on the heels of 50 deaths at the hands of domestic extremists in 2018, with the majority linked to white supremacy specifically, making 2018 the fourth-deadliest year since 1970 in terms of domestic extremist deaths.[27] The lethality of extremism dropped significantly in 2020, with only 17 domestic extremist murders – all but one linked to right-wing extremism and over half linked to white supremacist extremism (one death was attributed to a left-wing extremist, and five deaths were attributed to anti-government extremists). But even as deadly outcomes declined during the COVID-19 pandemic, extremists remained highly engaged in other ways. At least 16 far right terrorist plots or attacks were documented in 2020,[28] some of which received wide media attention, such as the kidnapping plot against the Michigan and Virginia governors. Hate crimes against Asian Americans also increased significantly during the pandemic, due to COVID-19 related hate directed at people of Asian descent, with a UN report documenting more than 1,800 hate incidents against Asian Americans in the U.S. just between March and May 2020.[29]

    The circulation of extremist propaganda and the numbers of hate groups also remain very high. White supremacist extremist propaganda nearly doubled in 2020, (from 2,724 incidents in 2019 to over 4,500 incidents).[30] Importantly, this type of propaganda is not limited to any single group. The hundreds of instances of far-right propaganda documented in 2018, for example came from at least ten separate national ‘alt-right’, white-supremacist, and neo-Nazi groups.[31] The numbers of hate groups in the U.S. remains at a historic high. These numbers had more than doubled to over 1,000 after the presidential election of Barack Obama before declining by 2014 to 784. Hate group numbers then rose to a record high of 1,020 in 2018 and remain historically high at 838 in 2020. White-nationalist groups alone increased by nearly 50 percent in 2018, from 100 to 148.[32]

    It is hard to predict what the future of far-right extremism looks like in the U.S. The January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol was a wake-up call for much of the public and the policymaking community about the impact of mass disinformation and the potential for large numbers of people to become radicalized and mobilize to violence. The Biden administration will certainly take on the issue of domestic violent extremism in ways that will be important to watch in the months and years to come.

    ENDNOTES

     

    [1] For a longer discussion of these categories, see Miller-Idriss 2020.

    [2] Smith 2011.

    [3] Mudde 2019, Plattner 2019.

    [4] See the thorough discussion of the Great Replacement theory, along with its precursors “white genocide” and “Eurabia,” in Davey and Ebner 2019

    [6] See ADL (Anti-Defamation League). “White Supremacists Embrace Acceleration.” ADL Blog, April 19, 2019. https://www.adl.org/blog/white-supremacists-embrace-accelerationism.

    [7] For an example, see the case of Atomwaffen in the U.S. in Ari Shapiro’s interview with Joanna Mendelsohn, National Public Radio, March 6, 2018, https://www.npr.org/transcripts/590292705; also see Ware, Siege, citing Hatewatch, “Atomwaffen and the SIEGE Parallax: How One Neo-Nazi’s Life’s Work Is Fueling a Younger Generation,” SPLC, February 22, 2018

    [8] Pitcavage 2019, p. 3.

    [9] See discussion of the first Ku Klux Klan in Blee 1991, esp. pp. 12-15

    [10] See Blee 1991 p. 17; McVeigh. 2009.

    [11] Pitcavage 2019, p. 3.

    [12] See Mudde, 2018, p. 7.

    [13] See “Opposing Nationwide Protests against Police Brutality.” The Year in Antigovernment Extremism Part 2. Southern Poverty Law Center, February 8, 2021. Available at: https://www.splcenter.org/news/2021/02/08/year-antigovernment-extremism-part-2

    [14] Belew 2018, 40.

    [15] Belew 2018, 33.

    [16] For more reading on this, see Jackson 2020.

    [17] See Pitcavage 2019 for a full discussion of these groups.

    [18] See Homeland Threat Assessment, October 2020. p. 18. Homeland Threat Assessment October 2020 (dhs.gov)

    [19] Caitlin, Emma and Sarah Ferris. “Second Police Officer died by suicide following Capitol attack.” Politico, January 27, 2021. Available at: Second police officer died by suicide following Capitol attack - POLITICO

    [20] Dreisbach, Tom and Meg Anderson. “Nearly 1 in 5 Defendants in Capitol Riot Cases Served in the Military.” NPR, January 21, 2021. Available at: Military Veterans Overrepresented In Those Charged In Jan. 6 Capitol Riot : NPR

    [21] Miller-Idriss, Cynthia. “When the Far Right Penetrates Law Enforcement.” Foreign Affairs.¸December 15, 2020. Available at: When the Far Right Penetrates Law Enforcement | Foreign Affairs

    [22] Jones, Christopher. “Does the American Military Have a Problem with Far-Right Extremism?” Pacific Standard, March 26, 2019. Available at: Does the American Military Have a Problem With Far-Right Extremism? - Pacific Standard (psmag.com)

    [23] See Downs, Kenya. “FBI warned of white supremacists in law enforcement 10 years ago. Has anything changed?” PBS News Hour. October 21, 2016. Available at: FBI warned of white supremacists in law enforcement 10 years ago. Has anything changed? | PBS NewsHour

    [24] Anti-Defamation League. “Twenty-five years later, Oklahoma City Bombing Inspires a New Generation of Extremists.” April 19, 2020. Available at: Twenty-five Years Later, Oklahoma City Bombing Inspires a New Generation of Extremists | Anti-Defamation League (adl.org)

    [26] Stewart, Phil and Ali Idrees. “Pentagon, stumped by extremism in ranks, orders stand-down in next 60 days.” Reuters. February 3, 2021, available at: Pentagon, stumped by extremism in ranks, orders stand-down in next 60 days | Reuters

    [27] See the Anti-Defamation League’s report, “Murder and Extremism in the U.S. in 2018.” Available at:  https://www.adl.org/murder-and-extremism-2018

    [28] ADL, “Murder and Extremism in the United States in 2020.” Also see See the ADL’s Oren Segal’s statement in Montanaro, Domenico: “Democratic Candidates Call Trump a White Supremacist, a Label Some Say is ‘Too Simple,’ ” NPR, August 15, 2019; also see “ADL: White Supremacist Propaganda Distribution Hit All-Time High in 2019,” ADL, February 12, 2020, https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/adl-white-supremacist-propaganda-distribution-hit-all-time-high-in-2019.

    [29] See the August 2020 report, “Mandates of the Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance; the Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants; and the Working Group on discrimination against women and girls.” Available at: DownLoadPublicCommunicationFile (ohchr.org).

    [31] Propaganda was linked in 2018 to Identity Evropa (which regrouped in 2019 as the American Identity Movement, AIM), Patriot Front, Loyal White Nights, Ku Klux Klan, Daily Stormer, Atomwaffen Division, National Alliance, National Socialist Legion, National Socialist Movement, and Vanguard America. See Selim, “Congressional Testimony.”

    [32] As cited in Brooks, Lecia. “Testimony of Lecia Brooks, Southern Poverty Law Center, Before the Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Committee on Oversight and Reform, United States House of Representatives.” Testimony at the hearing “Confronting White Supremacy (Part II): Adequacy of the Federal Response.” June 4, 2019. https://docs.house.gov/meetings/GO/GO02/20190604/109579/HHRG-116-GO02-Wstate-BrooksL-20190604.pdf, and documented in the SPLCs Intelligence Reports magazine. See especially Beirich, “Year in Hate” and the 2020 Year in Hate Report, available at The Year in Hate and Extremism 2020 | Southern Poverty Law Center (splcenter.org).

     

    CITATION

    Cynthia Miller-Idriss, ‘White Supremacist Extremism and the Far Right in the U.S.’, Political Extremism and Radicalism: Far-Right Groups in America, Cengage Learning (EMEA) Ltd, 2021.

    BIBLIOGRAPHY

    Belew, Kathleen. Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018.

    Berger, J. M. Extremism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018.

    Blee, Kathleen. Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. 

    Davey, Jacob and Julia Ebner. “The Great Replacement”: The Violent Consequences of Mainstreamed Extremism. London: Institute for Strategic Dialogue, 2019. https://www.isdglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/The-Great-Replacement-The-Violent-Consequences-of-Mainstreamed-Extremism-by-ISD.pdf.

    Jackson, Sam. Oathkeepers. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020.

    Rory McVeigh. The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan: Right-Wing Movements and National Politics. University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

    Michael, George. “David Lane and the Fourteen Words.” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 10, no. 1 (2009). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14690760903067986.

    Miller-Idriss, Cynthia. Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020.

    Mudde, Cas. The Far Right Today. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2019.

    Mudde, Cas. The Far Right in America. Routledge, 2018.

    Pitcavage, Mark. Surveying the Landscape of the American Far Right. George Washington University Program on Extremism, August 2019. https://extremism.gwu.edu/sites/g/files/zaxdzs2191/f/Surveying%20The%20Landscape%20of%20the%20American%20Far%20Right_0.pdf.

    Plattner, Marc F. “Illiberal Democracy and the Struggle on the Right.” Journal of Democracy 30, no. 1 (2019): 5–19.

    Smith, David Livingstone. Less than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others. New York: St. Martin’s, 2011.

    Ware, Jacob. Siege: The Atomwaffen Division and Rising Far-Right Terrorism in the United States. International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT) Policy Brief, July 2019. The Hague: ICCT, 2019.

  • Product Overview: Political Extremism and Radicalism: Far-Right Groups in America

    Political Extremsim Far Right in America Banner

     

    This archive explores the role and development of a variety of conservative political movements and groups by showcasing unique materials that examine right-wing ideology. Building on the successful platform created by Part I, this next installment gives researchers access to more essential materials that support the study of extreme political viewpoints throughout history. Sourced from eminent libraries, including the University of California, Santa Barbara; the University of California, Davis; the University of Iowa, Idaho State University; and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Far-Right Groups in America provides scholars with a better understanding of American conservative political movement from multiple angles.

     

    DATE RANGE:
    1850–2010

    DOCUMENT TYPES:
    monographs, manuscripts,  periodicals, pamphlets, and ephemera

    SOURCE LIBRARIES:
    University of California, Santa Barbara; University of California, Davis; University of Iowa; Idaho State University; and The Federal Bureau of Investigation

    SUBJECTS SUPPORTED:
    history, politics, American history, sociology, anthropology, social history, social sciences, and government

Various source media, Women’s Studies Archive: Rare Titles from the American Antiquarian Society, 1820-1922

Women’s Studies Archive: Rare Titles from the American Antiquarian Society, 1820-1922

  • Product Overview: Women’s Studies Archive: Rare Titles from the American Antiquarian Society, 1820-1922

    Various source media, Women's Studies Archive

    The third module in Gale’s Women’s Studies Archive series, Rare Titles from the American Antiquarian Society, 1820-1922, gives researchers unprecedented access to over one million pages of female-authored work across a diverse range of both fiction and non-fiction. Sourced from and curated by the American Antiquarian Society, the pre-eminent collector of pre-twentieth century Americana, this archive includes around 5,700 monographs published between 1820 and 1922 in the United States and authored by women.

    An official bibliography of female-authored texts published in the United States during this period does not exist. In its absence, this assembly of monographs, expertly curated by the American Antiquarian Society, serves this purpose for scholars.

    Composed of rare and unique titles and covering over a century of female writing, the collection will enable new scholarship into feminist perspectives and the discovery of female-authored works that have been previously overlooked. Providing users with a canon of women’s literature, the archive helps to answer questions about women’s cultural contributions, provides insight into the female experience, and represents exciting new opportunities for the digital humanities. Although several of the authors found within will be highly recognisable, such as George Eliot and Louisa May Alcott, many of them will be completely unknown, allowing scholars to make new connections as well as rediscovering lost or ignored works from the past. The vast majority of monographs have never been scanned before and are not available on the open web.

