Act of Bermuda for restraining and punishing privateers and pirates, 1684. Source: Colonial State Papers
This month the Libraries offer a bounty of trials of primary source databases. From the Tudors to the Tetons, pirates to porcelain, Hemisfair ’68 to the Treaty of Lisbon in 1668, we’ve got you covered.
Two of these databases, Colonial State Papers from ProQuest and State Papers Online from Gale, offer digitized versions of British documents, together with the various calendars, or detailed abstracts, of those documents. State Papers Online, covering the Tudor and Stuart reigns, offers diplomatic correspondence and memoranda through the age of exploration and colonization, and dynastic contests on the continent, and the rise of a worldwide market economy. Colonial State Papers, taken from National Archives, encompass relations with colonies in North America and the West Indies between 1574 and the mid-eigtheenth century.
Four other trial resources are offered by Adam Matthew, a publisher specializing in building rich thematic collections of primary source documents and images from libraries, archives, and museums worldwide. Each collection features overview essays and overviews, tools such as a robust image viewer, document maps, glossaries, and recommended links, and tips for teaching such as embedding materials in Blackboard. Adam Matthew resources on trial this month include:
- Global Commodities: manuscript, printed and visual primary source materials for the study of global commodities such as chocolate, cotton, and tobacco in world history
- World’s Fairs: covers world expositions from the Crystal Palace in 1851 and the proliferation of North American exhibitions, to fairs around the world and twenty-first century expos, with interactive site plans and detailed histories of each fair.
- Colonial America: aims to offer all 1475 volumes of the Colonial Office (CO 5) series from The National Archives, UK, covering the period 1606 to 1822 and includes s topics such as American Indians, the American Revolution, trade and taxation, and diplomatic relations with the Dutch, French, and Spanish governments and colonies.
- Frontier Life: covers cultural encounters in Africa, South America, and Australia and New Zealand, in addition to North America.
The Original Samuel Allen’s Empire Chocolate – ‘Defenders of our Empire’, 1915. From Global Commodoties
The Libraries have access to these resources only for a limited time. If you have any kind of history research paper due this semester, be sure to visit our trials page and start your own age of exploration in these database offerings. Before — they’re history.