Our collections

Unique and extremely rare eighteenth-century periodicals, each chosen to convey the eclecticism and evolution of the publishing world between 1685 and 1835. Highlights include a complete run of The Lady's Magazine, and rare titles missed out of other collections focused on the Eighteenth Century.

Spanning five centuries and charting the rise and fall of empires around the world, Empire Online is a digital archive enabling research of colonial history, politics, culture and society. There is a focus on the British Empire, but documents also give information on other European empires and the experience of colonised people.

Presenting content from across the globe, this diverse and comprehensive resource features thousands of audio field recordings and interviews, educational recordings, film footage, field notebooks, slides, correspondence and ephemera from over 60 fields of study, including sites in West Africa, North America, South East Asia and more.

American social, cultural, and popular history during the 19th and early 20th centuries. It comprises thousands of fully searchable images (alongside transcriptions) of monographs, pamphlets, periodicals and broadsides addressing political, social and gender issues, religion, race, education, employment, marriage, sexuality, home and family life, health, and pastimes.

AM’s Open Access collection, First Folios Compared, represents a major milestone in Shakespearean scholarship and cultural heritage

Revealing the voices and experiences of the men and women who served in the First World War, this rich and varied collection will be an invaluable source for anyone studying and researching the ‘Great War’. Material includes letters and diaries of service people, maps, photo albums, artwork, oral histories, official documents, newspapers, posters and much more, covering all aspects of the global conflict.

A wide range of primary source material, including printed and manuscript cookbooks, advertising ephemera, government reports, films and illustrated content. It reveals the evolution of food and drink within everyday life and the public sphere. The material in this collection has been sourced from across the globe to reflect a wide range of food cultures and traditions.

Through a large array of unique documents, this multi-archive collection captures the lives, experiences and colonial encounters of people living at the edges of the Anglophone world from 1650-1920. It ranges across the various colonial frontiers of North America before touching on the settlers of Southern Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

Explore the changing representations and lived experiences of gender roles and relations.

Discover the histories of fifteen key commodities that changed the world through a wide range of manuscript sources, rare books, maps, advertising memorabilia, paintings, photographs and ephemera. Explore themes of exploration and discovery; imperialism and attempts at monopoly, trade Wars, translocation and economic geography, slavery, mass production, luxury, taste and the evolution of global branding.

A rich audio-visual resource exploring personal accounts of the Hindi filmmaking tradition.

The National Library of Scotland has wonderful collections documenting this history from the foundation of the East India Company in 1615 to the granting of independence for India and Pakistan in 1947. They are made available online through this collection.

From early contacts between European settlers and Indigenous Peoples and the subsequent political, social and cultural effects of those encounters on Indigenous American life, these materials tell both the historical and the personal stories of the colonisation of the Americas. 

Discover North American Indigenous journalism spanning two centuries with this major digital resource. Featuring publications from a range of communities, with an extensive list of periodicals produced in the United States and Canada, including Alaska, Arizona, British Columbia, California, Nevada and Oklahoma, from 1828 to 2016.

From entertainment and technology to relationships and current affairs, explore everyday life and society on both sides of the Atlantic through popular and lesser-known periodicals.

The online version of the J Walter Thompson Company archive - the single most complete and informative corporate record of the history of modern advertising. It includes the account files of some of the world’s biggest brands, such as Kraft, Kodak, Oscar Mayer and Pan Am.

Material is sourced from the American Jewish Historical Society, New York. It contains primary sources on the history of Jewish immigration to the United States, life and culture among the Jewish population there, and records of business and trade from Jewish-owned companies.

Primary sources on the history of tourism. Bringing together collections from multiple archives, including Thomas Cook, this resource presents an untapped multi-national perspective on the evolution of affordable tourism around the world.

Explore three centuries of life at sea through the individual histories of ships’ crews during the Age of Sail and into the era of steam.

The Berg Collection is recognised as one of the finest literary research collections in the world, and the Victorian holdings are the undisputed jewel in its crown. This collection makes them available online, and includes unpublished poems, working notebooks, holograph manuscripts and drawings that trace the inspiration and genesis behind the period’s greatest works.

Materials include 17th and 18th century poetry from the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds.