Early modern history (British & W European c. 1500-c. 1800): Home

Historical Abstracts is your complete reference guide to the history of the world from 1450 to the present (excluding the United States and Canada, which are covered in America: History and Life). This database is packed with annotated references to information on topics from the Renaissance to Tiananmen Square - over half a million entries in all.

Published since 1954, Historical Abstracts has long been recognized as the leading bibliography for historical study in the world. Currently over 2,000 journals published throughout the world are covered in the database, making this a historical periodical database unmatched in breadth. In addition to including the key historical journals from virtually every major country, Historical Abstracts includes a targeted selection of hundreds of journals in the social sciences and humanities that are of special interest to researchers and students of history.

Being the successor to the Royal Historical Society Bibliography online, BBIH is a comprehensive guide to historical writing about the history of Britain, Ireland, and relations with the empire and Commonwealth from 55BC to the present. The database consists of more than 470,000 records giving as comprehensive a guide as possible to books, articles in journals, and articles in books published since 1901, and to a considered selection of those published before 1901. The database consolidates a number of existing bibliographies (primarily series published by the Royal Historical Society and the Institute of Historical Research) together with some additional material. It is not intended to be a guide to the raw material of history - the manuscripts, printed books, buildings, artefacts and so on which constitute the historical record. However, published guides to these sources are included, as are modern editions of primary material and a selection of printed primary material published up to 1900.

BBIH also includes the ability to find out more about people covered using the integrated links with the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the National Register of Archives, and Who Was Who; and includes links to British History Online, Reviews in History, H-Albion Reviews, BLArticles Direct and Google books.

Index Religiosus is a reference bibliography for academic publications in Theology, Religious Studies and Church History. It covers publications written in various European languages (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, etc.) and is the result of collaboration between the Catholic University of Louvain and the KU Leuven, which are both recognized internationally for their excellence in the field of Theology and Religious Studies. The new bibliography starts on the basis of two existing bibliographies: the bibliography of the Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique and the Elenchus Bibliographicus from the journal Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses. From January 2014 onwards, the printed version of the bibliography of the Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique and the Elenchus Bibliographicus will be no longer available. These printed bibliographies will be replaced by the Index Religiosus.

This database provides access to over 1,270 newsbooks, newspapers, pamphlets and a variety of other news materials published in England, Ireland and Scotland, plus papers from British colonies in Asia and the Americas. The collection is particularly rich in 18th century London newspapers. All the major titles are included, such as the Daily Courant from 1702 to 1735, the first daily newspaper published in London, and the London Gazette from 1665. Periodicals, such as Tatler (1709-1711) and Spectator (1711-1712), are also included.

Also represented are English provincial titles from 1712, Irish newspapers (the earliest being the Dublin Intelligence of 1691), Scottish ones from 1708 onwards, and many 18th century American ones too, including the New England Courant (1721-1723).

Features the newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets and broadsheets that form the Nichols newspaper collection held at the Bodleian Library. All 296 volumes of bound material, covering the period 1672-1737 have been digitized. This collection charts the history of the development of the press in England and provides invaluable insight into 17th and 18th century England.

A digital library containing some of the core printed primary and secondary sources for the medieval and modern history of the British Isles. Some of the highlights include: House of Commons and Lords Journals, Victoria County History, Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, Survey of London, Statutes of the Realm, Thurloe State Papers, Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae and much more. Premium content which Oxford has subscribed to include: Calendars of State Papers (Domestic & Foreign), Calendar of Close Rolls 1266-1509, Calendar of Home Office Papers (George III).

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.

Electronic Enlightenment has as its foundation major printed editions of correspondence centred on the "long 18th century". From the correspondence itself, the supporting critical apparatus and additional research, the project has developed a set of information categories that creates an intricate network of connections between the documents and enriches Electronic Enlightenment as a digital academic resource. Through such interconnecting and contextualizing categories, Electronic Enlightenment is able to offer the user an unrivalled range and depth of approachs to the documents and people included here.

To date, most of the content of Electronic Enlightenment has been provided by printed editions of correspondences from academic presses worldwide; nevertheless, it is not simply an aggregation of these editions. Rather it is a database of individual letters and correspondents that can be searched or browsed as a complete collection. This is one of the great strengths of Electronic Enlightenment.

The content of Electronic Enlightenment is planned to grow by several thousand letters a year: additional content will include both new print editions and correspondence never previously edited. The network of external links to leading resources, from Chambers' Cyclopaedia to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, will continue to expand. The functionality of Electronic Enlightenment will also be enhanced in line with developments in online database technology.

"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.

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.

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.

SPO is relevant to those studying Early Modern British and European history: diplomatic, political, social, cultural, local, legal, religious, kingship and queenship, exploration, travel and trade and early empire; Early Modern literature; Renaissance and Reformation Studies; Tudor & Stuart history.