     

    ARCHIVE CONTENT

    Curated by the American Antiquarian Society, the monographs in this archive were selected from across the library’s collection, primarily because they were authored or edited by women, to provide users with a canon of women’s literature. By maintaining a wide scope in the selection of material, this artificial collection supports a diverse variety of research areas, both answering questions on women’s cultural contributions and providing insight into the day-to-day lives of both upper-class and working-class women.

    Encompassing more than one hundred years of female authorship, the material in Rare Titles from the American Antiquarian Society, 1820-1922  includes a diversity of fiction genres and non-fiction subjects such as poetry, personal letters, recipe books, memoirs, histories, pamphlets, leaflets, instructional guides on domesticity and etiquette, biographies, autobiographies, personal papers, children’s literature, commentaries on fashion, diaries, religious tracts, legal accounts, oration, political ephemera and fiction, although there is no overlap with Gale’s American Fiction archive.  These titles are united in that they are all texts written by women, not just documents about them, with the wide variety of genres supporting multiple avenues of research into women’s history, in women’s own voices.

    A de-duplication analysis has been conducted and none of the content overlaps with other Gale archives, and there is a minimal amount available via open access platforms.

     

    A MULTIDISCIPLINARY ARCHIVE

    The deliberately broad nature of the selected titles included in Rare Titles from the American Antiquarian Society, 1820-1922 means it contains a wide variety of materials that will appeal to a range of disciplines, such as:

    • Women’s History
    • Gender Studies
    • American Literature
    • Cultural Studies
    • Critical Theory and Analysis
    • History / American and Canadian History
    • Media and Journalism
    • Politics
    • Sociology

     

    OPPORTUNTIES FOR DIGITAL SCHOLARSHIP

    As an archive of exclusively female-authored works, Rare Titles from the American Antiquarian Society, 1820-1922 presents an exciting opportunity for text and data mining. By providing a unique corpus of material that has clear definition and boundaries, the module forms a perfect data set for digital humanities research, enabling new scholarship into feminist perspectives.

    DATE RANGE:
    1820-1922

    DOCUMENT TYPE:
    Monographs

    SOURCE LIBRARY:
    American Antiquarian Society

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Case Studies

  • Eighteenth Century Collections Online at Bath Spa University

    Eighteenth Century Collections Online enriches English Literature and extends student horizons at Bath Spa University.

     

    Photograph of Dr Stephen Gregg, Bath Spa UniversityDr Stephen H. Gregg, Senior Lecturer in English, Bath Spa University, explains how this significant primary digital resource has enriched the educational experience and extended the horizons of students studying eighteenth-century literature within his English department.

    Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) from Gale has played a significant role in enriching the scholarly experience of second and third year students studying our eighteenth-century literature modules ‘Gender and Eighteenth-Century Fiction’ and ‘Empire and Identity in the Eighteenth Century. The depth and breadth of content is truly stunning. What’s more, it can be accessed by our 400 English degree students anytime anywhere and has had a significant impact on teaching and learning, in particular undergraduates, postgraduates, PhD students and lecturers.”

     

     


    IMPACT ON STUDENTS

    According to Dr Gregg, the benefits for students are significant:

    “Over the years, students’ knowledge of eighteenth-century literature has been narrowed and limited to a relatively small number of classics, such as Robinson Crusoe, that are popular enough to make them commercially viable for publishers to print”, he said. “Gale’s unique resource ECCO, with its vast array of digitised original sources, breaks down these barriers, allowing students to contextualise these popular classics and understand the larger landscape from which the classics originated. Students can now readily access the work of authors such as Eliza Haywood, who in the eighteenth century was as popular as Daniel Defoe, but over the years has fallen from view. My students have really enjoyed reading her novels, in particular her eighteenth-century novella Fantomina, which charts the sexual conquests and disguises of an unnamed young lady from the country.

    “It’s wonderful to see the literary horizons of students being broadened in such a great way”, he continued. “ECCO also allows them to grow their appreciation of the different genres of eighteenth-century literature, such as conduct books, ‘it narratives’ and miscellanies/anthologies of poems. Conduct books designed to guide eighteenth-century young women, and occasionally young men, through their development from childhood to adulthood, typically provoke heated debate from our liberated twenty-first-century female students. These books both reflected and created the socially acceptable roles of women on issues such as religion, courtship and marriage with instruction on how to survive in a man's world. Others, like Mary Hay’s Appeal to the Men of Great Britain, in Behalf of Women (1798) shed light on the gender inequalities that made such instruction necessary, planting the seeds for the more radical demand for women's rights that was to come.

    “‘It narratives’, in which the author assumes the role of an inanimate object like a coin or watch, also provoke a lot of interest from students, as do ‘Miscellanies’, which feature poems from a wide range of authors spanning a broad range of subjects; a stark contrast to the themed collections of poems we get today and books dedicated to the poems of one particular poet”.

    “Of particular note and of interest to students are travel writers, such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Jemima Kindersley. The contrasting views of life in foreign lands, highlighted by Montagu and Kindersley are captivating”, said Dr Gregg. “We have two extremes - the letters of aristocrat Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, wife to the British Ambassador of Turkey, which are remarkable for their sympathetic, female-centred view of Muslim society and the rather Eurocentric views of Jemima Kindersley who accompanied her husband Colonel Nathaniel Kindersley of the Bengal Artillery to India to report on the manners and customs she encountered during her five year absence from England.

     

    IMPACT ON LECTURERS

    ECCO’s ‘mark-list’ feature has proved particularly popular with lecturers because it allows them to direct students in a slightly more focussed way to the ECCO resources pertinent to each element of each particular module. “I’ve produced mark lists or single links to collections of literature on femininity and manners, early feminism, gentlemanliness and unmanly behaviour. ECCO is an enormous database and it’s good to be able to guide students in this way”, said Dr Gregg.

    ECCO also helps us to attract the crème de la crème of students – it can be a real ‘decider’ for MA and PhD students. A university that can demonstrate that it has a first class primary resource is essential for postgraduate studies. Students naturally expect this sort of resource to be available to them – it’s viewed as essential.”

     

    IMPROVING RESULTS

    ECCO really does inspire our students”, concluded Dr Gregg. “It enables those students prepared to work hard to really fly. The quality of work, depth and breadth of understanding has resulted in some truly exceptional essays and dissertations.”

  • Eighteenth Century Collections Online at Leeds University

    Eighteenth Century Collections Online brings learning to life and new dimension to history at Leeds University.

     

    Photograpg of Professor John Chartres, Leeds UniversityJohn Chartres, Professor of Social and Economic History, Leeds University, and former Oxford Scholar, tells us about the significant difference this primary digital resource has made to the quality and depth of work produced by lecturers and students in the history, history of art, history and philosophy of science and English departments.

     

    IMPACT ON TEACHING AND LEARNING

    Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) is a true feast of delights. It’s like being Hansel and Gretel from the Brothers Grim fairy tale walking into a delicious gingerbread house, but without a witch to stop you”, Professor John Chartres exclaimed.

     

     

    Accessible anytime anywhere by Leeds University’s 35,000 students, ECCO has had a significant impact on teaching and learning across departments, in particular lecturers, undergraduates, postgraduates and PhD students in his history department.

    “It’s extremely interesting how this resource has enriched the educational experience for my students. In year one when students study A tour thro' the whole island of Great Britain (Daniel Defoe’s matter-of-fact account of his visits to various places within Britain) and access primary resource material from ECCO, it’s fascinating for them to discover for themselves the extent of Defoe’s plagiarism. Students can readily track the intertextuality or unacknowledged quotation from one primary resource to another.

    “In their third year when students are preparing their research dissertations they make extensive use of ECCO and are able to conduct global library searches that would have been inconceivable before its arrival. MA and PhD students are taken to another level – the depth and range of materials to which they have instant access is astonishing. They, like the teaching staff at Leeds, can follow their own inclinations, provide evidence for their arguments and view secondary resources with a critical eye. This simply wasn’t possible before. They can achieve a much more sophisticated appreciation of what history actually means.

    “Today’s generation of students are more inclined to sit online than look in the library, so it makes this resource all the more valuable.”

     

    OVERCOMING LIMITATIONS

    “Before the arrival of ECCO, students keen to perform even a simple primary resource task would have the daunting job of gaining access to a special part of our library – one of the top 10 research libraries in the country – searching through reams of microfiche which can be technically problematic, and still only gain access to approximately 20 percent of the original primary source material. When studying at Oxford I had to travel the breadth of the country to gain access to the material I wished to examine and pay for expensive photocopies of primary resource documentation held in universities abroad. I then spent days and days reading through extensive collections of magazines, catalogues and trade cards, often finding just a nugget of information that would lead me to my next discovery. It was hugely time consuming.”

     

    NEW AVENUES

    “The arrival of ECCO and its powerful search facilities opens up new avenues for students and lecturers to explore subjects that before would not have been possible.

    “For example, one student recently presented a study on the sexual mores of eighteenth century society by interrogating pamphlet accounts of particularly elite women and their love affairs and volumes of criminal conversation cases. Interestingly, she was able to see that if a married woman committed adultery, the husband could sue the adulterer for invasion of property rights.

    “Another student presented a study on the history of perfume. By reading trade cards (small cards, similar to the visiting cards exchanged in social circles, that businesses would distribute to clients and potential customers) they were able to track its evolution from the original nosegay, used to mask the unpleasant smells of the time, to the arrival of perfume applied directly to the body. Students searching manually for this information would have had to visit several different libraries. It would have been like searching for a needle in a haystack.”

     

    IMPROVING RESULTS

    “Every year I see at least 10 percent of my students moving up to a top First Degree performance in their dissertations through the application of ECCO.”

     

    SEARCHABILITY

    “Powerful search capabilities, a key feature of ECCO, mean that for the first time students have access to material that can radically change their understanding of a topic. It’s an extraordinarily exciting resource”, he concluded.

  • State Papers Online at York and Durham

    State Papers Online transforms early modern historical research at top UK universities.

     

    Amongst the first UK institutions to offer students online access to the largest set of government documents from the Early Modern period, the Universities of York and Durham are taking 16th and 17th century historical research to a new level. State Papers Online, 1509-1714, from Gale, a Cengage Company, offers easy access to the full range of the Tudor and Stuart governments’ domestic and foreign activities in a searchable digital format. Dr John Cooper, history lecturer at the University of York, and Dr Natalie Mears, senior lecturer in early modern British history at Durham University, discuss how this resource is opening up new avenues of scholarship and transforming the field of early modern studies.

    The University of York has one of the largest history departments in the UK and a very prestigious research culture, attracting students from all over the world. The university first implemented State Papers Online (SPO) Part I in 2008 and has purchased the fourth and final part, completing the collection. Parts I and II cover the State Papers for the Tudor period, while Parts III and IV complete the collection for the whole of the Stuart period. Combined, all four parts create an essential resource for understanding the socio-economic, political and religious issues of the Early Modern period that shaped the future course of Britain and the modern world.

     

    DIGITAL ACCESS TO IRREPLACEABLE ORIGINAL ARTEFACTS

    Previously, the university held selected printed volumes of the State Papers, some of which were only available as special collections as they were too fragile to be viewed on an open shelf. Staff and students would travel long distances to The National Archives in Kew and British Library in London, to access the originals. Even then, access was restricted as archivists would worry that the acid on peoples’ hands would deteriorate the collections and the ink on hand-written manuscripts would be smudged, making some documents unreadable.

