Gale Review Team

We upload guest posts on behalf of our visiting writers and editors.

Learning from the Ground Up – Hacking History in Oxford with Gale Digital Scholar Lab

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Hacking History Oxford Digital Humanities Skills Workshop

│By Chris Houghton, Head of Academic Partnerships│ This blog post details the Gale Hacking History event run in collaboration with Digital Scholarship @ Oxford in May 2025. It also reflects on the value of using hackathons to teach digital humanities tools and methodologies, enabling participants with no knowledge of DH to collaboratively develop projects and … Read more

Reflecting on the Recent Past with The Independent Historical Archive Supplement, 2017-2021

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│By Leila Marhamati, Associate Editor, Gale Primary Sources│

Through their daily, on-the-ground coverage of current events, newspapers continue to be a rich resource for understanding key societal issues. In March 2025, Gale released a supplement to its digital archive of the major British newspaper The Independent, bringing coverage up to 2021.

The additional 190,000 pages of material offered in this supplement provides a unique opportunity for users to reflect back on events they have lived through as a matter of scholarly interest, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Using this archive, we can paint a retrospective of this major recent event, thinking about questions of hindsight, bias, and personal experience.

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From the Physical-to-Digital Archive and Back: A Gale Fellow’s Account of Trials and Errors

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│By Vanessa Bateman, ESEH-Gale Fellow│

When I received the 2024/2025 ESEH-Gale Non-Residential Fellowship in Digital Environmental History I was just starting the early stages of my first solo book project. I had done enough research to develop my book’s main themes, structure, and research questions, but I had not started the writing process because I still had some gaps to fill.

As someone new to the Digital Humanities (DH), I applied to the Gale Fellowship because I wanted to learn how DH methodologies could elevate my research and eventually expand my output beyond a traditional academic book. As a Gale Fellow, I received training in different research and analysis methods that could be achieved in Gale Digital Scholar Lab, and access to the Gale Primary Sources.

Below I share an account of how I had to problem solve and pivot my research in the digital space, and some findings I made that will be useful in the future. Sharing moments when research didn’t go according to plan, I believe, is just as important as a polished finished project.

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Revisiting South Africa through Gale Primary Sources

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│ By Tom English, Strategic Initiatives Manager – EMEA │

Was South Africa the first African state to gain independence from colonising powers or the last? This question is posed by Frank Welsh’s telling of the country’s colonial history in his book, A History of South Africa, and it speaks to the rich and complex nature of the country known as the rainbow nation.

If we want to make sense of, and make new discoveries about, a country as complex and dynamic as South Africa, we need to look at it from a range of perspectives. What are the different narratives of its inception? Who are its constituents? How do they see themselves in relation to their country? How did South Africa come to be as it is today? And what journey has the country been on in its long walk to freedom and beyond?

Gale Primary Sources collections give us the perspectives and insights that can help us to make sense of these questions and find some answers.

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Exploring Latino History through the Chicano Movement

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│By Phil Virta, Senior Acquisitions Editor, Gale Primary Sources│

Gale’s archive Latino Social and Political Culture and History: Perspectives on the Chicano Movement presents a history of Chicanas/os in the United States with documents on programmes that brought Mexican guest workers to the country such as the Bracero Programme, organisations that evolved to support the community such as the United Farm Workers, and the individuals who helped found and advance the Chicano Movement (El Movimiento) such as César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, and Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales. 

Labour records, correspondence, organisational papers, personal papers, manuscripts, and ephemera all contribute to our understanding of a tumultuous period in the annals of the United States. This post will introduce the background and content of this important new archive.

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A New Course in Gale Digital Scholar Lab: Introduction to Digital Humanities

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│By Sarah L. Ketchley, Senior Digital Humanities Specialist│

In today’s rapidly evolving academic landscape, digital tools are reshaping the way we study literature, history, and culture. As digital humanities (DH) becomes increasingly central to research and teaching, instructors—particularly graduate students and early-career faculty—often find themselves faced with the challenge of integrating digital methodologies into their courses. To address this need ‘Introduction to Digital Humanities‘ offers a structured, assignable course designed to equip students with essential digital research skills. It provides an accessible, hands-on approach to digital humanities, helping instructors save valuable time while fostering critical data literacy in students.

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Global Development and Humanitarian Aid: The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, 1919-1997

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│By Clem Delany, Acquisitions Editor, Gale Primary Sources│

Note: Links to documents in this blog post will be provided on publication of the digital archive.

Like many people in the UK, my first experience of humanitarian appeals was through charity campaigns at school or through Blue Peter. The first one I strongly recall is sending care packages to Romania. Famine in Ethiopia and the need for wells in Africa also loom large in my memories of this era; if Matt Baker told me to give money I said how much (up to a limit of £2)?

Years later, studying history at University, I took a module on the Greek famine of 1941-1942. It was something I had known nothing about, illustrated with stark numbers of Axis requisitions, of the dead and the starving, and by accounts from survivors.

Primary sources for situations such as famines can be a real challenge for scholars; data is shaky, accounts are limited. Few people in a famine zone are there to count heads or write a dissertation; they are either struggling to survive the disaster or there to provide aid.

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An Eighteenth-Century Intersectional Feminist? Exploring the Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Eighteenth Century Collections Online

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│By Leila Marhamati, Associate Editor, Gale Primary Sources│

Maybe “Intersectional Feminist” is taking it a bit far, but Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) has certainly been described as a woman ahead of her time. Best known today for the correspondence she maintained while traveling with her husband through the Ottoman Empire from 1716 to 1718, Lady Mary was commonly on the fringes of and often at the forefront of major historical developments in Britain and the Western world. She provided startlingly positive views on non-Western cultures and scientific experimentation at a time when both were viewed with suspicion. And yet, she was still located within a society that embraced hierarchical institutions and systems of oppression.

Using Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), we can trace these many aspects of Lady Mary and, through them, glean insights into the eighteenth century as a whole. This post contains some documents from the forthcoming release Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Part III, available in March 2026.

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Unlocking the Past: Advancing Discoverability of Gale Primary Sources

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Photographs. Amateur Theatricals, 1890

|By Magaly Taylor, Discovery and Usage Product Manager, Gale│

Archives provide valuable access to the past, enabling educators and researchers in the humanities and social sciences to incorporate historical collections into their work. Primary source archives products are invaluable for research and learning, encapsulating entire historical periods through diverse content like manuscripts, images, and publications.

This blog post explores the use of metadata to discover primary source content and Gale’s activities to enhance the discoverability of their eResources.

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The American Civil War: The International Perspective – The First Digital Archive of Its Kind

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│By Emma Harris, Associate Editor, Gale Primary Sources│

A fundamental topic in American history, the American Civil War (1861-1865) was a major event of the nineteenth century, not just in America but also in global politics, with ramifications for the future of slavery and ideas of popular, democratic government. Lecturers and researchers have increasingly been looking to study the war in its international context as the trajectory and outcome of the war impacted those beyond just America—especially in Europe.

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