Gale News and Teams

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

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│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.

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Terra Nullius: The Legacy of “The Land of No One”

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│By Oralkhanova Alima, Year 11 Student at Nazarbaev Intellectual School in Semey, Kazakhstan│

In an era when concerns about overpopulation and scarcity of natural resources are rising, it may seem paradoxical that certain areas of land remain unclaimed and unwanted. Even today, when countries continue to engage in territorial disputes and conflicts, there still exist regions that have been ignored by the international community. To describe such territories, early international law introduced a specific term – terra nullius, a Latin expression meaning “the land of no one”. Although this term is no longer officially used, the concept of terra nullius continues to captivate people’s minds.

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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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Collisions: Driving Through Digital Humanities in Search of Roadkill

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│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.

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G is for Golden Age: Exploring a Golden Age of Children’s Literature with Gale’s Nineteenth Century Collections Online

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│By Elizabeth Gaglio, Academic Customer Success Specialist│

The nineteenth century is known as a “Golden Age” of children’s literature. Advancements in printing and new views on childhood transformed the genre that was overwhelmingly moral and didactic, finally allowing for tales of adventure, nonsense verse, and imaginative illustration.

Rather than reading just to learn proper behaviour and lessons, children got to find out what happened to Alice when she fell down the rabbit hole and follow the woodland adventures of “a silly old bear” and his friends. Reading for pleasure, curiosity, and wonder became a valued part of childhood in this golden age.

By looking at one popular style of book, the alphabet book, we can see echoes of trends found across children’s literature in the nineteenth century, laying the foundations of modern works. Didactic by nature, but with growing whimsy and creativity, these alphabet collections found in Gale’s Children’s Literature and Childhood archive (part of Nineteenth Century Collections Online) help us track the evolution of children’s literature.

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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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From Salty Dreams to Solar Futures: Rethinking Desalination with Gale Primary Sources

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│By Elizabeth Hameeteman, Postdoctoral Researcher, Technische Universität Berlin │

When I began my Gale Fellowship, I was curious about how digital tools might support my historical research. As someone trained primarily in archival and text-based methods, I was eager to explore how computational approaches might offer new ways of seeing familiar materials – or even lead me to sources I wouldn’t have encountered otherwise. What I didn’t expect was that it would shift the trajectory of my work entirely.

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In the Footsteps of My Avô: Exploring Angola’s Fight for Independence Through Family History

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|Rosa Ferreira, Digital Product Trainer|

Armando Dias De Castro, my avô – my Portuguese grandfather – was a man full of life. He was warm, funny, always ready with a story or a joke. He was also the kindest man you’d ever meet. But when it comes to his time in Angola, I’ve got nothing. No stories, no memories. If he ever spoke about it, I must have been too small to notice, or the words just never stuck.

My uncle, however, recalls many conversations. That makes me believe my avô must have shared his experiences, at least in fragments, though they slipped past me.

It is this gap – between the grandfather I knew and the silence that lingers – that has drawn me into the archives.

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Understanding Ngrams

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│By Becca Gillot, Gale Digital Scholar Lab Product Manager│

One of the easiest tools to understand and use in Gale Digital Scholar Lab is the Ngram tool. This blog post will explain the tool itself, how to use it to explore your content set, and some tips and tricks for getting the most out of your visualisations.

The Ngram Tool

The Ngram tool is one of the easiest to understand in Gale Digital Scholar Lab. The tool works its way through the cleaned OCR that you have created (by applying a cleaning configuration to your content set) and counts how many times an ‘Ngram’ appears, before displaying that data as either a word cloud or a bar graph.

The Ngram tool is great for getting a high-level overview of your content set, so you can see at a glance the themes, key concepts, and ideas contained in the documents you are exploring. This type of distant reading is particularly great for large content sets that can be unwieldy to explore using close reading, or for content sets you’re not familiar with, but can also be used to analyse specific texts, such as an individual monograph. Even if you know your material really well, the Ngram tool can be a great way of presenting that knowledge as an accessible snapshot that others can quickly understand.

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