    Dr John Cooper, history lecturer at the University of York, comments: “State Papers Online is already having a significant impact on research by providing students from undergraduate to PHD level with unrestricted online access to almost three million original historical manuscripts. The manuscripts are linked to fully text-searchable Calendars, which provide a summary of contents in chronological order, thereby reducing the need to consult the originals.

    SPO has removed the cost and burden of travelling long distances to access these documents, as well as the complexity of searching for them. Now students and staff can spend more quality time on developing their research rather than fishing for the information. This can be done from their own PC, considerably speeding up the time it takes to reach the information they need.

    “I have just completed a project on Sir Francis Walsingham - government administrator during the reign of Elizabeth I - which I initially struggled to complete as I could not spend all of my time in Kew since I am based in York. However, using SPO I am now able to access all the records from home, compare manuscript records and magnify the ones I want to study in more depth. The ability to access original manuscripts of foreign policy papers has made the foreign policy section of my book possible”.*

     

    RAISING STANDARDS

    Dr Cooper explains how SPO can take undergraduate studies to a whole new level, as it helps to improve the research base for dissertations: “What has surprised me the most is second year students using SPO with a great deal of enthusiasm to start to identify their dissertation subjects. They expect to use electronic resources and SPO is very much meeting their requirements.

    “During my six years at York, the most interesting dissertation I have marked is from a third year undergraduate that used SPO to trace records on cultural minority groups, studying the experience of non whites and Irish immigrants and travellers – ‘gypsies’ or ‘Egyptians’ as they used to be called in Elizabethan times. It is very difficult to research this topic as gypsies rarely left records in their own voice. However, with SPO, it is possible to trace official attitudes, such as what the government thought of Irish travellers moving around, and how and why they worried about gypsies.

    “This student made very imaginative and innovative use of traditional and political records, including the ‘Elizabeth I and Acts of the Privy Council’ volume, revealing a new area in historical research that was previously largely unexplored. The advanced skills this student displayed, by going beyond the minimum expectation of reading the Calendars to reading the actual manuscripts themselves, would normally be expected of an MA student, and so helped earn them a distinction”.

     

    DIGITAL ARCHIVE SUPPORTS FLEXIBLE INDEPENDENT LEARNING

    Dr Natalie Mears, senior lecturer in early modern British history, has been working at Durham University for seven years as part of a 30-strong history department, comprising British, European, American, African and Chinese historians. She explains how SPO supports the changing nature of the way students now work: “When I was a student 20 years ago, we would sit in a library and read through the documents. Now, students are more likely to sit in their room late at night to study; with SPO they can go online anytime and work how and where they want.

    “Prior to SPO, students would read the printed Calendars, of which there are only three copies in the library, meaning only three students could access them at any one time. With over 600 students in the history department alone, this presented real challenges. Now, the ability to read the Calendars online means more students can work on the same topic, which is really important because there tends to be pockets of interest in particular topics such as Elizabeth I and women in politics – so many students are after the same resources.”

     

    TRAINING STUDENTS TO READ 16TH AND 17TH CENTURY HANDWRITING

    Dr Cooper goes on to explain the importance of accessing the original manuscripts, not only the Calendars: “We implement training courses for undergraduate and MA students on palaeography to help them with the study of 16th and 17th century handwriting so they are able to read the original documents. There are also online tutorials, available through the online archives. I introduce my MA and PHD students to the SPO site, teach them about links between calendars and manuscripts, and how to interpret them. I explain that there is more to the manuscripts than writing; there are often other clues. For example, if you turn a letter over you can see the original address and date received, a sentence about whether they thought it was useful or not, and whether it was dealt with. Students can trace the prioritisation of records online, which would be very difficult to do in real Calendars.”

    Dr Natalie Mears comments: “Prior to the SPO palaeography tool, I would direct students to an English handwriting book, of which there is only one copy in the library, or to the Public Records Office (PRO) website. Undergraduates are normally daunted by original manuscripts but with SPO they are given tools to easily decipher them, meaning more students can now focus their dissertations on the early modern period”.

     

    TEACHING FIRST YEAR UNDERGRADUATES ABOUT HOW HISTORIANS RESEARCHED THEIR STORIES

    Although SPO is mainly used by third year undergraduates and above, first years at York University are also being introduced to it. As Dr Cooper explains: “Using SPO we have built in to our new first year undergraduate programme a series of York-based case studies to teach students how historians have researched the stories they are learning about – this is something they will not have learned at school. We ask students to read important works, compare articles and discuss the relative significance of York based stories. For example, Henry VIII’s visit to York in 1541 came about following the Pilgrimage of Grace rebellion of 1536-7 which generated enormous correspondence – all of which can be found in SPO.

    “We encourage first year undergraduates to access the resource, view the calendars and manuscripts and see if they can decipher any of it. This introduces them to the idea of using stories to create historical records and teaches them that not all records are complete. The records that historians used were created for political correspondence and for legal reasons, not just for historians.”

     

    DEVELOPING STUDENTS INTO YOUNG RESEARCHERS

    Dr Mears comments: “Many of my students like studying Elizabeth I and marriage, looking at themes such as fashion and ‘did she control her own image?’ I also encourage them to look into other areas such as the Reformation and Henry VIII.

    “One of my students completed a dissertation on the experience of religion change in Calais in the 16th century, focusing on religious change on the periphery border between England and France, where there were potentially different development of ideas. My student was able to go through the Calendar and read the whole document, rather than just the index, in order to glean more details. He got a First, which was helped by his use of SPO.

    Dissertations are supposed to utilise original sources, not just Calendars, and SPO facilitates this.

    “Students often use SPO to search for key words, as they would on Google, however, they are very receptive to the training we have given them on using proper research paths rather than just key word searchers. This is helping them to develop the skills that a proper researcher would deploy. SPO helps replicate the research process and enables them to discover manuscripts.

    “At Durham we encourage students to look at primary sources, even for non dissertation teaching, at levels two and three. We show students original Calendars and manuscripts, we take them to the library so they can see them in real life as well as printing some off from SPO, making them feel more comfortable with the material. SPO helps our students tackle primary sources more confidently and independently. A couple of my students have been inspired to stay on to complete a Masters degree next year as they feel confident they will be able to do real research using SPO.”

     

    BOOSTING POST GRADUATE RECRUITMENT AMIDST CUTS IN RESEARCH FUNDING

    Dr Mears explains: “SPO has added real value to Durham University, especially for non established academic researchers. It is used by staff and students across the university, not just academics, to influence teaching and learning outcomes. Universities originally thought of SPO simply as a high end research tool but it is more than that.

    SPO has helped us to attract more postgraduate students, who can now access invaluable research material despite being situated hundreds of miles away from the Public Records Office in London. There was huge cross-departmental demand at the university to purchase SPO to help deliver value for money to students and attract postgraduate students. As a result, we have seen an increase in the number of MA and PHD applications in the last three years.

    “As external research funding tightens and research grants disappear, SPO opens up access to a wider variety of original sources, helping students to complete their dissertations on a diverse range of topics without needing to leave Durham. Having SPO will also help us to secure external research grants, as it demonstrates our commitment to investing in top research resources. SPO has also been part of Durham’s investment in increasing our status as a top international research university.”

     

    ATTRACTING INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS

    Dr John Cooper comments: “York is very prestigious on account of its research culture and SPO helps us stand out both in the UK and internationally. For example, we have attracted students from Canada and Taiwan studying PHDs in 16th and 17th century English history – they would not have had access to SPO at their own institutions and they chose us over any other British institution because we have it.”

     

    ADVICE FOR OTHER INSTITUTIONS

    Both academics agree, the teaching of history in schools and universities has gone through a complete change in the last 20 years, moving away from history that is exclusively dominated by political narrative to other types of history such as social history, for which SPO is invaluable.

    Dr Cooper enthuses: “My next research project will be on the history of 16th century Ireland, including Elizabeth I’s colonisation of Ireland. This has to be reconstructed from the English State Papers as the Irish equivalent was blown up by the IRA in the 1920s, so SPO is the main repository available today for the exploration of Irish history.”

    He concludes: “We live in austere times and SPO is a considerable investment for a university, however, it is beneficial to have all four parts. SPO, alongside ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online) and Early English Books Online, completes our online access to major early records. SPO has the potential to revolutionise the availability and usability of manuscript records, which are the principal records of the 16th to 18th century. Any university that is serious about recruiting PHD students in early modern British history should consider offering access to these records.”

    * The Queen’s Agent – Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I, Faber & Faber

Read "The Media and Covid-19" from The Economist

Originally from the December 19th 2020 edition, The Economist explored the media coverage of covid-19 using Gale's search technology: read the original article (PDF).

Read "The World’s Most-Used Resource for 18th-Century Studies Gets an Upgrade"

Originally published online, Gale's sponsored article in Inside Higher Ed looks at the impact of an archive that revolutionized scholarship: read the original article.

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  • Product Overview: Archives of Sexuality and Gender: L’Enfer de la Bibliothèque nationale de France

    Archives of Sexuality and Gender l'Enfer Banner Image

    The fifth part of Gale’s Archives of Sexuality and Gender series, L’Enfer de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, provides access to one of the most storied and sought-after private case collections in the world. The name alone invokes visions of damnation and moral ruin. L’Enfer (which translates as “Hell” or “Inferno”) refers to the shelf mark given to the collection which was created in the 1830s to protect and isolate works that were considered contrary to the morals of the time. As with other private cases, the entire collection was kept in a locked section of the library because of the erotic or pornographic character of the works, as well as their rarity and value. 

    While the content in the collection was withheld from many readers in the past, the creation of this private case is to society’s benefit today, as it meant the content, dating from the 1530s to 2010s, was safeguarded for posterity. Today, L’Enfer is one of the most famous Private Case collections in the world.

     

    COLLECTION CONTENTS

    L’Enfer is made up of more than 2,400 printed works. Around 950 additional items come from an appendix to l’Enfer called Flagellation. Between the 1880s and the 1930s, an editorial subgenre flourished in France: the novel de flagellation, a specialised branch of erotic literature. In this context, "passionate flogging" is a sexual perversion consisting of experiencing an erotic pleasure to be whipped. The Flagellation collection in this archive consists of literary works on spanking, caning, and whipping.

     

    LANGUAGES

    Documents will mainly be in French, with some titles in English, German, Spanish, and a smattering of other languages.

     

    VALUE OF THE ARCHIVE

    As one of the premier private case collections in the world, l’Enfer is much sought after. In an article about an exhibition of l’Enfer at the BnF, Elaine Sciolino of the New York Times wrote the following about the significance of these items:

    “The handwritten manuscript of the Marquis de Sade’s novel “Les Infortunes de la Vertu” (“The Misfortunes of Virtue”) is under glass here, as are seventeenth-century French engravings of “erotic postures”; English “flagellation novels” exported to France in the late nineteenth century; Japanese prints; Man Ray photographs; and a police report from 1900 that compiles the addresses of Paris’s houses of prostitution and what they charged. Sadism, masochism, bestiality, inflated genitalia and the most imaginative sexual fantasies and athletic poses are given their due.”

    The ability to digitally cross-search and compare l’Enfer with the British Library’s Private Case (the third part of Gale’s Archives of Sexuality and Gender series) will be of significant benefit to researchers. Both private cases are extremely important to this research area, expanding our understanding of sexual history, developing views on sexuality, the policing of sexuality and the nature of titillation throughout history.

  • Product Overview: China and the Modern World: Imperial China and the West Part I, 1815–1881

    British Foreign Office correspondence from China on commercial, political, diplomatic, military and legal matters in nineteenth century Anglo-Chinese relations.

