Gale Review Team

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

Who is the Founder of Modern Singapore?

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By Vanessa Tan, Editorial Assistant with Gale Asia

In 2019, Singapore will commemorate her bicentenary since the landing of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781–1826) on the island on 28 January 1819. Raffles’ name now stretches beyond the widely known narrative of the nation-state’s genesis. Today, the name carries pomp and prestige—Raffles City and Raffles Hotel are both prominent landmarks situated in the richest areas of Singapore, while Raffles Institution remains the highest-ranked secondary educational institution in the country, having produced many of the country’s top-performing scholars and politicians.

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Western Books on Southeast Asia Collection

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By Gregory Green, Curator of the John M. Echols Collection on Southeast Asia, Cornell University Library

The Gale Archives Unbound collection titled Western Books on Southeast Asia brings together nearly three hundred years of writings by travellers from Europe to Southeast Asia.  These publications range from official reports of government sponsored expeditions to personal journals of people travelling through the region on business or pleasure.  With that variety, one can expect to find a wide range of observations in the collection.  Much of the information is quite accurate, while a large amount is based on misunderstandings of what people were seeing, or in other ways, simply incorrect.  Whether accurate or not, the collection provides a clear view of how Southeast Asia was seen during this period of time by Western eyes.

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Surprising Search Results: From Crystal Therapy to Singing Bowls

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By Rebecca Bowden, Associate Acquisitions Editor

If one was researching current affairs, political history, or a particular literary period, Gale Primary Sources would be an obvious place to look. It is full of useful archives, from newspapers like The Times and The Independent, to huge collections of diverse primary sources, such as Nineteenth Century Collections Online. But what if you were researching something altogether more obscure – say, palmistry, feng shui or crystal therapy? It may surprise you that Gale Primary Sources continues to shine!

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Inside the BNP: Being a Mole in the British Far-Right

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By Rebecca Bowden, Associate Acquisitions Editor On 29 March 1984, at 10:25pm, Channel 4 aired ‘The Other Face of Terror’. According to Elizabeth Cowley, writing for the Daily Mail, ‘if I didn’t know this documentary was fact and that the people we see and hear…were real, I’d swear it was an over-the-top political thriller.’ The … Read more

Ernest Mason Satow: An Essay

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Sir Ernest Mason Satow, British diplomat and renowned Japanologist, was a lynchpin of Anglo-Chinese and Anglo-Japanese relations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During his long diplomatic career, Satow wrote many books on the region, including several on Japan during the transition from rule by the Tokugawa shogunate back to imperial power in the … Read more

Jack’s Alive to Card Castles: Entertainment in the Victorian Parlour

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By Rebecca Bowden, Associate Acquisitions Editor

The upper and middle classes of the Victorian period had more leisure time than their counterparts of previous generations, yet they did not have the electronic devices which sap much of our free time in the twenty-first century – televisions, games consoles , mobile phones… our Victorian ancestors had to create their own fun!

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The Contested Legacy of The Iron Duke, Fernando Álvarez de Toledo

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By Tom English, Gale Field Sales Executive – North UK

I remember being told in my very first history lecture at university that there’s no such thing as ‘the truth’. I also remember the passion with which the esteemed professor near-bellowed this message to a large group of fresh faced undergraduates. He was adamant. Another professor gave each and every one of his students a letter pointing out that one doesn’t go to university to learn history, but to read history. The message was clear: seeking out and drawing upon a variety of sources and perspectives is an essential part of a history degree.

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Indigenous populations: exploring early encounters, subjugation and protection in Gale Primary Sources

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By Carolyn Beckford, Gale Product Trainer

Today is International Day of the World’s Indigenous People. This was first put forward by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1994, and came as result of a commission designed to promote and protect Human Rights. Now, on 9th August, the world works to remember, recognise and respect the rights of indigenous populations and celebrate their achievements and contributions.

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Gale’s Political Extremism and Radicalism Archive: Why create it and why is it important now more than ever?

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|By Rachel Holt, Acquisitions Editor, Gale Primary Sources|

When telling friends and family that I was working on a digital archive focusing on right-wing extremists, far-left militants and a wide range of radical movements in between, the most common response was ‘why’? To answer that I must explain the motivation that triggered this project, as well as why such an archive is important now more than ever.

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The road to American Independence

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By Carolyn Beckford, Gale Product Trainer

Every July 4th I send holiday greetings to my friends and family in the USA and they always say, “same to you”. I remind them that July 4th isn’t a holiday in the UK. As an educator, I relish the opportunity to highlight and explain why American Independence is not celebrated with euphoria in the UK as it is in America.

We can see from the map below, found in Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers, that the territory under British rule was once immense and spanned the globe, leading to the well-known quote that Britain had “the empire on which the sun never sets.” The British colonisation of the Americas began in 1607 and before long, colonies had been established throughout the Americas.

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