British and UK History: A Guide to Library Research

Tips for using this collection are available in the Adam Matthew Digital Help Centre.

Includes these collections:
 

• African American Communities
   
• Age of Exploration
   
• America in World War Two
   
• American History
   
• American Indian Histories and Cultures
   
• American West
   
• Apartheid South Africa, 1948 - 1980
   
• Central Asia, Persia and Afghanistan, 1834-1922
   
• Children's Literature and Culture
   
• China, America and the Pacific
   
• China: Culture and Society
   
• China: Trade, Politics and Culture
   
• Church Missionary Society
   
• Colonial America
   
• Confidential Print: Africa
   
• Confidential Print: Latin America
   
• Confidential Print: North America
   
• Defining Gender
   
• Early Modern England
   
• East India Company
   
• Eighteenth Century Drama
   
• Eighteenth Century Journals
   
• Empire Online
   
• Everyday Life and Women in America
   
• First World War
   
• Food and Drink
   
• Foreign Office Files for China
   
• Foreign Office Files for India
   
• Foreign Office Files for Japan
   
• Foreign Office Files for South East Asia
   
• Foreign Office Files for the Middle East
   
• Frontier Life
   
• Gender Identity and Social Change
   
• Gilded Age
   
• Global Commodities
   
• India, Raj and Empire
   
• J Walter Thompson: Advertising America
   
• Jewish Life in America c.1654-1954
   
• Leisure, Travel & Mass Culture
   
• Life at Sea
   
• Literary Manuscripts Berg
   
• Literary Manuscripts Leeds
   
• Literary Print Culture
   
• London Low Life
   
• Macmillan Cabinet Papers
   
• Market Research and American Business
   
• Mass Observation Online
   
• Medical Services and Warfare
   
• Medieval Family Life
   
• Medieval Travel
   
• Meiji Japan
   
• Migration to New Worlds
   
• Nineteenth Century Literary Society: The John Murray Publishing Archive
   
• Perdita Manuscripts
   
• Popular Medicine in America, 1800-1900
   
• Race Relations in America
   
• Research Source - AS:China and Southeast Asia
   
• Research Source - AS:India
   
• Research Source - AS:Japan
   
• Research Source - Business, Economic and Labour History
   
• Research Source - CMS
   
• Research Source - Empire
   
• Research Source - Literary Studies
   
• Research Source - Medieval and Early Modern Studies
   
• Research Source - Missionary Studies
   
• Research Source - Women's Studies
   
• Research Source - World War Two Studies
   
• Romanticism: Life, Literature and Landscape
   
• Service Newspapers of World War 2
   
• Shakespeare In Performance
   
• Shakespeare's Globe Archive
   
• Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice
   
• Socialism on Film: The Cold War
   
• The Grand Tour
   
• The Nixon Years
   
• Trade Catalogues and the American Home
   
• Travel Writing
   
• Victorian Popular Culture
   
• Victorians on Film
   
• Virginia Company Archives
   
• Women in the National Archives
   
• Worlds Fairs

Contains nearly a million collection descriptions contributed by thousands of libraries, museums, and archives. A combination of brief descriptions derived from catalog records in the RLG Union Catalog, and more detailed archival finding aids harvested from the Internet, including those that conform to the EAD (Encoded Archival Description) format standard.

Colonial State Papers (1574 - 1757) provides access to over 7,000 manuscript papers and 40,000 bibliographic records concerning English activities in the American, Canadian, and West Indian colonies between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.

The Colonial State Papers offers access to over 7,000 hand-written documents and more than 40,000 bibliographic records with this incredible resource on Colonial History. In addition to Britain's colonial relations with the Americas and other European rivals for power, this collection also covers the Caribbean and Atlantic world. It is an invaluable resource for scholars of early American history, British colonial history, Caribbean history, maritime history, Atlantic trade, plantations, and slavery. 

Colonial Legacies: Empire & Commonwealth Periodicals has over 30 periodicals concerning the 20th-century history of the British Empire, decolonization, and the history and culture of former colonies.

This archive offers a mixture of British publications about the empire and titles published in Commonwealth countries. Coverage ranges from the late-19th century to the 21st – these publications encompass the key events in the empire's later phase and its post-independence legacies.

Digital facsimile page images of works printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America, and English-language works printed elsewhere, from 1470-1700.