     

    MPK_1_37_0029In this, the first of two parts of British Foreign Office correspondence from China, scholars will find material relating to the internal politics of China and Britain, their relationship, and the relationships between other Western powers keen to benefit from the growing trading ports of the Far East. 

    From Lord Amherst’s mission at the start of the nineteenth century, through the trading monopoly of the Canton System, and the Opium Wars of 1839-42 and 1856-60, Britain and other foreign powers gradually gained commercial, legal and territorial rights in China. These files provide correspondence from the Factories of Canton (modern Guangzhou) and from the missionaries and interpreters who entered China in the early nineteenth century, as well as from the later Consulates and Legation and from the envoys and missions sent to China from Britain.

    After 1842 when the Treaty of Nanking was signed, the precedence of Canton declined as the treaty ports of Shanghai, Ningpo (Ningbo), Foochow (Fuzhou) and Amoy (Xiamen) were established. These were later joined by more trading posts, with British merchants and Consuls established at Swatow (Shantou), Chefoo (Yantai), Formosa (Taiwan) and more.

    As well as matters of trade and commerce, the correspondence in this archive covers local uprisings including anti-foreign riots and the Tientsin Massacre of 1870, piracy, judicial and legal matters, and the activities of Russia, the US, France and other Western powers in the region. It also covers British interests and ambition in Japan, Thailand, Burma (Myanmar), Malaya (Malaysia) and Korea (particularly Seoul).

    These hand-written documents have been opened up to scholars with the use of Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technology, as well as item-level information drawn from the Foreign Office Indexes in series FO 605.

     

    SUBJECTS COVERED

    • Asian Studies
    • Chinese Studies
    • Colonialism
    • History
    • Political Science & Diplomatic Studies

     

    ADVISORS:

    STEPHEN R. PLATT, Professor of History, University of Massachusetts at Amherst

    DAVID FAURE, Professor of History and Director of Center for China Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong

    EIICHI MOTONO, Professor of Economic History, Waseda University

    EI MURAKAMI, Associate Professor of Economic History, Kyoto University

    HANS VAN DE VEN, Professor of Modern Chinese History, Cambridge University

    HUANG KO-WU, Distinguished Research Professor, Institute of Modern History, Academic Sinica, Republic of China (Taiwan)

    ISABELLA JACKSON, Assistant Professor in Chinese History, Trinity College Dublin

  • Product Overview: Declassified Documents Online: Twentieth-Century British Intelligence, An Intelligence Empire

    Various source media, Declassified ocuments Online, Brtisih Intelligence

    From the international machinery of espionage and twentieth-century warfare to personal surveillance and Cold War intelligence, this uniquely broad view of the interests of the British government, her allies and her enemies is sourced from five government departments and totals around 500 000 pages.

    Twentieth-Century British Intelligence, An Intelligence Empire brings together files from the UK National Archives covering intelligence and security matters from 1905-2002. Material has been sourced from the UK Ministry of Defence, the Cabinet Office, the Colonial Office, MI5 (British Domestic Security Service) and the SOE (Special Operations Executive), reflecting an intelligence network that reached from the UK and Europe to Africa, the Middle East, Canada, Asia and Australia during a century of global conflicts, high-stakes diplomacy and political upheaval. These documents cover the development of British intelligence and its impact on policy from its earliest days, through Room 40 in the First World War and the activities of the Security Services throughout the British Empire during WWII, to the geopolitics of the Cold War and decolonisation.

    Intelligence files, previously closed to scholars, represent an under-studied aspect of our recent past and provide exciting opportunities for new research. 

    Declassified Documents Online: Twentieth Century British Intelligence, An Intelligence Empire brings together files from five UK government departments to provide researchers with access to detailed, previously classified information on the intelligence services of Britain and her Empire throughout the twentieth century.

    The Security Service (MI5): KV 2, KV 3 & KV 4

    Personal, Subject and Policy files dating from 1905-1978. MI5 handled intelligence gathering within the British Empire and the Commonwealth. The selected subseries of KV 2 holds personal files on subjects of Secret Service enquiries, whilst KV 3 contains subject files on espionage activities of groups or other intelligence organisations, including the only subject files known to have survived from the First World War period. KV 4 holds section histories and policy files.

    The Ministry of Defence: Communications and Intelligence Records: DEFE 21, DEFE 26, DEFE 28, DEFE 31, DEFE 41, DEFE 44, DEFE 60, DEFE 62, DEFE 63 & DEFE 64

    These series include registered files, reports and memoranda of the Directorate of Scientific Intelligence, the Defence Intelligence Staff and the Defence Signals Staff focused on the technical and scientific interests of the British government from the Second World War to the decades of the Cold War and the Atomic Age. The intelligence assessments and reports include those gathered post-war in Allied-occupied Germany, such as interviews with German scientists. With files dating from 1912-2002, these series bring the coverage up to the end of the twentieth century, and include defence records on the Falklands, the Middle East, UFO incidents and details of Soviet weapon systems.

    The Special Operations Executive: HS 7 & HS 8

    These are records of the Ministry of Economic Warfare and the Special Operations Executive (SOE), which functioned during WWII to promote sabotage and subversion, and assist resistance groups in enemy occupied territory, famously directed by Winston Churchill to ‘set Europe ablaze!’. Records date from 1935-1988 and include histories & war diaries in HS 7, and headquarters records in HS 8.


    The Colonial Office: Intelligence and Security Departments: Registered Files (ISD Series): CO 1035
    This series contains registered files of the Colonial Office relating to the security of British colonies, and intelligence on colonial matters and decolonisation, including reports by Security Intelligence Advisors throughout the British Empire, and assessments from the Joint Intelligence Committee. Running from 1954-1966, these files represent a vital piece of the intelligence picture of the global Cold War and decolonisation at the end of Empire.

    The Cabinet Office: CAB 56, CAB 121, CAB 176 & CAB 301

    The material in these series dates from 1936-1974 and shows how intelligence matters were considered, analysed, and processed through the Cabinet Office. Records from the Joint Intelligence Committee appear alongside Policy and Strategy files from the Special Secret Information Centre, and selected intelligence material from the Cabinet Secretary’s Miscellaneous Papers held in CAB 301.

    The study of Intelligence and security casts light on international relations and politics, on social conditions and personal experiences in a time of conflict and shifting global alliances, on the running and dismantling of Empire and on the secret operations and planning of global conflicts. The politics of today are a direct result of the events of the twentieth century, and the depth and breadth of information gathered by British intelligence agencies revealed in this product, from British communists to African independence leaders and German Abwehr agents, allows scholars to follow the decisions and events that formed the world we live in. 

  • Product Overview: Political Extremism and Radicalism: Far-Right Groups in America

    Political Extremsim Far Right in America Banner

     

    This archive explores the role and development of a variety of conservative political movements and groups by showcasing unique materials that examine right-wing ideology. Building on the successful platform created by Part I, this next installment gives researchers access to more essential materials that support the study of extreme political viewpoints throughout history. Sourced from eminent libraries, including the University of California, Santa Barbara; the University of California, Davis; the University of Iowa, Idaho State University; and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Far-Right Groups in America provides scholars with a better understanding of American conservative political movement from multiple angles.

     

    DATE RANGE:
    1850–2010

    DOCUMENT TYPES:
    monographs, manuscripts,  periodicals, pamphlets, and ephemera

    SOURCE LIBRARIES:
    University of California, Santa Barbara; University of California, Davis; University of Iowa; Idaho State University; and The Federal Bureau of Investigation

    SUBJECTS SUPPORTED:
    history, politics, American history, sociology, anthropology, social history, social sciences, and government

  • Product Overview: Women’s Studies Archive: Rare Titles from the American Antiquarian Society, 1820-1922

    Various source media, Women's Studies Archive

    The third module in Gale’s Women’s Studies Archive series, Rare Titles from the American Antiquarian Society, 1820-1922, gives researchers unprecedented access to over one million pages of female-authored work across a diverse range of both fiction and non-fiction. Sourced from and curated by the American Antiquarian Society, the pre-eminent collector of pre-twentieth century Americana, this archive includes around 5,700 monographs published between 1820 and 1922 in the United States and authored by women.

    An official bibliography of female-authored texts published in the United States during this period does not exist. In its absence, this assembly of monographs, expertly curated by the American Antiquarian Society, serves this purpose for scholars.

    Composed of rare and unique titles and covering over a century of female writing, the collection will enable new scholarship into feminist perspectives and the discovery of female-authored works that have been previously overlooked. Providing users with a canon of women’s literature, the archive helps to answer questions about women’s cultural contributions, provides insight into the female experience, and represents exciting new opportunities for the digital humanities. Although several of the authors found within will be highly recognisable, such as George Eliot and Louisa May Alcott, many of them will be completely unknown, allowing scholars to make new connections as well as rediscovering lost or ignored works from the past. The vast majority of monographs have never been scanned before and are not available on the open web.

     

    ARCHIVE CONTENT

    Curated by the American Antiquarian Society, the monographs in this archive were selected from across the library’s collection, primarily because they were authored or edited by women, to provide users with a canon of women’s literature. By maintaining a wide scope in the selection of material, this artificial collection supports a diverse variety of research areas, both answering questions on women’s cultural contributions and providing insight into the day-to-day lives of both upper-class and working-class women.

    Encompassing more than one hundred years of female authorship, the material in Rare Titles from the American Antiquarian Society, 1820-1922  includes a diversity of fiction genres and non-fiction subjects such as poetry, personal letters, recipe books, memoirs, histories, pamphlets, leaflets, instructional guides on domesticity and etiquette, biographies, autobiographies, personal papers, children’s literature, commentaries on fashion, diaries, religious tracts, legal accounts, oration, political ephemera and fiction, although there is no overlap with Gale’s American Fiction archive.  These titles are united in that they are all texts written by women, not just documents about them, with the wide variety of genres supporting multiple avenues of research into women’s history, in women’s own voices.

    A de-duplication analysis has been conducted and none of the content overlaps with other Gale archives, and there is a minimal amount available via open access platforms.

     

    A MULTIDISCIPLINARY ARCHIVE

    The deliberately broad nature of the selected titles included in Rare Titles from the American Antiquarian Society, 1820-1922 means it contains a wide variety of materials that will appeal to a range of disciplines, such as:

    • Women’s History
    • Gender Studies
    • American Literature
    • Cultural Studies
    • Critical Theory and Analysis
    • History / American and Canadian History
    • Media and Journalism
    • Politics
    • Sociology

     

    OPPORTUNTIES FOR DIGITAL SCHOLARSHIP

    As an archive of exclusively female-authored works, Rare Titles from the American Antiquarian Society, 1820-1922 presents an exciting opportunity for text and data mining. By providing a unique corpus of material that has clear definition and boundaries, the module forms a perfect data set for digital humanities research, enabling new scholarship into feminist perspectives.

    DATE RANGE:
    1820-1922

    DOCUMENT TYPE:
    Monographs

    SOURCE LIBRARY:
    American Antiquarian Society

NEWS AND UPDATES

  • Shandong University Acquires Gale Scholar

    The original can be read here on PR Newswire.

     

    Shandong University is the latest university in China to acquire Gale Scholar, from Gale, a Cengage company, empowering its researchers to make fresh discoveries through digital access to millions of pages from Gale Primary SourcesGale Scholar offers institutions access to core collections in Gale Primary Sources totaling more than 170 million digitized pages from the vaults of world renowned libraries, covering over 500 years of international history.

    Shandong University is one of the highest ranking universities in China, and one of the first members of Project 211 and Project 985, two state projects to support the development of the country's best universities.

