The Bodleian Libraries have committed substantial external funding to a one-off set of purchases of electronic research resources deemed to be important to researchers in the University. This follows a project to identify desiderata across all subjects and to list suggestions from readers. The list includes items costing up to £125,000 which cannot easily be covered by recurrent budgets. The first tranche of purchases includes a number of important primary sources from Gale Cengage, including some of particular interest to US historians such as NCCO: Women: Transnational Networks and Political extremism & radicalism in the twentieth century, together with their new Gale Digital Scholar Lab, which will allow digital research methods to be applied across all the primary sources published by them and acquired by the Bodleian Libraries.
Nineteenth Century Collections Online: Women: Transnational Networks
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) this resource 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.
Researchers and scholars will find rare content related to:
- Social reform movements and groups
- High and popular culture
- Literature and the arts
- Immigration
- Daily life
- Religion
Source libraries include the Library of Congress, the London School of Economics and Political Science Library, and the Library of the Society of Friends.
Political Extremism & Radicalism in the Twentieth Century
This resource provides access to “a compilation of rare and unique archival collections covering a wide range of fringe political movements. It has been sourced from distinguished libraries and archives across the world but also premiers some previously hidden treasure troves.
With an extensive scope of content focused on political extremism and radical thought, this archive is one of the first digital archives covering such a broad assortment of both far-right and left political groups. It offers a diverse mixture of materials, including periodicals, campaign propaganda, government records, oral histories, and various ephemera, which allow researchers to explore unorthodox social and political movements in new and innovative ways and to understand what impact they have had on today’s society.
The collections cover a period of just over a century (1900s to 2010s) when the world saw the formation of several civil rights movements for the rights of minorities, women’s rights, and gay rights. It also encompasses the rise and fall of a number of peripheral groups deemed ‘extreme’ or ‘radical’ by contemporaries, such as anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, anti-war, communist or socialist, creationist, environmentalist, hate, holocaust denial, new left, survivalist, white supremacist, and white nationalist. Global in scope, although the archive presents materials largely from the US and Britain, it also showcases important factions from Europe and Australia, such as the Norwegian Nazi Party and the Australian National Socialist Party. By spanning multiple geographic regions, the resource shows both the cultural impact of radical groups at a national level as well as the international networking and cross-border exchanges of extreme political movements.
Of particular interest to Americanists are the following collections:
- The Hall-Hoag Collection of Dissenting and Extremist Printed Propaganda from the John Hay Library at Brown Universit, features extremist literature ranging from the mid-1950s to the late 1970s – the most heated days of the civil rights movement. Publications in this collection represent a cross-section of extremist opinion towards integration and civil rights activism, but it also contains materials on American anti-Semitism, Christian Identity theology, neo-Nazi groups, and white supremacy movements.
- The American Radicalism Collection from Michigan State University is a collection of ephemera on radical political groups across a range of extremist and radical movements, including those involved in religion, race, gender, the environment, and equal rights. The materials represent a large variety of viewpoints, from the far-right to the far-left, on political, social, cultural, sexual, and economic issues in the United States from 1970 to the present.
This collection covers U.S. perspectives on Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, and Trans-Jordan, from Ottoman rule to the era of British and French mandates following the First World War. The archive is sourced from the Central Files of the General Records of the Department of State. The records are under the jurisdiction of the Legislative and Diplomatic Branch of the Civil Archives, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.
Details on more new resources now available in Oxford may be found on the History Faculty Library blog: