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Department of History

HI2E4 Research Project - Archives and Primary Sources

Archives

General
Early Modern
Modern Britain and Europe
Wider World
Medical
Further reading

Archives: The Journal of the British Records Association

  • Bastian Jeannette, “Reading Colonial Records Through an Archival Lens: The Provenance of Place, Space and Creation,” Archival Science, 6 (2006)
  • Beal, Peter, In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and Their Makers in Seventeenth-Century England ( 1998)
  • Brett, Michael, Approaching African History (Rochester, Boydell & Brewer, 2013), see “The Written Dimension” and “The Scriptural Dimension”
  • Burton, Antoinette, ‘Introduction: Archive Fever, Archive Stories’, in Antoinette Burton (ed.), Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History (Durham and London, 2005)
  • Burton, Antoinette, Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India (Oxford, 2003)
  • Cook, Terry,‘The Archive(s) is a Foreign Country: Historians, Archivists and the Changing Archival Landscape’, American Archivist, 74, no. 2 (2011), pp. 600-632
  • Crick, Julia and Alexandra Walsham ed, The Uses of Script and Print, 1300-1700 (2004), introduction
  • Derrida, Jacques, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (University of Chicago Press, 1996)
  • Hamilton, Carolyn, Refiguring the Archive (Springer, 2002)
  • Love, Harold, ‘Oral and Scribal Texts in Early Modern England’, in The Cambridge History of the Book, ed. by John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (2002).
  • Millstone, Noah, Manuscript Circulation and the Invention of Politics in Early Stuart England (2016)
  • Peters, Kate, Alexandra Walsham, and Liesbeth Corens, Archives and Information in the Early Modern World (2018), Introduction also chapter 7 by Heather Wolfe and Peter Stallybrass
  • Pollmann, Judith, ‘Archiving the Present and Chronicling for the Future in Early Modern Europe’ Past & Present, 230, (2016), pp. 231-252.
  • Sangha, Laura and Jonathan Willis, Understanding Early Modern Primary Sources (London: Routledge, 2016)
  • Steedman, Carolyn, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (Rutgers University Press, 2002)
  • Stoler, Ann Laura, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance,” Archival Science 2 (2002)
  • Stoler, Ann Laura, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, 2010)
  • Wagner, Kim and Ricardo Roque, Engaging Colonial Knowledge: Reading European Archives in World History (Palgrave, 2011)
  • Walsham, Alexandra, ‘The Social History of the Archive: Record-Keeping in Early Modern Europe’, Past & Present, Volume 230, Issue Supplement 11 (November, 2016), pp. 9-48.
  • Zemon Davies, Natalie, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (1987), introduction.

Printed Sources

General
Early Modern
Modern Britain and Europe
Wider World
Further Reading
  • Barnard, John, D. F. McKenzie, David McKitterick and, I. R. Willison, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain (Cambridge, 2011-2019), 7 vols.
  • Bates, Denise, Historical Research Using British Newspapers (Pen and Sword, 2016)
  • Darnton, Robert, “What Is the History of Books?”, Daedalus, 111 (1982)
  • Davies, C. S.L, 'Representation, Repute, Reality', English Historical Review 124 (2009)
  • Dobson, Miriam and Benjamin Ziemann, eds, Reading Primary Sources: The Interpretation of Texts from Nineteenth and Twentieth Century History (Routledge, 2008)
  • Eisenstein, Elizabeth, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge, 1980)
  • Gaskell, Philip, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford, 1972)
  • Gough, Hugh, The Newspaper Press in the French Revolution (Chicago, 1988)
  • Heyd, Uriel, Reading Newspapers: Press and Public in Eighteenth-Century Britain and America (Oxford, 2012)
  • Howsam, Leslie, The Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book (Cambridge, 2015)
  • Johns, Adrian, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, 2009)
  • Martin, Shannon, and Kathleen Hansen, eds, Newspapers of Record in a Digital Age: From Hot Type to Hot Link (Greenwood, 1998)
  • Sangha, Laura and Jonathan Willis, Understanding Early Modern Primary Sources (London: Routledge, 2016), chapter 4 ‘Print’.
  • Suarez, Michael and H. R. Woudhuysen (eds), The Book: A Global History (Oxford University Press, 2013)
  • Walton, Charles, ed., Into Print: Limits and Legacies of the Enlightenment (Penn State, 2011)
  • Williams, Kevin, Read All About It!: A History of the British Newspaper (Routledge, 2010)
  • Withers, Charles W. J and Miles Ogborn (eds), Geographies of the Book (London, 2010)
  • Sample Topics
  • Restrictions on Public Meetings in Hyde Park: June 1855 and Summer 1866 (AntonyTaylor,"Commons-Stealers", "Land-Grabbers" and "Jerry-Builders": Space, Popular Radicalism and the Politics of Public Access in London, 1848-1880', International Review of Social History, 40(3):383-407)
  • The Great Stink of London, summer 1858 (ClareHorrocks,'The Personification of "Father Thames": Reconsidering the Role of the Victorian Periodical Press in the "Verbal and Visual Campaign" for Public Health Reform',Victorian Periodicals Review. 36:1 (2003),2-19)
  • Whitechapel Murders, September 1888 (Judy Walkowitz, ‘Jack the Ripper and the myth of male violence’, Feminist Studies, 1982)
  • Ruth Ellis and debates about capital punishment, July 1955 (Lizzie Seal, 'Ruth Ellis and Public Contestation of the Death Penalty' Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 50:5 (2011): 492-504)
  • The Wolfenden Report and the Reform of Laws on Homosexuality, 1957 (Brian Lewis, Wolfenden's Witnesses: Homosexuality in Post-War Britain (Palgrave, 2016))