    "Since its founding nearly 120 years ago, Shandong University has attached great importance to the research and study of western culture," said Director Zhao Xingshen of Shandong University Library. "Gale's primary sources gathered from many world-renowned institutions in Europe and America can support many disciplines with their wealth of content. Introducing these academic resources into our teaching and research activities will continue Shandong University's academic tradition of disseminating its humanities and social sciences research to the world. Consequently, Gale Scholar is destined to have a positive and far-reaching impact. We are very pleased to join the community of Gale Scholar institutions in China and look forward to further collaboration with Gale."

    The Gale Scholar program enables Shandong University to enhance its current holdings with Gale Primary Sources, which have been core to the collection-building strategies of institutions in North America and Europe for many years. By granting immediate access to these collections, the Gale Scholar program supports the university's mission to grow its research output, improve student outcomes and attract the best and brightest in their fields – both at the researcher and postgraduate levels.

    "We're delighted to welcome Shandong University to the Gale Scholar program," said Terry Robinson, senior vice president and managing director of Gale International. "The university library's decision to invest in the program reflects its ongoing commitment to foster world-leading research, while strengthening its position as a regional hub of learning."

    Gale Scholar provides Shandong University researchers with access to curated digital collections of books, maps, photographs, newspapers, periodicals and manuscripts from some of the world's well-known libraries like: the University of Oxford, Harvard University and the British Library.

    Acclaimed Gale Primary Sources series in the university's program include:

    The richness of this content is harnessed by powerful search technology that empowers researchers and students to discover new research connections through a single search environment. A newly launched Gale Scholar landing page in both English and Chinese further streamlines the researchers' workflow, acting as a starting point into searching the collections. From the landing page, users can also access the Gale Digital Scholar Lab, a digital humanities tool which allows researchers the ability to text and data mine their Gale Primary Sources content. With access to world-class research materials and a tool to analyze those materials, Gale Scholar serves as Shandong University's gateway to the digital humanities.

    For more information, visit the Gale Scholar webpage.

  • U.S. Declassified Documents Online

    U.S. Declassified Documents Banner Image

    The latest content update to U.S. Declassified Documents Online provides 5,000 documents from a variety of U.S. Government sources, including the Central Intelligence Agency, Department of Homeland Security, Environmental Protection Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the White House.  Declassified materials include Department of Defense Cables on military conflicts, White House memoranda on foreign relations, security reports from the Central Intelligence Agency, and letters from Senators concerning domestic policy initiatives.  These documents reveal how the U.S. Government operates on many different levels, and allows researchers to better understand relationships between the various agencies.

    Document highlights:

    • U.S. House Resolution (H. Res.) on articles of impeachment against Donald John Trump, President of the U.S., for high crimes and misdemeanors: Article I: Abuse of Power; Article 2: Obstruction of Congress - 12/10/2019
    • U.S. Air Force Fact Sheet no. 87-34 on the history of the Air Force's investigations into unidentified flying objects (UFOs) starting in 1948 under a program entitled "Project Sign." - 10/1/1987
    • U.S. Air Force report entitled: "The Roswell Report - Case Closed." The focus of this probe has been to access if the U.S. Air Force, or any other government agency, possessed informed on the alleged crash and recovery of an extraterrestrial vehicle and its alien occupants near Roswell, New Mexico, in July 1947. It has been determined that the crashed object was a nuclear test surveillance balloon from Project Mogul - 4/25/1996
    • National Security Council (NSC) staff member Fritz Ermarth provides Deputy National Security Adviser Colin Powell with talking points in preparation for a 2:00 p.m. Domestic Policy Council (DPC) meeting on acid rain. The NSC strongly endorses full federal research funding in an attempt to ease Canadian concerns over environmental problems associated with acid rain from American industrial plants. - March 9, 1987
    • In a letter to President Barack Obama, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California) provides information on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's study of the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) Detention and Interrogation Program - 12/30/2014
    • Deputy Director for Central Intelligence (DDCI) Richard Kerr provides Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) William Casey with an assessment about the catastrophic nuclear accident that occurred on 4/26/1986 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine - 7/31/1986
    • National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski provides President Jimmy Carter with an attached cable from General Robert Huyser, Deputy Commander in Chief, U.S. European Command (DCINCEUR), concerning his appraisal of the attitude of the Iranian military community toward the U.S. - 1/13/1979
    • Commander William Anderson congratulates Rear Admiral Hyman Rickover for his vision on the importance of nuclear power and his vision's fulfillment in the completion of the first transpolar voyage from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean by the nuclear submarine, the USS NAUTILUS - August 8, 1958

     

    ABOUT U.S. DECLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS ONLINE

    U.S. Declassified Documents Online's greatest value lies in the wealth of facts and insights that it provides in connection with the political, economic, and social conditions of the United States and other countries. Materials as diverse as State Department political analyses, White House confidential file materials, National Security Council policy statements, CIA intelligence memoranda, and much more offer unique insights into the inner workings of the US government and world events in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A significant resource for researchers in almost every discipline, this collection makes it possible for researchers to easily and quickly access and review selected previously classified government documents online.

  • Eighteenth Century Collections Online

    On Friday, December 18, 2020, the current ECCO interface was retired and existing ECCO links have been automatically redirected to a new interface, making ECCO look and feel like the other Gale Primary Sources archives.

    Eighteenth Century Collections Online Old Interface  Eighteenth Century Collections Online New Interface

    The new ECCO experience is the culmination of extensive user research, including a widely distributed survey and an extensive series of usability tests and Zoom interviews. In response to observations during testing, as well as direct feedback provided by power users, we are making several impactful changes and enhancements, with more to come in subsequent software releases.

    Will the migration affect usage data?
    Yes. Because ECCO is comprised of monograph content, usage will be calculated according to stricter criteria and may decline as a result.

    Will customers’ existing links redirect?
    Yes. All A-Z list links, MARC records, and bookmarks will automatically redirect to the new experience. While you are not required to update your links, we encourage you to do so, if possible. This applies to MARC records which, while intended to redirect, do not always anticipate every possible redirect scenario. So we encourage you to obtain new MARC for their catalogues if they are open to it.

    Which legacy features will be retained in the new experience?

    • Most legacy functionality will carry over. However, due to low usage, “Browse Works” will not be carried over
    • The Library of Congress Subject Headings that are currently available in legacy ECCO will not be carried over for the December release, but will be added as part of a subsequent release
  • Daily Mail Historical Archive: now includes 2005-2016

    Daily Mail Historical Archive, 2005-2016

    Customers who purchase this archive after December 2020 will have the full archive from 1898-2016. Customers who previously purchased the original archive covering 1898-2004 can purchase the years 2005-2016 to extend their existing archive. Please note that the 1898-2016 module is only available as an add-on to institutions that have the original archive, and is not available as a standalone purchase. Find out more about our Gale Historical Newspaper add-on modules here.

     

    View some sample articles

    (Click on the image to see the full page)

    "What If Scotland Did Become Independent?" Daily Mail, 8 May 2008  "Brown Accused of Dithering in Scots Independence Row." Daily Mail, 8 May 2008

     

    "The Next President?" Daily Mail, 12 Feb. 2007  "How America's Elite Hijacked a Massacre to Take Revenge on Sarah Palin." Daily Mail, 11 Jan. 2011

     

    "At 8lb6oz, He's the Heaviest Future King in 100 Years." Daily Mail, 23 July 2013  "William's Dismay at 'Hothead' Harry's Plea over Meghan." Daily Mail, 26 Nov. 2016

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

SIGN UP FOR FUTURE NEWSLETTERS

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NOVEMBER 2020

COMING SOON

  • Advanced Search and New Tools for Gale Primary Sources

    On Friday 18 December 2020, we will be upgrading tools across the Gale Primary Sources platform, as well as adding some new functionality.

     

    ENHANCED ADVANCED SEARCH

    We are launching a major upgrade to Advanced Search across the Gale Primary Sources platform. This new user interface will meet our users where they are by providing useful tips and information to help them get the most out of their search experience. Below is a prototype which shows a preview of what to expect:

    Advanced Search Updates to Gale Primary Sources archivs

     

    PAGE-LEVEL BOOKMARKS

    With this release, users will have the ability to generate bookmarks at the page level. This enhancement will apply to both Manuscripts and Monographs – a feature that is especially helpful for researchers who want to return to a specific page in a long monograph or manuscript folder.

    IMPROVED DEFAULT DOCUMENT VIEW

    We are changing the image viewer to a default “Fit to Height” view. This is in response to feedback that the default “Fit to Width” view is too magnified and that users would prefer to see more of the document by default.

  • Product Overview: China and the Modern World: Imperial China and the West Part I, 1815–1881

    British Foreign Office correspondence from China on commercial, political, diplomatic, military and legal matters in nineteenth century Anglo-Chinese relations.

     

    MPK_1_37_0029In this, the first of two parts of British Foreign Office correspondence from China, scholars will find material relating to the internal politics of China and Britain, their relationship, and the relationships between other Western powers keen to benefit from the growing trading ports of the Far East. 

    From Lord Amherst’s mission at the start of the nineteenth century, through the trading monopoly of the Canton System, and the Opium Wars of 1839-42 and 1856-60, Britain and other foreign powers gradually gained commercial, legal and territorial rights in China. These files provide correspondence from the Factories of Canton (modern Guangzhou) and from the missionaries and interpreters who entered China in the early nineteenth century, as well as from the later Consulates and Legation and from the envoys and missions sent to China from Britain.

    After 1842 when the Treaty of Nanking was signed, the precedence of Canton declined as the treaty ports of Shanghai, Ningpo (Ningbo), Foochow (Fuzhou) and Amoy (Xiamen) were established. These were later joined by more trading posts, with British merchants and Consuls established at Swatow (Shantou), Chefoo (Yantai), Formosa (Taiwan) and more.

    As well as matters of trade and commerce, the correspondence in this archive covers local uprisings including anti-foreign riots and the Tientsin Massacre of 1870, piracy, judicial and legal matters, and the activities of Russia, the US, France and other Western powers in the region. It also covers British interests and ambition in Japan, Thailand, Burma (Myanmar), Malaya (Malaysia) and Korea (particularly Seoul).

    These hand-written documents have been opened up to scholars with the use of Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technology, as well as item-level information drawn from the Foreign Office Indexes in series FO 605.

     

    SUBJECTS COVERED

    • Asian Studies
    • Chinese Studies
    • Colonialism
    • History
    • Political Science & Diplomatic Studies

     

    ADVISORS:

    STEPHEN R. PLATT, Professor of History, University of Massachusetts at Amherst

    DAVID FAURE, Professor of History and Director of Center for China Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong

    EIICHI MOTONO, Professor of Economic History, Waseda University

    EI MURAKAMI, Associate Professor of Economic History, Kyoto University

    HANS VAN DE VEN, Professor of Modern Chinese History, Cambridge University

    HUANG KO-WU, Distinguished Research Professor, Institute of Modern History, Academic Sinica, Republic of China (Taiwan)

    ISABELLA JACKSON, Assistant Professor in Chinese History, Trinity College Dublin

  • Eighteenth Century Collections Online

    On Friday, December 18, 2020, the current ECCO interface was retired and existing ECCO links have been automatically redirected to a new interface, making ECCO look and feel like the other Gale Primary Sources archives.

    Eighteenth Century Collections Online Old Interface  Eighteenth Century Collections Online New Interface

    The new ECCO experience is the culmination of extensive user research, including a widely distributed survey and an extensive series of usability tests and Zoom interviews. In response to observations during testing, as well as direct feedback provided by power users, we are making several impactful changes and enhancements, with more to come in subsequent software releases.

