New: Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive, part II: Slave Trade in the Atlantic World

Posted on 19 September 2023 by iholowaty

We are delighted to announce that Oxford researchers now have access to Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive, part II: Slave Trade in the Atlantic World.

This collection provides access to a wide range of materials to help understand the inception of slavery in Africa and its rise as perpetuated on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, with particular focus on the United Kingdom, France, and the United States.

It covers a wide spectrum of subjects related to the history of slavery: legal issues; economics; the Caribbean; children and women under slavery; modes of resistance; and much more, from 1490 to 1896.

Snippet from an 1851 court report, reading "Note. The following report is published at the request of numerous persons who are of opinion that all which is known of the operation of the Fugitive Slave Bill should be spread before the public. To the legal profession it will be of interest, as developing new points in the construction and application of a Statute, destined to be of great political importance now and in future history. They will be able to judge of the construction upon the Statute, and of the law of evidence, as laid down and applied by the Commissioner, and contended for by the representative of the Government. Not the profession alone but the public can judge of the temper and manner as to parties and witnesses in which the prosecution was pressed and the judicial duties performed."

Report of the proceedings at the examination of Charles G. Davis, Esq., on a charge of aiding and abetting in the rescue of a fugitive slave, held in Boston, in February, 1851 / Davis, Charles G. United States. Circuit Court (Massachusetts). Boston : White & Potter, printers, 1851
© Cengage

Sources

Sources include monographs and individual papers, account ledge books, diaries, names of slave ships, lists of captains and crews, details of slave ship seizures as well as description of slave conditions, company records, newspapers, and a variety of government documents.

The resource is also useful for finding European travellers and missionaries accounts (often the only records available to document the evidence of slavery in Africa) and European business records (particularly valuable for piecing together the many wars and commercial disputes among the African powers on the Gold Coast, Sierra Leone, and the Gambia area.

Geographical coverage

This resource is particularly relevant in its significant coverage of France, Haiti, Jamaica, Denmark, Portugal, Brazil, Senegal, and many other countries and regions.

Source institutions

The sources come from a variety of institutions including The National Archives (esp. Colonial Office records), Company of Royal Adventurers of England Training with Africa, British Library manuscripts, US Customs Service Records, and more. Material used in this collection include:

U.S. Customs Service Records: Port of New Orleans, Louisiana Inward Slave Manifests, 1807-1860
U.S. Customs Service Records: Port of New Orleans, Louisiana Outward Slave Manifests, 1812-1860
Exploration and Colonization of Africa
Selected Records of the Danish West Indies, 1672-1917: Essential Records Concerning Slavery and Emancipation
Appellate Case File No. 2161, United States v. The Amistad, 40 U.S. 518
Records of the U.S. District and Circuit Courts for the District of Connecticut: Documents Relating to the Various Cases Involving the Spanish Schooner Amistad
Records of the Spanish Governors of Puerto Rico, Registro Central de Esclavos, 1872 (Slave Schedules)
Company of Royal Adventurers of England Trading with Africa and Successors: Records
Heartman Manuscript Collection at Xavier University Library, New Orleans: Manuscripts on Slavery
Africa Squadron, 1843-1861; Letters Received by the Secretary of the Navy from Commanding Officers of Squadrons
The Yale University Collection of Latin American Manuscripts, Part V: The Caribbean
Oliver Pollock Papers, 1767-1788
Vernon-Wager Papers, 1654-1773
Jamaica Manuscripts Collection, 1774-1950
British Library Collections
Aaron Thomas papers, 1798-1799

Sensitive content

Please note that you may encounter harmful and/or offensive material during your research. It is important to approach sensitive topics with cultural awareness and respect for the lived experiences of marginalized groups and individuals.

Related resources:

Slavery, Exploitation and Trade in the West Indies, 1759-1832 (subscription resource)
Slavery, abolition and social justice (subscription resource)
Black Abolitionist Papers (1830-1865) (subscription resource)
Liberated Africans of the Havana Slave Trade Commission
Confidential Print: North America 1824-1961 (subscription resource)
More websites on slavery
Books on slavery
Archive of the Anti-Slavery Society (Bodleian Libraries)

Re-trial until 25 April: Early Modern England: Society, Culture & Everyday Life, 1500-1700

Posted on 31 March 2023 by iholowaty

We decided to repeat a trial of Early Modern England: Society, Culture & Everyday Life, 1500-1700. The trial ends 25 April.

This resource offers access to rare and invaluable sources for examining the lived experience of people in England between 1500 and 1700. From ‘ordinary’ people through to more prominent individuals and families, these documents show how everyday working, family, religious and administrative life was experienced across England.

Rather than dealing specifically with the great political and religious upheavals of these years, the project aims to look at the everyday happenings of people in different parts of England.

What topics can you research?

