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Department of History

Electronic sources

Electronic Sources for use in essays


Full text is searchable for 9.5 million pages for over 184,000 parliamentary papers.

A full set of 18th, 19th and 20th Century British Official Publications consists of approximately 250,000 Parliamentary Papers and an unknown number of non-parliamentary publications.

  • Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: see Library e-sources page for direct access and access via Athens

An illustrated collection of more than 50,000 specially written biographies of the men and women who shaped all aspects of Britain's past, from the fourth century BC to the year 2001. It contains biographies of 55,000 people, has 62 million words, 10,000 contributors, and 10,000 images. It is searchable by keyword, person, date and place.

  • The Times: see Library e-sources page for direct access and access via Athens

It is possible to search through the complete digital edition of The Times (1785-1985), using keyword searching to retrieve full facsimile images of either a specific article or a complete page. The entire newspaper is captured, with all articles, advertisements and illustrations/photos divided into categories to facilitate searching.

The Proceedings contain accounts of trials which took place at the Old Bailey. The crimes tried were mostly felonies (predominantly theft), but also include some of the most serious misdemeanours.

The Spectator (1711-14), by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, was an extremely innovative publication; it was enormously influential, not only in the content of its speculations on aesthetics, literary style, and urban life, but also as a medium. It, along with the Tatler, inaugurated the tradition of the daily periodical whose subject was not news, but literature and manners, and they adapted the gentlemanly culture of polite letters to a wide print audience.

  • Eighteenth-century collections online: see Library e-sources page for direct access and access via Athens

Eighteenth Century Collections Online allows access to the digital images of every page of 150,000 books published during the 18th century. There is full-text searching of approximately 33 million pages of every book published in England during the 18th century

Full text searchable copies of texts from a range of women writers.

The John Johnson Collection is one of the most important collections of printed ephemera in the world. It was assembled by John de Monins Johnson between c.1923 and 1956. The majority of material dates from the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. There are over 1 million items in the original collection. The material is principally British. See also the collection of broadside ballads: http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ballads/ballads.htm

  • In addition use electronic bibliographic finding aids: most importantly Historical Abstracts (reached via Library e-sources page) and the History e-books project.