    Will the migration affect usage data?
    Yes. Because ECCO is comprised of monograph content, usage will be calculated according to stricter criteria and may decline as a result.

    Will customers’ existing links redirect?
    Yes. All A-Z list links, MARC records, and bookmarks will automatically redirect to the new experience. While you are not required to update your links, we encourage you to do so, if possible. This applies to MARC records which, while intended to redirect, do not always anticipate every possible redirect scenario. So we encourage you to obtain new MARC for their catalogues if they are open to it.

    Which legacy features will be retained in the new experience?

    • Most legacy functionality will carry over. However, due to low usage, “Browse Works” will not be carried over
    • The Library of Congress Subject Headings that are currently available in legacy ECCO will not be carried over for the December release, but will be added as part of a subsequent release
  • U.S. Declassified Documents Online

    U.S. Declassified Documents Banner Image

    The latest content update to U.S. Declassified Documents Online provides 5,000 documents from a variety of U.S. Government sources, including the Central Intelligence Agency, Department of Homeland Security, Environmental Protection Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the White House.  Declassified materials include Department of Defense Cables on military conflicts, White House memoranda on foreign relations, security reports from the Central Intelligence Agency, and letters from Senators concerning domestic policy initiatives.  These documents reveal how the U.S. Government operates on many different levels, and allows researchers to better understand relationships between the various agencies.

    Document highlights:

    • U.S. House Resolution (H. Res.) on articles of impeachment against Donald John Trump, President of the U.S., for high crimes and misdemeanors: Article I: Abuse of Power; Article 2: Obstruction of Congress - 12/10/2019
    • U.S. Air Force Fact Sheet no. 87-34 on the history of the Air Force's investigations into unidentified flying objects (UFOs) starting in 1948 under a program entitled "Project Sign." - 10/1/1987
    • U.S. Air Force report entitled: "The Roswell Report - Case Closed." The focus of this probe has been to access if the U.S. Air Force, or any other government agency, possessed informed on the alleged crash and recovery of an extraterrestrial vehicle and its alien occupants near Roswell, New Mexico, in July 1947. It has been determined that the crashed object was a nuclear test surveillance balloon from Project Mogul - 4/25/1996
    • National Security Council (NSC) staff member Fritz Ermarth provides Deputy National Security Adviser Colin Powell with talking points in preparation for a 2:00 p.m. Domestic Policy Council (DPC) meeting on acid rain. The NSC strongly endorses full federal research funding in an attempt to ease Canadian concerns over environmental problems associated with acid rain from American industrial plants. - March 9, 1987
    • In a letter to President Barack Obama, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California) provides information on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's study of the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) Detention and Interrogation Program - 12/30/2014
    • Deputy Director for Central Intelligence (DDCI) Richard Kerr provides Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) William Casey with an assessment about the catastrophic nuclear accident that occurred on 4/26/1986 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine - 7/31/1986
    • National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski provides President Jimmy Carter with an attached cable from General Robert Huyser, Deputy Commander in Chief, U.S. European Command (DCINCEUR), concerning his appraisal of the attitude of the Iranian military community toward the U.S. - 1/13/1979
    • Commander William Anderson congratulates Rear Admiral Hyman Rickover for his vision on the importance of nuclear power and his vision's fulfillment in the completion of the first transpolar voyage from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean by the nuclear submarine, the USS NAUTILUS - August 8, 1958

     

    ABOUT U.S. DECLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS ONLINE

    U.S. Declassified Documents Online's greatest value lies in the wealth of facts and insights that it provides in connection with the political, economic, and social conditions of the United States and other countries. Materials as diverse as State Department political analyses, White House confidential file materials, National Security Council policy statements, CIA intelligence memoranda, and much more offer unique insights into the inner workings of the US government and world events in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A significant resource for researchers in almost every discipline, this collection makes it possible for researchers to easily and quickly access and review selected previously classified government documents online.

NEWS AND UPDATES

  • Enhancements to Gale Primary Sources

    The cross-search has a new look! Designed specifically to improve the newspaper and periodical cross-search experience, these enhancements will be closely followed by the November 20, 2020 retirement of NewsVault, our older, newspaper-only cross-search interface.

     

    Homepage

    1. Banner: Reduced the height of the banner so that the options below are more visible. Added three concise bullet points to the banner which explains what the cross-search is and what you can do here. The intent is to help orient users who are coming to the product for the first time.
       
    2. Product categories: Streamlined the list of product categories to three simple sections: ALL, NEWSPAPERS, and LEGAL STUDIES. This decision is based on feedback from customers who expressed that the previous categories were not the most intuitive, and that it was more important to isolate Historical Newspapers and the Making of Modern Law products.
       
    3. Product list layout: Follows the design of the new Common Menu, featuring product icons and a short description about each product.
       
    4. Ability to link out to the standalone product: Individual product titles are hyperlinked to the standalone experience, so users who want to delve into a specific product can get there quickly and easily from the cross-search.
       
    5. Limit search by Date: Added the date limiter to the homepage. Because the date limiter is the most used search parameter, we moved it to the homepage for the convenience of our users. It is still available in Advanced Search, but users do not need to go there to limit their search by date.

     

    Advanced Search

    1. User’s product category selection retained from homepage: If a user selects the Newspapers or Legal Studies section on the homepage and then goes to Advanced Search, the application will remember that selection and apply it to their query in Advanced Search. The intent is to make the newspaper and MOML research workflows more seamless, requiring fewer steps from users by remembering the preference they set in the beginning of their workflow.
       
    2. Advanced Search database menu: The database menu has moved! Previously hidden beneath the Advanced Search form and requiring an extra click to open, all available products are now listed in a clear, easy-to-read list on the left-hand side of the page. Like the homepage, it is organized by three categories: ALL, NEWSPAPERS, and LEGAL STUDIES.
       
    3. Limit Search by Publication Country, Publication City/Province, and Publication State: We’ve added three new limiters to Advanced Search! Users now have the option to limit their search by a comprehensive list of countries, states/provinces, and cities. These are also available as filters in Search Results. In addition, we have configured this feature in the following products:
      • Amateur Newspapers from the American Antiquarian Society
      • American Historical Periodicals from the American Antiquarian Society
      • British Library Newspapers
      • Nineteenth Century UK Periodicals
      • Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers
      • Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection
      • Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Nichols Newspapers Collection

    NOTE: this feature only applies to newspaper and periodical content. It does not apply to monographs and manuscripts.

     

    Gale Primary Sources cross-search enhancements guide 1

    Gale Primary Sources cross-search enhancements guide 2

  • Harvard Citations

    Citations adhering to the Harvard style have been a top customer request, and we’re pleased to add this enhancement to our citation service. The introduction of Harvard citations adheres to the “Cite Them Right” format which provides users with a starting point for their references. Many universities use their own adaption of Harvard requirements, so we encourage users to consider their institution’s preferences when compiling reference lists.

    Citation options are accessible by selecting the Cite button in the toolbar:

    Harvard Citations Menu

     

    Gale is committed to streamlining user workflows. Users can easily export MLA, APA, Chicago, or Harvard citations for use in their favorite citation services, including:
     

    Harvard Citation Example

    - EasyBib

    - EndNote

    - NoodleTools

    - ProCite

    - Reference Manager

    - RefWorks

    - Zotero

  • Slavery and Anti-Slavery

    We’re excited to share that Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive migrated to the Gale Primary Sources platform on Friday, November 20th. Your current links now redirect automatically, and Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive is available exclusively in the new experience. 

     

    In addition to the existing Gale Primary Sources functionality, there are also be some new options available for this archive:

    • NEW! Related Resources feature: Legacy Slavery and Anti-Slavery collections include some older reference content, which will not be carried over: however, it has been replaced with something better: More Like This. This enables researchers to link out to related reference content in Gale eBooks. The feature is available in the document view Explore panel and is subscription-based, so users will only see links to reference content available to them through their library.
    • Search by Collection: Between its four modules, Slavery and Anti-Slavery is comprised of dozens of rare and unique collections. However, legacy Slavery and Anti-Slavery does not allow the user the limit their search by a specific collection. This functionality is now available, and, like other collection-based GPS products, will feature the dynamic Explore Collections feature. 
    • Cross-search ability: for the first time ever, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive is available in the Gale Primary Sources cross-search, so researchers can compare their search results in one place with content from their institution’s other Gale archives.
    • Gale Digital Scholar Lab availabilitySlavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive is also available for the first time in the Gale Digital Scholar Lab, allowing researchers to apply natural language-processing tools to raw text data (OCR) from Gale Primary Sources in a single research platform.
    • Enhanced product platform: the platform now has a modern look and feel, in-line with user expectations of modern websites. 
    • Improved accessibility: maintained for web accessibility standards, the new user interface ensures access by users of all abilities.  
    • Smarter search results: the user interface retains Advanced Search fields and limiters, but also include new search features, such as additional filtering options; Name and Subject Expansion, which looks for pseudonyms and synonyms of your search term; and access to our Topic Finder and Term Frequency textual analysis tools. 
    • Streamlined user interface: consistent with other Gale products, the interface delivers an engaging experience that allows quick access to search tools, relevant content, and collaborative features like Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive. 
    • Secure product access: HTTPS guarantees data between a patron’s browser and Gale products is encrypted, and the right to privacy for library users is protected.  

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

How I Survived Studying in Lockdown – and You Can Too

Gale Review Lockdown Post Image"When lockdown hit in March 2020, lectures were cancelled and the library shut, but university work was still expected on time and many students were thrown into a panic. I was one of those students and although I didn’t have a final year dissertation to hand in, I still had valuable assignments that would make or break my final MA grade. How was I going to cope?"

 

Our Gale Student Ambassador at the University of Portsmouth, Emily Priest, gives us an insight into her experience of studying during lockdown, and offers advice to other students as they navigate a drastically different learning experience.

 

Read the full post on our blog, the Gale Review.

DEVELOPING IDEAS FOR A DIGITAL ARCHIVE

 

"One way to look at archive creation is as a series of many moving parts; there are always many different ways to accomplish a task and they can all work together to build the final product. Yet everything begins with a single idea, that one spark of imagination that sets everything in motion."

Phil VirtaPhil Virta has worked at Gale for more than fifteen years in various capacities, most recently as a publisher of digital primary source archives, including the Archives of Sexuality and Gender program. He gives us a tour of his process for developing a digital archive; he discusses his sources of inspiration, how he fleshes out the idea, and why some ideas become archives and why some don't.

USING ARCHIVES: A STUDENT AND ACADEMIC PERSPECTIVE

 

Our Gale Student Ambassadors Pauli Kettunen (University of Helsinki) and Emily Priest (University of Portsmouth) recently interviewed users of our archives for our blog, the Gale Review

SEPTEMBER 2020

2020 RELEASES SO FAR

  • Archives of Sexuality and Gender: International Perspectives on LGBTQ Activism and Culture

    International Perspectives on LGBTQ Activism and Culture, the fourth module in the Archives of Sexuality and Gender programme, examines populations and areas of the world previously underrepresented in prevailing scholarship on sexuality and gender, with a particular focus on southern Africa and Australia. The module also provides significant coverage of lesbian and feminist organisations, and lesbian culture internationally.

    Alongside LGBTQ history, the module explores other individual and collective struggles for rights and freedoms. Contextualising sexuality within wider narratives of cultural and social history helps counter the erasure of LGBTQ stories and experiences from official histories.

    Including manuscripts, periodicals and other ephemera, International Perspectives on LGBTQ Activism and Culture totals around 450,000 pages of content dating from the 1820s, with the bulk of the material between 1970–2016.

