NCCO's content is sourced from the world's preeminent libraries and archives. It consists of monographs, newspapers, pamphlets, manuscripts, ephemera, maps, photographs, statistics, and other kinds of documents in both Western and non-Western languages. For printed materials, users may download the scanned OCR as a text file to mine the data for themselves. Textual analysis tools, public and private tagging, an annotation feature, full Zotero compatibility, and social media sharing help users to organize content for their own research and to share their findings with colleagues, students, and the entire Nineteenth Century Collections Online community.
Asia and the West: Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange features primary source collections related to international relations between Asian countries and the West during the 19th century. These invaluable documents--many never before available--include government reports, diplomatic correspondences, periodicals, newspapers, treaties, trade agreements, NGO papers, and more. Documents are sourced from The National Archives, Kew; The National Archives, United States; and other collections.
This unmatched resource allows scholars to explore in great detail the history of British and U.S. foreign policy and diplomacy; Asian political, economic, and social affairs; the Philippine Insurrection; the Opium Wars; the Boxer Rebellion; missionary activity in Asia; and many other topics. Asia and the West also includes personal letters and diaries, offering first-hand accounts and revealing the human side of international politics, as well as nautical charts, maps, shipping ledgers, company records, and expedition and survey reports for more than a century of world history.
Including papers of British statesmen, Home Office records, ordnance surveys, working class autobiographies, and other unique collections, British Politics and Society is a remarkable resource for scholars looking to explore the political and social history of Britain. Source libraries are the British Library, Oxford University, and The National Archives, Kew.
British Politics and Society enables researchers to explore such topics as British domestic and foreign policy, trade unions, Chartism, utopian socialism, public protest, radical movements, the cartographic record, political reform, education, family relationships, religion, leisure and many others. With this archive scholars have instant access to a range of never-before-available primary sources, including manuscripts, maps, drawings, newspapers, periodicals, government correspondence, letters, diaries, photographs, poster, pamphlets and more.
British Theatre, Music, and Literature: High and Popular Culture features a wide range of primary sources related to the arts in the Victorian era, from playbills and scripts to operas and complete scores. These rare documents, many of them never before available, were sourced from the British Library and other renowned institutions, and curated by experts in British arts history. Covering more than a century, British Theatre, Music, and Literature is without equal as a resource for 19th century scholars. These rare documents, many of them never before available, were sourced from the British Library and other renowned institutions, and curated by experts in British arts history.
This unparalleled collection provides a detailed look at the state of the British art world with, for example, not only manuscripts and compositions, but also documents such as personal letters, annotated programs, meeting minutes, and financial records, offering scholars an unmatched glimpse into the inner workings of the arts world and life in Victorian Britain.
Children's Literature and Childhood provides a wide range of primary sources related to the experience of childhood in the long nineteenth century. Included in the archive are books and periodicals for children, primers and other material related to education, pamphlets produced by child welfare groups, documents and photos related to children and crime, newspapers produced by youths, and much more. Curated by experts in the field of children's literature, this unique assemblage of material is sourced from such renowned institutions as the University of Florida's Baldwin Library Collection of Historical Children's Literature, the National Archives (UK), and the British Library, among others.
In its focus and range, Children's Literature and Childhood offers an array of compelling subjects for research and teaching. Children's literature from any period reflects that period's social, moral, economic, and political views. This archive serves as a rich resource for nineteenth-century study across disciplines.
So many research topics emerged from the colonial conquest and the legacy of slavery in modern South African society—the Anglo-Boer War, imperial policy, and race classification among them—that this volatile corner of nineteenth-century history draws enduring interest from scholars and students. To support their research, Europe and Africa: Commerce, Christianity, Civilization, and Conquest delivers monographs, manuscripts, and newspaper accounts covering key issues of economics, world politics, and international strategy.
The "Scramble for Africa" began with the arrival of missionaries and explorers to the "Dark Continent" in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Over the next 100 years, Africa would be "Christianized" by European missionaries; "commercialized" as an outlet for European-produced consumer goods and source for raw materials; and "civilized" by the establishment of European political institutions and the arrival of European settlers. Europe and Africa: Commerce, Christianity, Civilization, and Conquest provides an in-depth look into the motivations, activities, and results of the European conquest of Africa in the nineteenth century.
European Literature, 1790-1840: The Corvey Collection includes the full-text of more than 9,500 English, French and German titles. The collection is sourced from the remarkable library of Victor Amadeus, whose Castle Corvey collection was one of the most spectacular discoveries of the late 1970s. The Corvey Collection comprises one of the most important archives of Romantic era writing in existence anywhere--including fiction, short prose, dramatic works, poetry and more--with a focus on especially difficult-to-find works by lesser-known, historically neglected writers.
As a resource for Romantic literature and historical studies, the Corvey Collection is unmatched. It provides a wealth of fully searchable content with digital research tools that enable scholars to uncover new relationships among authors and works. The inclusion of texts from neglected writers further provides scholars with new topics for exploration. With the European Literature, 1790-1840: The Corvey Collection, scholars can research a range of topics, including Romantic literary genres; the mutual influences of British, French and German Romanticism; literary culture; women writers; the canon; Romantic aesthetics; and many other subjects.
