Gale Ambassadors

Critical Thinking in Business Studies using Gale Primary Sources

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│By Brendon Ndoro, Gale Ambassador at the University of Cape Town│

In Business studies, it is easy to assume that success is all about securing the best return on investment. However, true academic and professional success requires a deeper, more analytical approach: critical thinking.

The foundational concepts explored in the study of business ethics, particularly covered in the “Business Ethics”1 textbook by Jimmy Winfield, George Hull, and Greg Fried, will be used to explore the topic of critical thinking and how it can be used to distinguish between what is merely profitable and what is genuinely right.

The Times Digital Archive offers us the ability to travel back in time, providing us the opportunity to audit the reasoning of past business leaders and equip ourselves with the logical tools needed to succeed today.

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Discovering American Roots of the Indian Independence Movement through Gale Primary Sources: The Hindu-German Conspiracy Trials in the USA

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Montage of historical images

| By Amandeep, Gale Ambassador at Banaras Hindu University |

Whenever the Indian revolutionary movement outside India is taught in history classes at different universities and colleges, the Komagata Maru incident of 1914 and the revolutionary activities of the Ghadar Movement in the United States certainly bring a thrilling experience to students and teachers. However, over the years, it has become a footnote when it comes to bringing new discourses.

For decades, the revolutionary movements outside India have not been rethought in the ways they should have been. The paucity of primary sources and travel limitations have been among the significant reasons why scholars and students have been unable to rethink and revisit the revolutionary movements abroad, especially in the USA.

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A Right Won, A Civic Duty to Learn: Women’s Civic Education After the Nineteenth Amendment

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│By Kat Weiss, Gale Academic Intern |

In the years leading up to the Nineteenth Amendment and after its ratification in 1920, American women realised that equality did not end with the right to vote. They recognised that they now had a civic duty to their country, to use this newfound right responsibly. With that realisation came a new question: now that women could participate in democracy, how would they learn to practice it?

They did not have access to the same education and resources as their male peers because the system was not built for them; they needed to find new ways to educate themselves and each other. With that in mind, the Nineteenth Amendment opened a new chapter in women’s history, one centred on learning how to exercise civic power. Using primary sources from Gale’s Nineteenth Century Collections Online, we can trace how women across the USA began to define and teach the responsibilities of citizenship.

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Exploring Corporate Social Responsibility Through the Times Digital Archive

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│By Brendon Ndoro, Gale Ambassador at the University of Cape Town│

When does one acknowledge the impact of their decisions on society? How does one remedy their wrongdoings? When does one act in response to the threat their actions bring upon the welfare and sustainability of society and the environment?

These are a few questions Business Studies students may come across when delving into the world of business ethics. A great starting point to answering questions like these lies in understanding Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). CSR is an ongoing practice in the world of business. It is a management concept focusing on the integration of social and environmental concerns into a business’s operations and relationships with various stakeholders.

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Italian Futurism and Gale Primary Sources

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│By Caley Collins, Gale Ambassador at University College London (UCL)│

Italian Futurism was an avant-garde movement founded in 1909 by F. T. Marinetti upon the publication of his tract The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism. The Futurists aimed to radically break from the past and create new types of literature, art, photography, and even music. They intended to glorify technology, aggression, and speed while destroying artistic and literary conventions.

The movement officially ended in 1944 with Marinetti’s death, however it is often considered to have had two phases. The first, more valiant phase is perceived as having ended in 1916 upon the deaths of several key members of the movement, including Umberto Boccioni, in WWI. In the subsequent years, Futurism moved in a different direction, allying itself with the Italian National Fascist Party and thus occasioning its own downfall. Using Gale Primary Sources, this post will explore the different facets of Futurism’s attempted creative emancipation from the past, alongside the movement’s legacy.

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Femininity and Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century European Aesthetics

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│By Sofía Sanabria de Felipe, Gale Ambassador at the University of Oxford│

In March 2022, an exhibition entitled Fashioning Masculinities opened at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Its manifesto was to show a ‘history of changing ideas of masculinity’. The exhibition greeted visitors with a gallery of plaster-casts of statues in a Greco-Roman idiom. Amongst them stood Pietro Francavilla’s statue of Apollo, a Renaissance sculpture depicting the apparent timelessness of the nude masculine ideal of Western classical epistemology.

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Perfecting the Elevator Pitch: Using Gale Primary Sources to Unpack Intellectual History

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│By Sofía Sanabria de Felipe, Gale Ambassador at the University of Oxford│

With great power comes great responsibility. With being a doctoral researcher comes the ever-present question: what do you work on? As a response, you come up with an elevator pitch that somewhat does justice to your project. To do so, you find yourself using abstract terms like ‘universality’ and ‘contingency’, often leaving your audience none the wiser as to what exactly it is you do.

So, when Gale Primary Sources offered me the opportunity to write a blog post centred on my research, I decided to use their archives and digital humanities tools as a way of finally perfecting my elevator pitch.

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Fabricating History: Empire Lines, Modern Designs, and the Politics of Dress in Regency Representations

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│By Megan Harlow, Gale Ambassador at Durham University│

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Regency fashion has become a cultural touchstone, romanticised amid the contemporary resurgence of early nineteenth-century period dramas. The global reception of Bridgerton (2020–), alongside the proliferation of the ‘Regencycore’ aesthetic, exemplifies the symbiotic relationship between historical narrative engagement and a renewed preoccupation with sartorial historiography, positioning fashion as a dynamic site of aesthetic and ideological negotiation.

Yet, as screen portrayals negotiate between historical fidelity and modern sensibilities, they often obscure the constructed nature of costume, selectively resurrecting aspects of the past while neglecting the intricate social, political, and economic meanings embedded in dress. 

Drawing on Gale Primary Sources, this analysis interrogates how Regency fashion was originally represented and how its legacy is reshaped in adaptation. Ultimately, questioning what histories are made visible through costume, and what is strategically forgotten, highlighting the historiographical implications of fashion in contemporary media.

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Keeping Track of Research for your Undergraduate Humanities Dissertation and Using Gale’s Digital Resources

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│By Jessica Crawley, Gale Ambassador at the University of Lancaster│

So, you’re a humanities undergraduate writing a dissertation, are you? If you’re anything like me, then you’re already finding this process as overwhelming as it is exciting. You have likely never taken on a research project this vast before, and that’s okay! You’re already on the right track by clicking this blog, and by the end of your dissertation process you’ll be a pro. Most of these skills are transferrable to essays too so, even if you aren’t writing a dissertation, this blog will still be of use to you.

This is the blog that I WISH someone had written when I first started researching for my dissertation: I was clueless, directionless, and – honestly – a little bit scared to start. If you’re having any of these feelings too, then after this blog they will hopefully start to melt away. I’ll be mainly referencing Gale’s Digital Resources, but if you don’t have access to any of these then speak to your library about any similar resources they may have to offer.

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Leaning Into The Great Gatsby and Other Primary Sources

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Still from the Film “the Painted Flapper"

│By Caley Collins, Gale Ambassador at University College London (UCL)│

At 100 years’ old, The Great Gatsby is more popular than ever. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s seminal 1925 novel encapsulates the obsessive nature of the American Dream alongside investigating truths about love and desire. Novels like this are one example of a primary source, with primary sources being first-hand accounts of contemporary periods and phenomena.

Needless to say, various types of primary source should be positioned differently within the creation or evidencing of an argument, and each source has many arguments that can be drawn out from it. But what are the best ways to use these primary sources? This post will guide you through the process of finding and using primary sources from Gale Primary Sources, starting with The Great Gatsby.

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