     

    The content is drawn from three archives:

    Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action (GALA)

    GALA is a centre for LGBTQ culture and education in South Africa, founded to address the erasure of LGBTQ experiences from official archives, histories and other spaces in South Africa. Set up in 1997 as the Gay and Lesbian Archives, the name changed in 2007 to Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action to encompass their expanding range of activities. International Perspectives on LGBTQ Activism and Culture includes 25 GALA collections (over 99,000 pages) covering numerous aspects of LGBTQ life in southern Africa. Highlights include:

    • The papers of Simon Tseko Nkoli – Nkoli was a prominent South African anti-apartheid, gay and lesbian rights and HIV/AIDS activist. His high profile helped change the attitude of the ANC towards gay rights.
    • The papers of Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) – SMUG is non-profit umbrella organisation for LGBTQ advocacy groups in Uganda. Founded in 2004, SMUG offers counselling and health services to the LGBTQ community, as well as highlighting and fighting persecution in Uganda.
    • Exit newspaper – South Africa’s longest running monthly LGBT publication.
    • The papers of LEGATRA – LEGATRA, the Lesbians, Gays and Transgender Persons Association, was established in 1997 as an alliance for the defence of lesbians, gays and transgender persons' basic human rights in Zambia. Due to institutional harassment, LEGATRA was short lived, with most members fleeing Zambia’s borders.
    • The Papers of Joy Wellbeloved - Joy (James) Wellbeloved started the Phoenix Society in 1985 which provided a way for (white) men who dressed in women’s clothing to connect.

     

    Lesbian Herstory Archives – Organization and Geographic Files

    Established in the 1970s, the Lesbian Herstory Archives states that the organisation preserves records of lesbian lives and activities so that future generations will have ready access to materials, and researchers and scholars will be able to uncover the herstory previously ignored. This module includes around 130,000 pages of manuscripts and ephemera from two collections.

    • Organization Files – These files include materials from or related to 1,640 voluntary and not-for-profit groups in the LGBT community that focus on lesbian issues or have lesbian participation. They range from small groups like the Black Lesbian Study Group (NY), to community centres such as the Lesbian Resource Center (Seattle, WA). There are also files for the LGBT task forces of many national organisations. Some of the oldest files, for the Daughters of Bilitis, date from the 1950s.
    • Geographic Files – These files include material donated by the world-wide lesbian community who sent in items for archiving from their home state or that they picked up while traveling. The files include LGBTQ maps, city guides, event flyers, listings of bars, newspaper clippings and local newsletters.

     

    Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives – periodical collection

    Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives (ALGA) is a community group that collects and preserves material of an international scope, but focusing mainly on LGBTQ life in Australia, from the time of the Gold Rush to the battles against AIDS. This module includes the 122 titles in the ALGA periodical collection. Totalling over 216,000 pages, this is the largest collection of Australian LGBTQ periodicals available and provides a window into Australian LGBTQ history and culture from the 1970s to the 2000s.

    The ALGA periodicals provide coverage at a national level, such as OutRage and Gayzette, as well as state level, such as CAMP NSW Newsletter and Speaking Volumes (Adelaide). There are also titles specific to the large metropolitan centres such as Capital Q (Sydney) and Now in Melbourne, and titles covering issues and organisations such as AIDS Action (Canberra) and Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Guide.

  • The Mirror Historical Archive, 1903-2000

    Explore the influential mass-market alternative to broadsheets that changed the course of British newspapers and journalism.

    The Daily Mirror Historical Archive extends the ‘mass market’ content available in Gale Historical Newspapers. The Daily Mirror (working-class) and the Daily Mail (middle class) challenged the broadsheet dominance of newspapers such as The Times and The Telegraph, providing both an alternative view and journalistic style which went on to dominate the British newspaper market in the second half of the twentieth century.

    Started by Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe) in 1903, The Daily Mirror was influential in changing the course of British newspapers in the second half of the twentieth century, becoming Britain’s bestselling daily newspaper by 1949. Consistently left-leaning and populist to reflect the views of its target working-class audience, it offers a counterpoint to the more conservative newspapers that dominated the late nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, such as The Times and The Telegraph.

    The Daily Mirror was originally started as a journal for respectable women, run by an all-female staff, aiming at a previously neglected mass-market audience that were not catered for by the major daily newspapers aimed at the professional (male) reader. Northcliffe had misjudged the audience, and the first version of the Mirror was a financial disaster. The combination of bad judgement, technological developments in rotary printing, and the success of illustrated papers such as the Graphic led to a change of approach. Briefly becoming the Daily Illustrated Mirror, the all-female staff were replaced, and it moved to a style of journalism and visual presentation borrowed from the successful American dailies: bold headlines, sensationalist content, and everyday language.

    In 1914, Northcliffe passed ownership of the Mirror to his brother Harold Harmsworth (Lord Rothermere), as he expanded his own newspaper ownership with new acquisitions including The Times. Rothermere’s right-wing politics saw the paper shift for a while, and readership declined among its core working-class readership. During this time, the Mirror’s biggest rival was another Northcliffe paper: the Daily Mail. Between the two newspapers, the Northcliffe’s had captured the mass-market audience: both populist in nature, the Daily Mail was primarily aimed at the middle-class reader while the Mirror catered for the working-class. The Mirror became the first truly ‘national’ newspaper in Britain when it opened a regional printing operation in Manchester to serve the north of England and Scotland, rather than a newspaper distributed around the country from London.

    Beginning in 1934, an overhaul led the Mirror to become the bestselling daily newspaper in Britain in 1949, and by 1951 it was selling over 4.5 million copies a day, more than double the Daily Mail. During this time, the Mirror had separated itself from its competitors by becoming unashamedly populist, becoming the newspaper of choice for everyday people. It introduced the tactics used by American newspapers that followed on from ‘yellow’ journalism, focusing on sensation, simple language, and typographical changes like bold headlines to catch the eye. The strategy paid off as its new editorial stance—critical the officials and their institutions—resonated with the mass audience during World War II, and it achieved one of the largest readerships among the armed forces during the War.

    The overwhelming financial success of the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror during the mid-twentieth century—largely due to the lucrative advertising revenue gained from a mass market readership during a time of growing consumerism—started a change in British newspapers and journalism. Many other daily newspapers moved toward a tabloid approach as the business model became increasingly appealing, and those that did not began to struggle. While the Mirror continued to be successful, other significant rivals that remained closer to traditional ‘mass market broadsheets’ (such as the Daily Herald) disappeared.

    The Mirror began to decline in prominence after the 1960s, as it failed to judge the impact that the rise of television and youth culture would have on newspaper readership. Attempting to move slightly upmarket as the working-class became better educated and more affluent, it moved in the wrong direction and began to lose its audience, not helped by then Chairman Cecil King using it as a mouthpiece to further his own political ambitions. This was worsened by the emergence of a new generation of tabloid newspapers, led by The Sun: which was a relaunch of the failing Daily Herald that the Mirror Group had sold to Rupert Murdoch a few years before. By 1978, The Sun had overtaken the Mirror as the bestselling daily newspaper.

    After a decade of declining popularity and the political swing to Conservatism in the late 1970s leaving the newspaper catering for a smaller audience, The Mirror was sold to Robert Maxwell in 1984. When Maxwell died unexpectedly in 1991, the Mirror was left with significant debts, which led to its purchase by the Trinity Group in 1991, forming the Trinity-Mirror group (now Reach PLC). Despite the downturn in an increasingly competitive market since the 1980s, it remains one of the most historically significant newspapers in British history, prompting the change in approach that made it a distinctive voice among a market previously dominated by the broadsheets.

     

    1 Bingham, Adrian and Conboy, Martin: Tabloid Century: The Popular Press in Britain, 1896 to the present (Oxford, Peter Lang Ltd., 2015), pp.15.

  • The Making of Modern Law: U.S. Supreme Court Records and Briefs, 1832-1978

    Explore American legal history using documents from 140 years of cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.

    The Making of Modern Law: U.S. Supreme Court Records and Briefs, 1832-1978 contains the world's most comprehensive online collection of records and briefs brought before the nation's highest court by leading legal practitioners -- many who later became judges and associates of the court. It includes transcripts, applications for review, motions, petitions, supplements, and other official papers of the most-studied and talked-about cases, including many that resulted in landmark decisions. This collection serves the needs of students and researchers in American legal history, politics, society, and government, as well as practicing attorneys.

    Featuring background and context for the cases presented to the high court, The Making of Modern Law: U.S. Supreme Court Records and Briefs, 1832-1978 contains essential primary source material on every aspect of law -- civil rights law, constitutional law, corporate law, environmental law, gender law, labor law, legal history and legal theory, property law, taxation, and trademark and intellectual property law -- as well as the major topics in American history. A lawyer's brief often incorporates considerable historical, economic, and sociological data, which makes it a particularly rich archival source for lawyers, historians, and social scientists. From the generation before the American Civil War to the Vietnam War and Watergate, the collection offers an in-depth record of contemporary analytical writing by well-known social scientists, economists, sociologists, psychologists, social thinkers, scientists, historians, and academics.

    This collection is derived from two essential reference sources: Jenkins Memorial Law Library, America's first law library, and the Library of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. In addition to the full text of all works within this collection, additional details associated with each work have been captured to facilitate searching and ensure accessibility. Several search indexes have been developed utilizing this metadata, providing users with unequaled access to the content and providing full details within the full citation created for each work.

    This collection includes topics centering on:

    • The interpretation of the Constitution and its amendments
    • Judicial review and the role of the courts in American history
    • States' rights and national sovereignty
    • Free enterprise, banking, and commerce
    • Discrimination and modern civil liberties
    • Intellectual property and technology
    • Evolving nature of race, gender, faith, and identity
    • And much more

    In addition, The Making of Modern Law: Supreme Court Records and Briefs, 1832-1978:

    • Brings together a primary source component that scholars traditionally depend upon in order to answer key questions in legal and constitutional history
    • Revolutionizes the study of the Supreme Court -- the apex of the American judicial system and a critical focus for students of American politics, government and history -- by offering a fully searchable online resource to all major issues brought before the Supreme Court
    • Presents 140 years of court history, allowing researchers to trace the evolution of modern law in the United States
    • Supports research in other applications, including American economic history, American social history, rhetoric and the interpretation of language, African American history and critical race theory, feminist studies and jurisprudence, philosophy and ethics, social studies, and more

    With full-text search capabilities on the facsimile pages, researchers can conduct precise searches and comparative research in every area of law. Records include:

    • Case name
    • Variant case name
    • Document type
    • Document file date
    • Supreme Court term year
    • Docket number
    • Alternate docket number
    • U.S. Reports citation
    • Supreme Court Reporter citation
    • Lawyer's Edition citation
    • Opinion date
    • Author (counsel) names, including personal and organizational names
    • Case heard

     

    The Making of Modern Law: U.S. Supreme Court Records and Briefs, 1832-1978 includes famous briefs written by leading attorneys (many who later became judges and associates of the Court) such as Louis D. Brandeis, Abe Fortas, Thurgood Marshall, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It also contains briefs written by institutions, corporations, and advocacy groups, including NAACP, the ACLU and The New York Times. It covers cases whose landmark decisions have become an essential part of American law, politics and history, including:

    • "Dred Scott v. Sandford" (1857) held that a black slave could not become a citizen under the U.S. Constitution
    • "Plessy v. Ferguson" (1896), delivered the famous "separate but equal" decision allowing for racial segregation in public transportation
    • "Schenck v. United States" (1919) enunciated the "clear and present danger" rule as a means of testing the validity of government interference with freedom of speech
    • "New York Times Co. v. United States" (1971) the famous case of the "Pentagon Papers" during the Vietnam War era
    • "United States v. Richard M. Nixon" (1974) ordered President Nixon to obey a subpoena directing him to surrender tape recordings of conversations made in the White House during the Watergate scandal
  • The Making of the Modern World, Part IV: 1800 - 1890

    The Making of the Modern World: Part IV offers definitive coverage of the “Age of Capital,” the industrial revolution, and the High Victorian Era, when the foundations of modern-day capitalism and global trade were established. It includes unique material at the Senate House Library, University of London, that was not previously available; subsequent library acquisitions have broadened the scope of the Goldsmiths' Library of Economic Literature beyond economics. The core of the collection – 1850s – 1890 – offers rich content in the high Victorian period, the apogee of the British Empire. It is especially strong in “grey literature” and nonmainstream materials rarely preserved by libraries—including pamphlets, plans, ephemera, and private collections.