The Mapping the World: Maps and Travel Literature archive includes a myriad of maps representing the long nineteenth century. Selections have been culled from the vast map repositories of the British Library and the National Archives at Kew. In addition to these large map collections, maps representing the Americas, and in particular America's westward expansion, have been provided by the American Antiquarian Society. Maps depicting Canada and the polar regions have been generously provided by the University of Alberta.
Bryn Mawr's extensive collection of European Travel accounts provides a sweeping glance of the travel narrative genre. In addition to the Bryn Mawr Collection, selected travel narratives have been included from the collections of the American Antiquarian Society and the British Library.
The invention of photography represented a turning point in nineteenth-century culture and visual experience. For the first time, there was a means to capture an accurate and true portrayal of the people, places and events that would shape history. As a complement to studies of history, culture, media and many other disciplines, this archive provides the visual evidence to support and supplement written sources.
Photography: The World through the Lens assembles collections of photographs, photograph albums, photographically illustrated books and texts on the early history of photography from libraries and archives from across the globe. Some images are well-known while many have rarely been viewed. The nineteenth century was about family and society, invention and scientific discovery, exploration and colonization, urban versus rural life, work, leisure and travel—all this is captured in photographs. This engaging resource serves multiple disciplines and supports a range of research and study topics.
When the nineteenth century opened in Britain and the United States, it would not have been unusual to think that mainstream Christianity had made its peace with eighteenth-century rationalism and Enlightenment thought. In New England, the location of almost all of the elite American colleges, a Unitarian Deism had become the norm among faculty and students. As the century opened in Britain, William Paley published his Natural Theology (1802), a text that seemed to successfully integrate eighteenth-century natural science and religious belief into a sophisticated scheme proving that the universe demonstrated its own divine design. Liberal Christianity, however, would not go uncontested. The nineteenth century, instead, was punctuated by economic, social, and intellectual events that birthed two powerful waves of evangelical revival, waves that in turn sparked highly influential religious and secular responses of a rationalist, philosophically organicist, or countercultural character. These disruptive events included the demographic upheavals of the early and second industrial revolutions, the mid-century revolutionary political upsurges of 1848, labor restiveness, English translation of German historical biblical scholarship, stratigraphic geology spawned by the mining industry, and the natural selection thesis so forcefully argued by Darwin's Origin of the Species (1859). All three types of intellectual response were associated with powerful impulses toward moral or social reform. It is impossible, in fact, to consider the topic of religion in the long nineteenth century without considering its relationship to the abolition of slavery, woman suffrage, temperance, conditions of labor, utopian experiments in living, missions to aid the poor, and the emergence of Christian Socialism and the Social Gospel movement.
This archive of documents covers one of the most vibrant and creative periods in scientific research and discovery, the long nineteenth century. The modern researcher can exploit the more than 3.5 million pages of journals, books, reports, and personal documents to explore the rapid acceleration of scientific, technical, and medical knowledge, tracing the changes from the Newtonian world to that of Einstein, from the horse to the automobile, from medical treatments based on humors and bloodletting to antiseptics and epidemiology. This archive covers every aspect of nineteenth-century science: electricity and electromagnetism, mathematics and engineering, astronomy and astrophysics, color theory and the theory of natural selection, geology and mineralogy, chemistry and medicine. This period was also considered the last great age of discovery, as explorers charted the interiors of the Americas, Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Arctic and Antarctic regions. The documents collected represent the most theoretical pursuits as well as practical applications and popular science.
This second part of the Science, Technology, and Medicine archive includes some three million pages of scientific material from the late seventeenth century through the first quarter of the twentieth century, with a primary focus on the nineteenth century. The collection is divided into four major parts: academies of science publications, natural history, public health, and entomology. Taken together, the documents in this collection offer students and scholars a rare window onto the development of modern science and its methods.
Of particular utility to all scientific researchers is the unique collection Academies of Science Publications, which runs from 1665 to 1925. The academies were not only the first major research centers but also the first organizations dedicated to the promotion of scientific knowledge and inquiry. Their publications have a formidable intellectual reach, covering every area of science as well as related areas of technical and social concern. The thousands of digitized volumes are often beautifully illustrated and impeccably edited, containing articles by every major scientist in the era that dawned with the Newtonian mechanical universe and culminated with the uncertainty of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.
Issues of gender and class ignited nineteenth-century debate in the context of suffrage movements, culture, immigration, health and many other concerns. Using a wide array of primary source documents—serials, books, manuscripts, diaries, reports, and visuals—Women: Transnational Networks focuses on issues at the intersection of gender and class from the late-eighteenth century to the era of suffrage in the early-twentieth century, all through a transnational perspective. The collection contains deep information on European and North American movements, but also expands its scope to include collections from other regions.
May 30, 2012