To find further examples of secondary literature to support your chosen topic use the Bibliography of British and Irish History

Visual sources

General

Early Modern

Modern Britain and Europe

Wider World

Further reading
  • Armstrong, Catherine, Using Non-Textual Sources: A Historian’s Guide (Bloomsbury, 2015)
  • Auslander, Leora, “Beyond Words”, American Historical Review 110 (2005): 1015-45.
  • Barber, Sarah, and Corinna Peniston-Bird, eds, History Beyond the Text: A Student’s Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources (Routledge, 2009)
  • Berger, John, Ways of Seeing (Viking, 1973)
  • Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction (New York: Knopf, 1979)
  • Burke, Peter, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (London, 2001)
  • Clark, Stuart, Vanities of the Eye. Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford, 2007)
  • De Jongh, Eddy, 'Realism and Seeming-Realism in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting', in: Wayne E. Franits (ed.), Looking at Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art (Cambridge: University Press, 1997)
  • Gaskell, Ivan, “Visual History”, in Peter Burke (ed.), New Perspectives on Historical Writing (Cambridge, 1991)
  • Harley, J.B. et al, eds, The History of Cartography (1987 - ), 6 vols.
  • Harley, J.B., “Deconstructing the Map,” Cartographica 26 (1989)
  • Harley, J.B., The New Nature of Maps (Johns Hopkins, 2001)
  • Haskell, Francis, History and its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (London, 1995)
  • Hunter, Michael, Printed Images in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Interpretation (Routledge, 2016)
  • Jordanova, Ludmilla, “Approaching Visual Materials”, in Simon Gunn and Lucy Faire, eds, Research Methods for History(Edinburgh, 2011)
  • Jordanova, Ludmilla, The Look of the Past: Visual and Material Evidence in Historical Practice (Cambridge, 2012)
  • Rose, Gillian, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials (Sage, 2016)
  • Rosenstone, Robert, “History in Images/History in Words: Reflections on the Possibility of Really Putting History onto Film”, American Historical Review 93 (1988)
  • Rosenstone, Robert, History on Film/Film on History (Routledge, 2006)
  • Sangha, Laura and Jonathan Willis, Understanding Early Modern Primary Sources (London: Routledge, 2016), chapter 7 ‘Visual and material sources’.
  • Slide, Antonthy, Nitrate Won't Wait: A History of Film Preservation in the United States (Jefferson, MacFarland and Co, 1992)
  • Sontag, Susan, On Photography (Penguin, 1979)
  • White, Hayden, “Historiography and Historiophoty”, American Historical Review 93 (1988)

