Disability History Resources: Online Resources

Disabilities in Society, Seventeenth to Twentieth Century presents monographs (books), manuscripts, and ephemera that provide a historical view of disabilities from the seventeenth to twentieth century.

Medieval and Early Modern Sources Online (MEMSO) provides a large and growing resource of essential medieval and early modern sources online. It is an excellent way to access a large library of books essential to the study of medieval and early modern England, Scotland and Ireland. Includes selections of annals and chronicles, calendars and registers, saints’ lives, Rolls’ Series and HMC reports and Statutes of the Realm.

Disabilities in Society, Seventeenth to Twentieth Century presents monographs (books), manuscripts, and ephemera that provide a historical view of disabilities from the seventeenth to twentieth century.

Scanned from older microfilms, this resource gives access to 13 collections of scanned primary sources which document the rich and evolving cultural, social, political, scientific, and religious life from the 12th to the early 18th centuries. Largely covers British and some European content. Topics include culture, literature, music, history of science & medicine, women studies, domestic life, Reformation and religious history, political history, and global travel.

The sources are largely digitised manuscripts, rare printed works, literary texts, papers of individuals, treatises, correspondence, music scores, advice books, tracts, sermons, recipe books, manuals, travel writing.

The 13 collections are:

• Arthurian Legends and the Influence of French Prose Romance: The Grail, Lancelot, Tristan and related manuscripts from the British Library
• Black Death: Sources concerning the European Plague
• Crown Servants: Papers of Wentworth, Wynns or Gwydir, Lauderdale
• Early music: Music sources from Pembroke College, Cambridge and the National Library of Scotland
• English Clandestine Satire, 1660-1704: Popular Culture, Entertainment and Information in the Early Modern Period
• Foxe and the English Reformation, c1539-1587: Collected manuscript sources from the British Library, London
• The History of Science and Technology. Series One: The Papers of Sir Hans Sloane, 1660-1753 from the British Library, London
• Masculinity: Men Defining Men and Gentlemen. Part 1: 1600-1800, Sources from the Bodleian Library, Oxford
• Medieval and Early Modern Women
• Orinda: The Literary Manuscripts of Katherine Philips (1631-1664)
• Renaissance Man: The Reconstructed Libraries of European Scholars, 1450-1700 Series One: The Books and Manuscripts of John Dee, 1527-1608
• Spanish Historical Writing About the New World, 1493-1700. From the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University

From the first book published in English through the age of Spenser and Shakespeare, this incomparable collection contains over 96,000 images of titles listed in Pollard & Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue (1475 - 1640) and Wing's Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700) and their revised edition. Libraries possessing this collection find they are able to fulfill the most exhaustive research requirements of graduate scholars in the areas of English literature, history, philosophy, theology, art and music, politics, and the history of science and medicine.

EEBO Text Creation Partnership is an extension of the EEBO image resource. The project encodes the books in XML with a version of the TEI allowing researchers to do full text and other searches. Already there are around 1500 titles online and with several hundred being added each month it is an increasingly valuable resource. The aim of the EEBO TCP project is eventually to make 25,000 books available in this way.

Eighteenth Century Collections Online is a comprehensive digital edition of The Eighteenth Century, the world's largest library of the printed book on microfilm, available through its imprint Primary Source Microfilm. In the most ambitious single digitization project ever undertaken, nearly 150,000 English-language titles and editions published between 1701 and 1800 will be made available online over the course of the next two years. When complete, the product will allow full-text searching of more than 33 million pages of material, in essence, every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom, along with thousands of important works from the Americas.

Eighteenth Century Collections Online provides research opportunities in ways previously unavailable to a wide range of data spanning all disciplines. It is one of the largest sources of rare materials ever collected in microfilm and electronic formats. The collection is an ongoing project based on The English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), a machine-readable union list of the holdings of the British Library, as well as those from more than 1,500 university, private, and public libraries worldwide.

Eighteenth Century Collections Online captures the essence of the Enlightenment in Great Britain between 1701 and 1800. As the eighteenth century opened, the expiration of the strict controls that previously existed over printing, coupled with the birth of the Industrial Revolution, resulted in the proliferation of printing operations across the country and in turn, created an explosion of literacy. For the first time, a large segment of the population was exposed to a vast array of printed material. Social and economic criticism flourished; theories on man and society were set forth and debated.

"The Making of the Modern World: Goldsmiths'-Kress Library of Economic Literature 1450-1850" provides digital facsimile images on every page of 61,000 works of literature on economic and business published from 1450 through 1850. Full-text searching on more than 12 million pages provides researchers unparalleled access to this vast collection of material on commerce, finance, social conditions, politics, trade and transport.

This collection brings to life the teeming streets of Victorian London, inviting students and scholars to explore the gin palaces, brothels and East End slums of London in the 19th century. From salacious ‘swell’s guides’ to scandalous broadsides and subversive posters, the material sold and exchanged on London’s bustling thoroughfares offers an unparalleled insight into the dark underworld of the city. Children’s chapbooks, street cries, slang dictionaries and ballads were all part of a vibrant culture of street literature.

This is also an incredible visual resource for students and scholars of London, with many full colour maps, cartoons, sketches and a full set of the essential Tallis’ Street Views of London – resource for the study of London architecture and commerce. Also includes George Gissing's famous London scrapbooks from the Pforzheimer Collection, containing his research for London novels such as New Grub Street and The Netherworld.

This is a collection of all the material from the Mass Observation Archive. It includes the entire File Report sequence 1937-1972, access to all of the Day Surveys, Directives and Diaries, 1937-1967, Mass Observation Publications 1937-1965 and 87 Topic Collection (e.g. e.g. Smoking Habits 1937-1965, etc.). The Worktown Collection includes material of a major study of the towns of Bolton (Worktown) and Blackpool (Holidaytown).

The resource also includes interactive maps, bibliographic resources and essays on various aspects of Mass Observation.

Useful for the study of social history, sociology, etc., of modern Britain, it covers topics such as abortion, old age, crime, eating habits, shopping, fashion, dance, popular music, coal mining, adult education, sex, reading, ethnic minorities, and the decline of Empire. It is a resource that will be welcomed by historians, literary scholars, sociologists, anthropologists and political scientists.