March 2020 - The Gale Review

The Wall Street Crash – An Enduring Comparison

October 3, 2023March 26, 2020 by Gale Ambassadors

│By Pollie Walker, Gale Ambassador at the University of Liverpool | My plan is to become a commercial solicitor, and I have recently taken an interest in commercial markets, economic policies and how they impact business. Therefore, I decided to use this blog post to look at a major economic event and evaluate how it … Read more

Making Digital Scholarship accessible for all – New Learning Center added to the Gale Digital Scholar Lab

October 3, 2023March 24, 2020 by Gale Review Team

| By Lindsey Gervais, Digital Pedagogy Specialist and Margaret Waligora, Product Manager |

In this blog post we’re delighted to share some exciting new developments made to the Gale Digital Scholar Lab, including the much-anticipated release of the Learning Center! This release represents our efforts to put learning and teaching digital methods at the forefront of the platform – providing students, instructors and researchers with the instructional scaffolds needed to navigate and learn through Gale Digital Scholar Lab’s workflow. Users can now access the assistance or instructional supplements they need wherever they are in the Gale Digital Scholar Lab, allowing them to situate learning within the context of the overall research process. We’re delighted to release this suite of instructional materials, developed in collaboration with our in-house scholars and experts within the digital humanities field.

Humanity and Courage: Refugees and the Memory of Those Who Saved Them

October 3, 2023March 18, 2020 by Gale Review Team

│By Rebecca Bowden, Associate Acquisitions Editor, Gale Primary Sources│

By the end of 2018, the UN reported that an unprecedented 70.8 million people had been forced from their homes by conflict and persecution. Since its start on 15 March 2011, the Syrian Civil War has caused nearly 6.7 million Syrians to become refugees, with another 6.2 million people displaced within Syria. At the same time, the number of refugees from across North Africa increased significantly with the Arab uprisings of 2011. Additional refugee crises arose throughout the 2010s – although there has been little reporting on the subject, such as the over four million Venezuelans who have left their country since 2014. Most recently, there has been the much better covered flight of 900,000 Rohingya to Myanmar. Modern warfare, internecine strife, economic disruption and now climate change have both accelerated the number and exacerbated the breadth of refugee crises, impacting governments and straining international relations.

The Wacky World of Early Modern Patents

October 3, 2023March 13, 2020 by Gale Ambassadors

Harrison, Charles. "Farmers! Protect your Crops by Using 'Bink's Patent Futurist Scarecrow. ' Specially Designed by an Eminent Cubist. No Bird Has Ever Been Known to Go within Three Fields of It." Punch, July 17, 1918, 33. Punch Historical Archive, 1841-1992

│By Ellen Grace Lesser, Gale Ambassador at the University of Exeter│

The famous wizarding twins Fred and George Weasley first introduced patents to me, explaining them to be the legal right granted to an inventor to prevent others from copying their invention. State Papers Online taught me that patents can be more than that: they are the official and legal conferring of a right or a title of any kind to anyone for a set period of time. In practice, this means that as long as a right or a title is temporarily conferred to a named entity (whether that be an individual person or a company) the right is a patent. It was interesting to discover that patents do not necessarily have to apply to inventions. While looking into the State Papers Online archive, I discovered many other kinds of patents as well as patents for inventions. From the contents of the patents to the physicality of the documents, I will share with you three of the patents I found in the archives and why each is interesting in a different way.

An American Missionary with Two Motherlands: Joseph Beech and West China Union University

October 3, 2023March 11, 2020 by Gale Review Team

│By Liping Yang, Publishing Manager, Digital Archive and eReference, Gale Asia│

Reverend Dr Joseph Beech played an instrumental role in founding and running West China Union University, first as its founding president and later its chancellor, due to his vision, foresight, and resourcefulness. Today, March 11, 2020, marks the 110th anniversary of the founding of the university, one of the thirteen Christian universities established in China before 1949. Based on a perusal and research of articles published in English periodicals such as West China Missionary News, The Chinese Recorder and Educational Review, all available in Gale’s China and the Modern World archive, as well as his correspondence with the American Methodist Episcopal Church, available in Nineteenth Century Collections Online: Asia and the West, this essay attempts to reconstruct the story of this great missionary-educator who dedicated forty years of his life to the advancement of education in China, especially West China.

Teaching Primary Source Research Skills – Discovering New Points of View about European and Colonised Women Using Gale’s New Archive “Voice and Vision”

October 3, 2023March 8, 2020 by Gale Ambassadors

In this blog post, PhD student Meg Ison explains what she teaches and how she introduces students to primary source research skills at the University of Portsmouth. She also explores the new module of Women’s Studies Archive, Voice and Vision, and the fascinating insight it can give students into women’s involvement and influence in colonialism.

Liberating, Stultifying or Provocative: Mary Quant’s Miniskirt

October 3, 2023March 3, 2020 by Gale Ambassadors

│By Eloise Sinclair, Gale Ambassador at the University of Durham│

Mary Quant’s miniskirt of 1966 not only transformed the look of London’s youth but, according to Jonathan Aitken in a 1967 article in The Sunday Telegraph, inspired the “swinging revolution, the sexual revolution, the restaurant and night-club revolution”. The newspaper archives in Gale Primary Sources are particularly valuable for assessing the effect of Quant’s designs on the fashion industry and British culture, revealing the range of contemporary responses and reactions to this iconic item of clothing.