The sources are useful for the study of many aspects of life in early modern England. They include:

Agriculture
Arts, literature and culture
Births, marriages and deaths
Family life and relationships
Finance
Foreign affairs
Health and medicine
Land and property
Law and order
Monarchy
Politics and government
Possessions
Poverty
Religion
Scholarship: science and humanities
Trade and economics
Travel
War
Women’s history
Work and employment

What type of documents are included?

These experiences are revealed through a wide range of materials including legal records, family correspondence, tax records, administrative records, wills, inventories, petitions, military papers and commonplace books and more.

There is a strong material culture element to this project with the inclusion of images of everyday objects used in early modern households. Many can be viewed in 360-degree rotation.Which regions are covered?

The different collections of documents enable a regional comparison, for example with court records from the South East, London, the West Midlands and the North West.Searching

You can browse or search in many different ways. Useful are, for instance, indices for names, themes, regions and places.

The resource also offers searching of manuscripts using Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technology. This is still a developing area and results may not always be perfect.

Tell us what you think

The trial ends on 25 April. While there currently is no funding for this resource, your feedback is still helpful to gauge interest amongst the scholarly community. Please email isabel.holowaty@bodleian.ox.ac.uk to comment on the usefulness of the content, who would benefit from it and whether the searching functionality is adequate.

Trial until 15 February: Early Modern England Society, Culture & Everyday Life, 1500-1700

Posted on 20 January 2023 by iholowaty

Oxford researchers are warmly invited to trial Early Modern England: Society, Culture & Everyday Life, 1500-1700 [access via SOLO.]

Rather than dealing specifically with the great political and religious upheavals of these years, the project aims to look at the everyday happenings of people in different parts of England.

What topics can you research?

The sources are useful for the study of many aspects of life in early modern England. They include:

Agriculture
Arts, literature and culture
Births, marriages and deaths
Family life and relationships
Finance
Foreign affairs
Health and medicine
Land and property
Law and order
Monarchy
Politics and government
Possessions
Poverty
Religion
Scholarship: science and humanities
Trade and economics
Travel
War
Women’s history
Work and employment

What type of documents are included?

The different collections of documents enable a regional comparison, for example with court records from the South East, London, the West Midlands and the North West.Searching

You can browse or search in many different ways. Useful are, for instance, indices for names, themes, regions and places.

The resource also offers searching of manuscripts using Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technology. This is still a developing area and results may not always be perfect.

Tell us what you think

The trial ends on 15 February. While there currently is no funding for this resource, your feedback is still helpful to gauge interest amongst the scholarly community. Please email isabel.holowaty@bodleian.ox.ac.uk to comment on the usefulness of the content, who would benefit from it and whether the searching functionality is adequate.

New State Papers Online experience – preview from 1 Aug

Posted on 29 July 2022 by iholowaty

Called all early modernists: a new improved version of State Papers Online can be previewed from 1 August via the SPO webpage. The provider, Cengage Gale, is keen to get your feedback. Given the complexity of the material, I strongly encourage researchers to take a look and send in suggestions and comments. The plan is to retire the current version in December 2022.

What is State Papers Online I-IV 1509-1714?State Papers Online contains the Tudor and Stuart governments “domestic” and “foreign” papers – the equivalent of today’s documents from the Home and Foreign Offices and the Royal Archives. These everyday working papers of the British royal government reveal Tudor and Stuart society and government, religion and politics in all its drama allowing scholars to trace the remarkable – and frequently violent – transformations of the 16th & 17th centuries.

This major resource re-unites the Domestic, Foreign, Borders, Scotland, and Ireland State Papers of Britain with the Registers of the Privy Council and other State Papers now housed in the Cotton, Harley and Lansdowne collections in the British Library.

The papers are digitised images and are accompanied by the Calendars. The Calendars State Papers are fully searchable, and each Calendar entry has been linked directly to its related State Paper. Among the Calendars included are the HMC Calendars and the Haynes/Murdin transcriptions of the Cecil Papers in Hatfield House.

What is changing?

You can expect many improvements such as side-by-side viewing of the manuscript and calendar versions and more. See Gale’s blog post New State Papers Online Experience Available to Preview (5 July 2022) for more details.

Screenshot from the new State Papers Online interface showing a calendar entry of SP12 139.

Image from Gale’s bog post ‘New State Papers Online Experience Available to Preview’

Trial until 18 May 2020: Droz ebooks: Humanisme et Renaissance – Calvin

Posted on 20 April 2020 by iholowaty

Colleagues in the Taylor Institution Library have set up trials to some online Droz French resources. Two of these will be of interest to early modern history, history of the book, intellectual history, religious history, and European history. You will need SSO for remote access. Please send feedback to isabel.holowaty@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

Humanisme et Renaissance

The Droz Humanisme et Renaissance collection offers a collection of sources and studies on Humanism (Politien, Ficin, Erasmus, Budé…), the French Reformation (Lefèvre d’Etaples, Calvin, Farel, Beza…) and the Renaissance (literary and artistic, Hieronymus Bosch or Rabelais, Ronsard or Primaticcio), as well as the medicine, science, philosophy, book history, and all forms of knowledge and human activity from the long sixteenth century, roughly from 1450 to the death of Henry IV in 1610, the threshold of the classical age.