    With access to all four of The Making of the Modern World modules users will have the world’s greatest economic literature collection at their desktops.

    This is a major collection of rare and unique items that support a range of research and teaching topics in the 19th century, including slavery & abolition, the growth of capitalism, and the emergence of new political thinking such as nationalism and Marxism. The material that has been newly scanned from this period also includes the rise of the United States and Germany as economic power houses.

    Part IV also captures the hard-to-reach formats such as plans and pamphlets. This technically challenging material is now surfacing and offering original study resources to researchers. Grey literature, private publications, flyers, broadsheets and ephemera are the focus of much modern scholarship precisely because it is non-mainstream, hard to find in libraries, physically vulnerable to damage, loss and mis-filing, and of huge value.

  • Refugees, Relief, and Resettlement: Forced Migration and World War II


    Refugees, Relief, and Resettlement: Forced Migration and World War II chronicles the plight of refugees and displaced persons across Europe, North Africa, and Asia from 1935 to 1950 through correspondence, reports, studies, organisational and administrative files, and much more. It is the first multi-sourced digital collection to consider the global scope of the refugee crisis leading up to, during, and after World War II.

    Gathered together from key sources that include The U.K. National Archives, the British Library, the National Archives Records Administration in the United States, and World Jewish Relief, this archive documents the history of forced migration to uncover the hidden history of those displaced from their homes and the relief, resettlement, and repatriation efforts that followed.

    The archive chronicles not only the plight of those made to resettle inside and outside national borders owing to war and ethnic and political persecution, it also addresses the unique factors to give rise to the many kinds of refugees, from evacuees and displaced persons, to population transferees and forced labourers.

    Refugees, Relief and Resettlement: Forced Migrations and World War II represents an ambitious first step in a series of titles that will explore the history of refugeeism from the late 19th century through mid- to late 20th century.

     

    VALUE TO RESEARCHERS

    Relates to Current Issues: Forced migration represents one of the most pressing issues of our time. From the flight of Rohingya from Myanmar and Syrians from their homeland to longstanding crises in Sudan and Afghanistan, the world refugee crisis has in the last decade reached levels not seen since the end of the Second World War. In the same way, refugee influxes today have transformed government policy in this age of Brexit, Donald Trump, and European nationalism. Refugees, Relief, and Resettlement: Forced Migration and World War II sheds light on how the nearly 60 million displaced people by the war’s end would significantly reshape post-war diplomacy, political life, and society.

    Growing Academic Field of Study: The study of forced migration, or refugee studies, is an expanding field as the plight and presence of refugees gain ever more media attention and require a growing number of professionals to address the needs of these populations. Alongside programs dedicated entirely to refugee studies, courses and course sections on refugee issues in a variety of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences is matched only by the rapid growth of peer-reviewed publications on this topic.

    Interdisciplinary Nature and Global in Scope: Refugee studies is cross-disciplinary by nature, drawing in scholars of history, economics, psychology, public health, sociology, anthropology, religion, language and literature and nearly all regions within area studies/global studies.


    Refugees, Relief, and Resettlement: Forced Migration and World War II includes the following collections which are being digitized for the first time:

    • Refugee Records from the General Correspondence Files of the Political Departments of the Foreign Office, Record Group 371, 1938-1950, sourced from The National Archives, Kew
    • Refugee Files from the Records of the Foreign Office, 1938-1950, sourced from The  National Archives, Kew
    • Refugee Records from the War Cabinet, the Colonial Office, the Home Office and the War Office, 1935-1949, sourced from The National Archives, Kew
    • Documentation from these three collections together address the plight of various ethnicities: Albanian, Arab, Armenian, Assyrian, Austrian, Baltic, Belgian, British, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Ethiopian, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Jewish, Latvian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Ukrainian, and Yugoslavian.
    • Also included are displaced populations fleeing from or being resettled in: Austria, Belgium, Brazil, British Guyana, Central and Eastern Europe, China, Cyprus, Denmark, East, North, and Southwest Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, France, Germany, Gibraltar, Greece, India, Iran, Iraq, Italy, Jamaica, Mauritius, North Africa, Palestine, Poland, Portugal, Rhodesia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Tanganyika, the Middle East, the United Kingdom, Turkey, and Yugoslavia

COMING SOON

  • DESIGN ENHANCEMENTS TO THE MAKING OF MODERN LAW

    We released experience and design enhancements to The Making of Modern Law resources on Friday July 31st, which contained:

    • Enhanced product platform
    • Improved accessibility
    • Smarter search results
    • Streamlined user interface
    • Secure product access

    We’re doing everything we can to ensure that these enhancements launch seamlessly to your end-users. In regards to MARC records, all existing URLs will continue to work, and started automatically redirecting on July 31st.

  • SOURCES IN U.S HISTORY ONLINE HAS CHANGED

    At the end of July, this archive collection was renamed as Introductions to U.S. History, and is now part of the Archives Unbound product range. Most significantly, it is now cross-searchable on the Gale Primary Sources platform for the first time!

    INTRODUCTION TO U.S. HISTORY: THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

    Sources in U.S. History Online: The American Revolution is a digital archive documenting the revolution and war that created the United States of America, from the Paris peace treaty in 1763 through the early protests in 1785 to the Paris peace treaty of 1783. The collection examines the political, social, and intellectual upheaval of the age, as well as the actual war for American independence through its eight long years of conflict. A wealth of material from the European point of view is included.

    The archive tells the whole story of the American Revolution -- the experiences of commanders and common soldiers, women and slaves, American Indians and Loyalists are all recorded. A variety of primary source documents -- personal narratives and memoirs, political pamphlets and speeches, sermons and poems, legislative journals and popular magazines, maps and more -- cover the diversity of:

    • Battles -- from the Battle of Bunker Hill to the siege of Yorktown
    • Individuals -- from John Adams to Edmund Burke
    • Organizations -- from the American Philosophical Society to the Whig Party
    • Perspectives -- from the American loyalists to patriot preachers
    • Places -- from Falmouth, England, to Fort Ticonderoga, New York
    • Topics -- from agriculture to valor
    • And more

    Sources in U.S. History Online: The American Revolution allows researchers to examine economics, international relations, religion, and science as well as the strategies and battlefield realities of combatants on both sides of the conflict. The archive provides a rich sense of the causes and consequences of one of the great turning points in history.

    INTRODUCTION TO U.S. HISTORY: THE CIVIL WAR

    Sources in U.S. History Online: The Civil War documents the war that transformed America, ending slavery and unifying the nation around the principles of freedom. The collection examines the war and all its complexity -- its causes and consequences, its battles and campaigns, its political and religious aspects, the experiences of its leaders and common soldiers, the home front and the military campground, and more.

    This digital archive includes a variety of primary source documents -- personal narratives and memoirs, pamphlets and political speeches, sermons and songs, regimental histories and photograph albums, legal treatises, and children's books -- unveiling a time when friends were enemies and the United States were torn in half. Users can read about:

    • Battles -- some of the bloodiest in U.S. history
    • Military tactics and technology -- rifled barrels, trench warfare and other tactics and technology that pioneered modern warfare
    • Individuals -- William T. Sherman, Jubal A. Early, and others from both sides of the conflict
    • Societal impact -- sanitation, medicine, civilian life, clergy response, and more
    • Law, government, and foreign policy -- the rights of secession, Britain's view of the war, abolition of slavery, constitutional debates, presidential elections, and more

    Every aspect of the Civil War is covered: military, diplomatic, and cultural and legal history as well as special areas of study, including Southern history, African American history, medical history, history of technology, and more.

    INTRODUCTION TO U.S. HISTORY: SLAVERY IN AMERICA

    No study of the United States is complete without detailed research on the issue of slavery and its impact on American society and culture. Sources in U.S. History Online: Slavery in America documents key aspects of the history of slavery in the United States, from its origins in Africa to its abolition, including materials on the slave trade, plantation life, emancipation, pro-slavery and anti-slavery arguments, religious views on slavery, and other related topics.

    This digital archive provides access to a wide variety of documents -- personal narratives, political speeches, sermons, plays, songs, poetic and fictional works, and more -- published from the time of the transatlantic slave trade to the post-Civil War period. Users will find information surrounding important individuals, influential perspectives, controversial topics, key cases, and significant events, including Harriet Tubman and the underground railroad, the Fifteenth Amendment, and the New York African Free School.

    Primary sources are the most relevant materials for information about the influential events in U.S. history because they are written by those who witnessed it. Sources in U.S. History Online: Slavery in America provides researchers with unprecedented access to the essential documents that tell the story of slavery and the fight for abolition -- a complex topic that is critical to any study of U.S. history. Vernon Burton, Coastal Carolina University, and Troy Smith, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign reviewed a list of thousands of titles from several Gale collections -- including Sabin Americana, 1500-1926Travels in the Old South, the Anti-Slavery Collection from Oberlin College, and The Making of Modern Law -- to select the most meaningful and relevant documents for this comprehensive survey of slavery in America.

     

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

VP of Primary Sources publishing, Seth Cayley, gives a deeper look at The Mirror Historical Archive:


 

An extended look at International Perspectives on LGBTQ Activism and Culture:

 

New Contextual Essays:

Gale Digital Scholar Lab Case Studies:

Read our new case studies, which focus on how Gale Primary Sources and Gale Digital Scholar Lab are being used at Universities around the world.
 

Embracing the Spirit Of Discovery at Fudan University with Gale Scholar and Gale Digital Scholar Lab

Fudan University, China

 

Driving Departmental Change and Teaching Digital Humanities Courses with Gale Digital Scholar Lab

University of Adelaide, Australia

NEWS AND UPDATES


PREFERENCE CENTRE

To make sure we are sending you the communications you are interested in, we have added a new section to the website where you can keep your details up to date, and let us know what topics you would like to be kept informed on.

VISIT THE PREFERENCE CENTRE
 


PLATFORM UPDATES

We have created a new section on the website that lists the improvements and enhancements we have made to the Gale Primary Sources platform, and a preview of upcoming developments.
 

GALE PRIMARY SOURCES PLATFORM ENHANCEMENTS
 


COUNTER 5 STANDARDS
AND USAGE STATISTICS

In order to be COUNTER 5 compliant, monograph-based archives on our updated platform no longer calculate retrievals at the page-level, but at the title-level: therefore, it is expected that retrievals for monograph-based archives will have decreased since the December. There is a particular issue with Archives Unbound, Making of the Modern World, and Sabin Americana which is causing retrievals to be underrepresented due to a separate problem, which will be corrected starting in March.


NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
VIRTUAL LIBRARY

As of November 1 2019, the years 1995-2015 of the magazine archive are also available as a one-time purchase (previously subscription only). The years 1995-current can still be purchased as a subscription if you wish to buy the base archive covering 1888-1994.

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