Launched on 1 April Connected Histories: Sources for Building British History, 1500-1900 is a federated search engine to search in a single search a wide range of distributed digital resources relating to early modern and nineteenth-century British history.

The following 11 resources are included:

• British History Online: The digital library of primary and secondary sources for the history of Britain, from the Middle Ages to c.1900.
• British Museum Images: The collection provides searchable access to almost 100,000 images, relating to early modern and 19th-century Britain.
• British Newspapers, 1600-1900: The most comprehensive digital historic British newspaper archive in existence, with 3 million pages of historic newspapers, newsbooks and ephemera from national and regional papers.  Oxford user? Check below for tip how to connect to British Newspapers from Connected Histories.
• Charles Booth Online Archive: The online archive provides access to guides, digitised images and maps from the Booth archive collections at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the University of London Library.
• Clergy of the Church of England Database 1540-1835: A database containing details of the careers of more than 130,000 clergymen of the Church of England between 1540 and 1835, from over 50 archives in England and Wales.
• House of Commons Parliamentary Papers: The Parliamentary Papers gives access to page images and searchable full text for over 200,000 House of Commons sessional papers and supplementary information from 1688 onwards.
• John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera: The collection provides access to more than 67,000 scanned items from the Bodleian Library’s holdings documenting various aspects of everyday life in Britain from the 18th to the early 20th century.
• Old Bailey Proceedings Online, 1674-1913: The Old Bailey Online contains accounts of the trials conducted at London’s central criminal court between 1674 and 1913; and also the Ordinary’s Accounts – detailed narratives of the lives and deaths of convicts executed at Tyburn, published between 1676 and 1772.
• London Lives 1600-1800: London Lives provides a fully searchable edition of 240,000 manuscript pages from eight London archives and 15 datasets, giving access to 3.5 million names.
• Origins Network: Origins.net offers online access to some of the richest ancestral information available. The collection searchable through Connected Histories focuses on the early modern history of London.
• John Strype’s Survey of London: This is a full-text electronic version of John Strype’s enormous two-volume survey of 1720, complete with its celebrated maps and plates, which depict the prominent buildings, street plans and ward boundaries of the late Stuart capital.

Oxford Users

Please note that some of the resources searched are free while others require subscriptions. Fortunately Oxford users have access to all resources with the single exception of Origins.net.

Connecting to Burney:

If you find results from British Newspapers, 1600-1900 (aka 17th and 18th Century Burney Collection), you will be prompted with the UserGroup Identification. Type in oxford to proceed.

Remote access to Oxford subscription resources works best if you use VPN.