Calvin

This portal presents all the texts by or about John Calvin which have been published by the Librairie Droz from 1960 to 2012, with an initial focus on Geneva, Calvin, and the beginnings of the French evangelical movement with Lefèvre d’Etaples and Marguerite de Navarre.

Related resources already available in Oxford:

Anti-Calvin

This database comprises the writings of French Catholics against the doctrines of John Calvin (1509-1564) and other protestant leaders. France was a major centre in the clash between Catholics and Protestants during the sixteenth century. Much of the Protestant literature was in French in the hopes of converting the French people. In response, the Catholic Church preserved its position in France with these documents. This archive includes both sixteenth-century attacks on Calvinism and Protestantism as well as defences of the Catholic doctrine.

Huguenots

This collection offers a comprehensive survey of the original writings of the French Huguenot authors, from the first stirrings of radical dissent in the 1530s through to the end of the century. The selection privileges first and foremost original writings of authors writing within France and for an exclusively French audience. Thus whereas Calvin’s Genevan writings are not included, the tracts penned by Theodore de Bèze as part of the polemic exchange during the Colloquy of Poissy (1561) do appear here.

All told the writings collected here reveal an intellectually vibrant movement, meeting unprecedented challenges and later hardship with that mixture of confidence, aggression, and resolution in the face of adversity that characterises Calvinist churches of this era throughout Europe.

Access to Early European Books 5-16 until 31 May 2020

Posted on 30 March 2020 by iholowaty

ProQuest have kindly given Oxford researchers free temporary access to Early European Books Collections 5-16 until 31 May 2020. SSO is required for off-campus access.

Collections 5-16 draw mostly material held at Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) but also at Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague, the Kongelige Bibliotek in Copenhagen and the Wellcome Library in London. It provides access to early printed European collections published between 1450 and 1700.

Some collections are themed:

Collection 16 – French Culture in the Early Modern Period – From the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF)

Collection 15 – Revolution and Reformation: Early Modern Science and Religion – From the Wellcome Library (London), the Kongelige Bibliotek (Copenhagen), the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (The Hague) and the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze (Florence).

All EEB collections can be cross-searched. You can also cross-search with Early English Books Online (EEBO) (SSO required for off-campus access).

You have a number of searching and browsing options, including by subject. You can view the documents in thumbnail, Full View and see the full metadata description. Early European Books can now also be analysed visually with the new Interactive Historical Map. Check out the useful EEB LibGuide to learn more about the collection and how to use it.

Please note that book-level details are not in SOLO. You will need to access EEB directly to search for a particular titles.

After 31 May 2020, researchers will continue to have access to EEB Collections 1-4.

British Online Archives – full access until 20 April 2020

Posted on 24 March 2020 by iholowaty

British Online Archives are providing 30-day free access (starting from 23 March) of its entire collection to existing customers in light of the COVID-19 outbreak.

The company provides access to over 3 million records drawn from both private and public archives. There are 88 collections with thematically organised records covering early modern and modern world history, from politics and warfare to slavery and medicine. These are great source materials for 18th to later 20th century British and global history. Contributing archives include India Office, British Library, The National Archives, British Foreign & Commonwealth Office, LSE.

Examples of themes:

Paris Peace Conference, Prosecuting the Holocaust, Colonial Law in Africa, British Labour Party Papers 1906-1994, Liverpool and Bristol shipping records, slave trade records, missionary archives, British colonial government reports, and much more.

Please remember that this access will cease on 20 April 2020. However, the Bodleian Libraries has purchased a few of these collections already so you can continue to access them after 20 April.

Ecclesiastical History Sources for Postgraduates sessions

Posted on 21 January 2020 by bjenkins

We are pleased to announce two sessions of interest to Postgraduates studying ecclesiastical history:

Ecclesiastical History for postgraduates: Introduction to using the Special Collections at the Weston Library

Thurs 30 Jan, 11am-1pm, Horton Room, Weston Library (make sure you store your bags in £1 lockers first)

This session will provide a practical introduction to using special collections at the Bodleian Libraries. We will outline the nature of the main Bodleian collections and explain how to find research material using online and printed finding aids. (This will include practical exercises for which a laptop will be useful.) We will end with the practicalities of ordering and handling manuscripts and how to cite them in your work.