Beginning with the very first book published in English, EEBO draws from four authoritative bibliographical resources both Pollard & Redgraves Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640) and Wings Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700) in their revised versions, as well as the Thomason Tracts (1640-1661) and the Early English Books Tract Supplement to present more than 146,000 titles and over 17 million scanned pages of content.

Transcribed texts TCP I and TCP II are now included on EEBO, adding transcriptions to approximately 50% of the texts featured. EEBO also covers texts in more than 30 languages, ranging from Algonquin to Welsh, and incorporates variant editions and multiple copies.

This collection is included in the more comprehensive database Early Modern Books.

The EEBO corpus consists of the works represented in the English Short Title Catalog I and II (based on the Pollard & Redgrave and Wing short title catalogs), as well as the Thomason Tracts. Together these trace the history of English thought from the first book printed in English in 1475 through 1700. The content covers literature, philosophy, politics, religion, geography, science and all other areas of human endeavor. The assembled collection of 125,000 volumes is a mainstay for understanding the development of Western culture in general and the Anglo-American world in particular. The STC collections have always found strong proponents in English, linguistics, and history but the collections are all encompassing in coverage, including core texts in religious studies, art, women's studies, history of science, law, and music.

Includes these collections:

• American Historical Periodicals from the American Antiquarian Society  
• Archives of Sexuality & Gender  
• Archives Unbound  
• Associated Press Collections Online  
• Brazilian and Portuguese History and Culture  
• British Library Newspapers  
• China and the Modern World  
• Daily Mail Historical Archive, 1896-2004  
• The Economist Historical Archive  
• Eighteenth Century Collections Online  
• Financial Times Historical Archive, 1888-2021  
• The Illustrated London News Historical Archive, 1842-2003  
• The Independent Historical Archive  
• Indigenous Peoples of North America  
• International Herald Tribune Historical Archive 1887-2013  
• Liberty Magazine Historical Archive, 1924-1950  
• The Listener Historical Archive, 1929-1991  
• The Making of Modern Law: Foreign Primary Sources, 1600-1970  
• The Making of Modern Law: Foreign, Comparative and International Law, 1600-1926
• The Making of Modern Law: Legal Treatises, 1800-1926  
• The Making of Modern Law: Primary Sources  
• The Making of Modern Law: Trials, 1600-1926  
• The Making of Modern Law: U.S. Supreme Court Records and Briefs, 1823-1978  
• The Making of the Modern World  
• Nineteenth Century Collections Online  
• Nineteenth Century UK Periodicals  
• Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers  
• Picture Post Historical Archive  
• Political Extremism and Radicalism  
• Public Health Archives: Public Health in Modern America, 1890-1970  
• Punch Historical Archive, 1841-1992  
• Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Collection  
• Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive  
• Smithsonian Collections Online  
• The Sunday Times Historical Archive, 1822-2021
• The Telegraph Historical Archive  
• The Times Digital Archive  
• Times Educational Supplement Historical Archive, 1910-2000  
• Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive  
• U.S. Declassified Documents Online  
• Women's Studies Archive

Primary source collections of the long nineteenth century, including monographs, newspapers, pamphlets, manuscripts, ephemera, maps, statistics, and more from around the world, including from national libraries, academic and public libraries, and a variety of special collections, archives, and repositories. 

Currently contains four collections:

• Asia and the West: Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange   
• British Politics and Society  
• British Theatre, Music and Literature: High and Popular Culture  
• European Literature, 1790-1840: The Corvey Collection

Includes over 200,000 House of Commons sessional papers from 1715 to 2005, with supplementary material back to 1688.

Includes these collections:

• Part I: The Tudors, 1509-1603: State Papers Domestic  
• Part II: The Tudors, 1509-1603: State Papers Foreign, Scotland, Borders, Ireland and Registers of the Privy Council  
• Part III: The Stuarts and Commonwealth, James I - Anne I, 1603-1714: State Papers Domestic  
• Part IV: The Stuarts and Commonwealth, James I - Anne I, 1603-1714: State Papers Foreign, Ireland and Registers of the Privy Council  
• Eighteenth Century, 1714-1782, Part I: State Papers Domestic, Military, Naval and Registers of the Privy Council  
• Eighteenth Century, 1714-1782, Part 2: State Papers Foreign, Low Countries and Germany