Material culture collections

Further reading
  • Appadurai, Arjun, The Social Life of Things (Cambridge, 1988)
  • Armstrong, Catherine, Using Non-Textual Sources: A Historian’s Guide (Bloomsbury, 2015)
  • Auslander, Leora, “Beyond Words”, American Historical Review 110 (2005)
  • Brett, Michael, Approaching African History (Rochester, Boydell & Brewer, 2013), see “The Archaeological Dimension”
  • Clark, Stuart, Vanities of the Eye. Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford, 2007)
  • Craciun, Adriana, and Simon Schaffer, eds, The Material Cultures of Enlightenment Arts and Sciences (Palgrave, 2016)
  • Findlen, Paula, ed., Early Modern Things: Objects and Their Histories, 1500–1800 (New York, 2013)
  • Hannan, Leonie and Sarah Longair, eds, History Through Material Culture (Manchester University Press, 2017)
  • Hansen, Valerie, The Silk Road: A New History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)
  • Hicks, Dan and Mary C. Beaudry, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies (Oxford University Press, 2010)
  • Hood, Adrienne, “Material Culture”, in Barber, Sarah, and Corinna Peniston-Bird, History Beyond the Text: A Student’s Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources (Routledge, 2009)
  • Jordanova, Ludmilla, The Look of the Past: Visual and Material Evidence in Historical Practice (Cambridge, 2012)
  • Riello, Giorgio and Anne Gerritsen, eds, The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the First Global Age (London: Routledge, 2015)
  • Riello, Giorgio and Anne Gerritsen, eds, Writing Material Culture History (London: Bloomsbury, 2014)
  • Sangha, Laura and Jonathan Willis, Understanding Early Modern Primary Sources (London: Routledge, 2016), chapter 7 ‘Visual and material sources’.
  • Smith, Pamela, “Historians in the Laboratory: Reconstruction of Renaissance Art and Technology in the Making and Knowing Project”, Art History 39 (2016)
  • Thomas, Nicholas, ed., Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Harvard, 1994)
  • Tilley, Christopher, Susanne Kuechler-Fogden, Mike Rowlands, and Patricia Spyer, eds, Handbook of Material Culture (Sage, 2017)

Oral and sound archives

Further reading
  • Abrams, Lynn, Oral History Theory (Routledge, 2016), 2nd ed.
  • Lummis, Trevor, Listening to History: The Authenticity of Oral Evidence (Barnes and Noble, 1987)
  • Perks Robert and Alistair Thomson, eds, The Oral History Reader (Routledge, 2006)
  • Ritchie, Donald, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Oral History (Oxford, 2011)
  • Tonkin, Elizabeth, Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History (Cambridge, 1992)
  • Thompson, Paul, Voices of the Past: Oral History (Oxford, 2000)
  • Vansina, Jan, Oral Tradition as History (Oxford, 1985)
  • White, L, S. F. Miescher and D. W. Cohen, eds, African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral History (Bloomington IN, 2001)

Sources in foreign languages

  • Sources Portal for the Weimar Republic
  • German History in Documents and Images
  • Eurodocs
  • Bary, Theodore de, Wing-tsit Chan, and Burton Watson, eds., Sources of Chinese Tradition (Columbia University Press, 1999), 2 vols.
  • Bidlack, Richard, and Nikita Lomagin, The Leningrad Blockade, 1941-1944: A New Documentary History from the Soviet Archives, Annals of Communism (Yale University Press, 2012)
  • Corley, Felix, ed., Religion in the Soviet Union: An Archival Reader (New York: New York University Press, 1996)
  • Dmytryshyn, Basil, ed., Imperial Russia: A Source Book, 1700-1917 (Dryden Press, 1974)
  • Ebrey, Patricia Buckley, ed., Chinese Civilization: A Sourcebook (Free Press, 1993)
  • Engel, Barbara Alpern, and Anastasia Posadskaya-Vanderbeck, eds., A Revolution of Their Own: Voices of Women in Soviet History (Westview Press, 1997)
  • Eudin, Xenia Joukoff, and Robert C. North, Soviet Russia and the East, 1920-1927: A Documentary Survey (Hoover Library on War, Revolution, and Peace), no. 25 (Stanford, Calif. ; London: Stanford University Press : Oxford University Press, 1957)
  • Fitzpatrick, Sheila, and Yuri Slezkine, eds., In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000)
  • Freeze, Gregory L., From Supplication to Revolution: A Documentary Social History of Imperial Russia (New York: OUP USA, 1988)
  • Frierson, Cathy A., Silence Was Salvation: Child Survivors of Stalin’s Terror and World War II in the Soviet Union, Annals of Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015)
  • Hillenbrand, Carole, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (Routledge, 2000)
  • Garros, Véronique, Natalia Korenevskaya, and Thomas Lahusen, eds., Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930’s(New York: New Press, 1995)
  • Geldern, James Von, and Richard Stites, Mass Culture in Soviet Russia: Tales, Poems, Songs, Movies, Plays, and Folklore, 1917-1953 (Indiana University Press, 1995)
  • Jansen, K. L., J. Drell, and F. Andrews (eds), Medieval Italy: Texts in Translation (Philadelphia, 2009).
  • Levi, Scott C. and Ron Sela, eds., Islamic Central Asia: An Anthology of Historical Sources (Indiana University Press, 2010)
  • Siegelbaum, Lewis H., A. K. Sokolov, L. Kosheleva, and Sergei Zhuravlev, eds., Stalinism as a Way of Life: A Narrative in Documents, Annals of Communism Series (Yale University Press, 2000)
  • Vernadsky, George, and S. G. Pushkarev, eds., A Source Book for Russian History from Early Times to 1917 (Yale University Press, 1972)