Presenter: Matthew Holford (Tolkien Curator of Medieval Manuscripts) and Mike Webb (Early Modern Curator)

Please note that there is limited availability. Email Isabel.holowaty@bodleian.ox.ac.uk if you are interested.

Ecclesiastical History for postgraduates: Digital resources

Thurs 13 Feb, 11am-1pm, Horton Room, Weston Library (make sure you store your bags in £1 lockers first)

A two hour seminar during which key online resources relating to church history, covering largely Christianity from medieval to early 20th century, will be demonstrated. The resources include bibliographical and reference tools, digital source materials and how to keep up-to-date with new publications. Presenters: Isabel Holowaty (History Librarian) and Hilla Wait (Theology & Philosophy Librarian)

Please note that there is limited availability. Email Isabel.holowaty@bodleian.ox.ac.uk if you are interested.

Trial: State Papers Online: Eighteenth Century, 1714-1782 and The Stuart and Cumberland Papers (until 20 Sept)

Posted on 21 August 2019 by iholowaty

Oxford early modernists are now invited to trial two State Papers Online resources:

State Papers Online: Eighteenth Century, 1714-1782

King George I
studio of Sir Godfrey Kneller, Bt
oil on canvas, 1714-1725, based on a work of 1714
NPG 544
© National Portrait Gallery, London

This resource represents the final section of the State Papers series from the National Archives in the UK before the series was closed and replaced by the Home Office and Foreign Office series in 1782.

Covering the reigns of the Hanover rulers George I (1714-1727) and George II (1727-1760) and part of the reign of George III (up to 1782), the series provides unparalleled access to thousands of manuscripts that reveal the behind-the-scenes, day-to-day running of the British Government during the eighteenth century.

It comprises 4 parts:

Part I: State Papers Domestic, Military and Naval and the Registers of the Privy Council
Part II: State Papers Foreign: Low Countries and Germany
Part III: Western Europe;
Part IV: Scandinavia, Eastern Europe and Turkey.

State Papers Online: The Stuart and Cumberland Papers

William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland
studio of David Morier
oil on canvas, 1749-1770, based on a work of circa 1748-1749
NPG 537
© National Portrait Gallery, London

Digitised for the first time, the Stuart and Cumberland Papers from the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle are now available online in their entirety.

The Stuart Papers represent the correspondence and personal documents of the exiled members of the Stuart dynasty after 1688.

Available here alongside the Cumberland Papers of William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland and second surviving son of George II, they provide a unique window into the world of the Stuarts and their Jacobite followers, as well as to the incumbent Hanoverian monarchy during a time of continental wars, domestic conspiracies and rival claims to the Throne.

Please send any feedback to Isabel Holowaty by 20 September 2019.

While you are here, check out other key resources for the 18th century?

Eighteenth Century Collections Online [subscription]
Electronic Enlightenment [subscription]
Early Modern Letters Online (EMLO)
The Grand Tour [subscription]
17th-18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers [subscription]
17th and 18th Century Nichols Newspapers Collection [subscription]
Eighteenth Century Journals [subscription]
More HFL news for early modern history

New: Military Architecture 1600-1900

Posted on 8 July 2019 by iholowaty

S. Vauban, Traité de l’attaque et de la défense des places (La Haye, 1743). Military Architecture 1600-1900 (Leiden, 2018), accessed 8 July 2019, http://primarysources.brillonline.com/browse/military-architecture-1600-1900.

I’m pleased to report that Oxford researchers now have access to Brill’s Military Architecture 1600-1900.

This online resource contains 99 printed works which represent the revolutionary developments in fortification in Early Modern Europe in theory and in practice.

The collection covers not only military architecture, but to some extent also the military arts (artillery, army camps, siege) and military and some naval history. While it focuses on early modern history, there are translations of works from Ancient Rome and there is at least one book on medieval military architecture (A. Hamilton Thompson, Military Architecture in England during the Middle Ages. London, 1912). A number of early modern printed books were published before 1600.

It’s possible to search the full-text of the entire collection or of individual books, but bear in mind that the collection comprises works in different languages, including Latin, and may use old language and orthography. Likewise, the rendering of the text from early modern print-type has not always been successful, so it pays to browse the books and read texts to get a sense of the content.

Many works will include illustrations of buildings, fortifications, harbours, etc. It does not appear to be possible to search for these separately.

Obsedio Bredana Armis Phillippi IIII (Antwerpen, 1629), p.9. Military Architecture 1600-1900 (Leiden, 2018), accessed 8 July 2019, http://primarysources.brillonline.com/bowse/military-architect

You will be able to copy the OCRed text of any selections or of a page; you can also download the ebook, or selections of it, as a zipped file; and you can share the link to the resource via email and social media.

Citations can be saved to Endnote and RefWorks, but also seem to work with Zotero.

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Tag Archives: early modern history