Key Categories

When Fiction Becomes History: How Gone with the Wind Shaped America’s Memory of the Civil War

by
Vivian Leigh and Hatti McDaniel in Gone with the Wind
Gale is thrilled to run a competition with Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools, Kazakhstan, which gives students at schools within the group the chance to research and write about a topic of interest – and potentially get their work published! Students entering the competition make use of resources in Gale Reference Complete: Schools Edition – Ultimate. Below is the 2026 winner – congratulations Gulsezim Maratkyzy!

| By Gulsezim Maratkyzy, Grade 11 Student at NIS Shymkent |

Some history is written by historians. But the history people remember is often written by storytellers. In 1936, Margaret Mitchell published Gone with the Wind, a love story set in the American South during the Civil War (1861–1865), and in 1939 it became a film. Adjusted for inflation, that film is still the highest-grossing movie ever made, and the novel became America’s best-selling book of the twentieth century (Walton, 2022). For millions, this romance did not simply describe the past. Quietly, it replaced it.

In this blog post, I will use Gale databases to explore how Gone with the Wind shaped the way Americans remember the Civil War, tracing where the “Lost Cause” myth came from, how the novel and film presented it, and why so many people believed it. My argument is simple: the story did not invent this myth, but it gave it its most powerful form.

Read more

History is Creative: How Can Students Use Gale Primary Sources in New and Unique Ways?

by

│By Helen Cartledge, Gale Ambassador at the University of Birmingham│

Post-colonial thinking is always developing and expanding, especially in relation to how historians understand the Atlantic Slave Trade. Primary sources are integral to the underpinning of this historical narrative and the new ways historians are trying to reconceptualise and re-narrate the slave trade in ways that decentre the European.

Countless types of primary sources exist that can help historians uncover the experiences of many people who were oppressed and marginalised. However, we need to be aware of how primary sources can reveal multiple and strikingly different ideas, even if this is not revealed at first glance.

Thus, this blog post guides you through the process of finding and using primary sources from Gale’s Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive and the different ways such sources can be used within research.

Read more

Queen Victoria’s Handwriting and State Papers Deciphered by AI-driven Transcription Solution

by
A montage of images of sources from State Papers Online: Nineteenth Century: The State Papers of Queen Victoria and King Edward VII combined with a photograph of Queen Victoria taken in 1882, available in Wikimedia Commons

|By Paul Schummer – Senior Manager, Gale Content Production, and Chris Houghton – Head of Academic Partnerships|

We often use tools without understanding how they work. Chris, for example, has a hazy memory of learning how a vacuum cleaner works in a school physics lesson, but if you asked him to explain it now, he’d struggle! Most of the time, that’s fine – it’s why we take our car to a garage rather than learning how to fix it ourselves. So it’s understandable that researchers or students working with databases might not know how these collections came to be, and what is actually happening when they run a search. However, to be a truly effective researcher, it’s important to understand how these databases work, so that you can adapt your investigations and not miss vital information that is significant to your scholarship. 

Read more

Uncovering New Angles and Arguments with Text Mining

by

│By Georgia Platt, Gale Ambassador at Lancaster University│

Six months ago, I knew nothing about Digital Humanities or text mining. It wasn’t really a topic covered in my undergraduate degree in History, and I’d always been a bit unsure of the place technology has in historical research. Then I began my MA in Digital Humanities, which I chose to try and engage with these technological aspects of humanities studies that I hadn’t had the opportunity to explore before. I spent the first ten weeks of this course doing an intensive text mining module, and it revolutionised my approach to historical study.

If you’re curious about text mining but don’t know where to start, or are a digital humanities sceptic looking to be proved wrong, this blog post is for you. I will start with some basic theory of what text mining is and what kinds of questions it can answer, then I’ll put my practical skills to the test with an example from my studies in Victorian crime and punishment.

Read more

Hacking History Workshop Delivers Future-Ready Skills

by
A montage of photos from the Hacking History workshop

|By Chris Houghton, Head of Academic Partnerships| In June, Gale delivered its fourth Hacking History event at the Dahod Family Alumni Center at the Castle, in central Boston. The hackathon showed participants that digital humanities is not just about using technology in the humanities. It’s about building practical, transferable skills, applicable in many careers: finding … Read more

Gale Fellows Present their DH Research at the Socio-Economic History Society Conference

by
Blog Post Author with the Gale–SEHS Fellows

| By Masaki Morisawa, Product Solutions Consultant |

On the sunny weekend of 9–10 May 2026, the 95th National Conference of the Socio-Economic History Society (SEHS) took place at Senshu University’s suburban Ikuta campus. More than 300 members gathered for the event, presenting and discussing topics as varied as promissory notes in Edo-period Japan, American civil aviation policy, and industrial development in colonial India. The breadth of subjects on display reflected the geographic and chronological range covered by this interdisciplinary society.

Against this vibrant backdrop, three participants in the Gale–SEHS Fellowship presented the results of their research to an audience of about fifty scholars. Gale has partnered with a number of scholarly societies and academic organisations to support digital humanities research, but until now all of these partnerships had been based in either the United States or Europe. The collaboration with SEHS therefore marked an important milestone as Gale’s first fellowship program in Asia.

Over the course of nine months, three early-career scholars selected by the Society’s board of directors explored historical questions using Gale’s resources and digital tools under the guidance of Chris Houghton, Head of Academic Partnerships. The conference provided an opportunity for them to share their findings with the wider academic community. Although Chris was unfortunately unable to travel to Japan for the event, I had the privilege of serving as moderator in his place.

Read more

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

by
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.

Read more

Doing Rather than Listening: Developing DH Skills at Hacking History

by

│By Chris Houghton, Head of Academic Partnerships│

This blog post discusses why it’s so important to provide additional value to universities at a time of unprecedented upheaval through professional development events like Hacking History workshops. It also reflects on the evolution of these events and the success of the third Hacking History event which recently took place at Coventry University.

Read more

Coming Soon: Global Politics and US Foreign Policy: The Council on Foreign Relations, 1918–2000

by

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

December 2025 will see the launch of a new digital archive, Global Politics and US Foreign Policy: The Council on Foreign Relations, 1918–2000.

This is the digitisation of material from the Studies Department, Records of Groups, and the Records of Meetings of the Council on Foreign Relations, a non-partisan, independent US think tank focused on the international relations of the United States and its role in the world.

This role, and public perceptions of it, has altered greatly throughout the twentieth century, from the isolationist principles of the 1920s and 30s, to the American engagement in WWII and subsequent support in Allied recovery processes, to the Cold War, global anti-communist fears, and the growth of American soft power. In 2025, many of the programs of the United States Agency for International Development (established in 1961 and a key tool of US soft power) were shut down and a new phase of US international relations began.

Read more

Collisions: Driving Through Digital Humanities in Search of Roadkill

by

│By Gilberto Mazzoli, ESEH-Gale Fellow│

In 2024 I have been one of four recipients of the ESEH-Gale Fellowship in Digital Environmental Humanities. This fellowship has been a good opportunity to explore some aspects of my research in environmental history in a different way and helped to make my current research more visible.

This fellowship not only allowed me to access for seven months, numerous online Gale Primary Sources archives related to the environmental history of the United States and to experiment with tools contained in the Gale Digital Scholar Lab, but enabled me to develop a part of my research project related to the creation of digital interactive maps. This pushed me to learn new technical skills, like GIS, and to think differently about some aspects of my research in environmental history.

In this brief account I reflect on my first experience with digital humanities and on the challenges faced during my research.

Read more