Gale News and Teams

Getting to know Isabel Fry (1869-1958)

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Isabel Fry (1869-1958)

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

Please note that this blog post refers to historical terms found in the archive which may be offensive to the modern reader.

The Isabel Fry Papers, 1878-1958 released this September in Archives Unbound. The papers are a series of diaries and personal papers detailing the life of a remarkable social reformer and keen observer of the events of her day. Isabel Fry (1869-1958) was one of nine children born to Mariabella Hodgkin (Lady Fry) and Sir Edward Fry, a judge and zoologist. Her family were Quakers, and the values of the Religious Society of Friends were apparent in her various pursuits and those of several of her siblings – Edward was a barrister; Joan was a social reformer; Roger was an art historian and member of the Bloomsbury Group; Agnes (Isabel’s twin) was a writer and botanist; Sara was a penal reformer and magistrate; and Anna was a humanitarian and peace activist.

The Isabel Fry Papers offer the opportunity to get to know Isabel through her writings and correspondence. The archive includes materials recording her thoughts from as early as 1878, and she kept detailed journals beginning in 1907 up until her death in 1958. Isabel’s diaries describe not only her thoughts and feelings about everyday relationships, events, and occurrences, but of the rapidly changing world around her. She was well-read, compassionate, intelligent, and well-travelled. In her diaries she commented on major events during her lifetime including the Suffrage Movement, the First and Second World Wars, Russia and the Bolsheviks, and the political situations in Ireland and Türkiye. Her diaries cover 80 years of history; this blog post explores some examples of what can be found within the collection.

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The Blue-Eyed Shogun: Douglas MacArthur and the Making of Postwar Japan

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│By Masaki Morisawa, Product Solutions Consultant│

There are two American names that every Japanese schoolchild learns in history class because of the enormous impact they had on our country. One is Commodore Matthew C. Perry (1794–1858), whose visits in 1853 and 1854 helped end more than two centuries of Tokugawa diplomatic seclusion. The other is General Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964), who, as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) from 1945 to 1951, oversaw the complete transformation of post-World War II Japan.

Both men embodied American power at critical turning points, but MacArthur’s influence was arguably greater. Perry jolted Japan out of seclusion and set major changes in motion, but he did not rewrite Japan’s laws, restructure its society, or govern its people. MacArthur oversaw sweeping changes in all three areas, leaving a legacy that is still debated today.

In this blog post, I’m going to explore the impact of General Douglas MacArthur using Gale’s exciting new archive collection Asia in the Twentieth Century: General MacArthur, and War, Occupation, and Reconstruction in the Pacific, 1941–1972.

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Sustainability Was Built by Women, and Here’s Why

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

Sustainability isn’t a modern term created by tech-bros. It is an invention hand-crafted by women from different communities across centuries. And the proof can be found in Gale’s The Times Digital Archive.

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

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│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.

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

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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. 

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Uncovering New Angles and Arguments with Text Mining

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│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.

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History, Politics and Memory: Ostalgie in Contemporary German Society

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│By Matt Hudson, Gale Ambassador at the University of Durham│

October 3rd, 1990 became a symbol of post-Cold War optimism. As the reunification of Germany was marked with joyous celebrations, liberalism had emerged victorious. The collapse of the stagnant East German regime heralded not just the end of totalitarianism and censorship, but also the triumph of ‘people power’.

This picture appears naïve in today’s climate. In the former East Germany (German Democratic Republic or GDR), economic progress since reunification has not prevented voters from supporting the far-right AfD in their droves. Ostalgie, meaning nostalgia for life in the GDR, served as an early warning sign that the so-called ‘end of history’ was a misnomer.

But when did Ostalgie become an observed phenomenon? How did disaffection with life in a united Germany arise? And has this nostalgia been misinterpreted by western reporters?

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Hacking History Workshop Delivers Future-Ready Skills

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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

Benevolence and Blame: The Question of Race in America’s Early-Twentieth-Century Tuberculosis Crisis

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| By Alice Shadbolt, Gale Ambassador at the University of Liverpool |

Between 1915 and 1940, tuberculosis posed one of the most urgent public health crises for North America and Europe. However, its impact was far from evenly distributed. In the United States, mortality rates amongst Black communities were consistently higher than those recorded amongst white Americans, a disparity that became a central preoccupation of contemporary public health discourse.

Drawing on Gale’s Public Health Archives, which preserves the reports, policy documents, and educational materials produced by municipal and state health departments, this post examines how these institutions approached and explained this disparity. A close reading of these documents reveals how language was strategically deployed to redirect responsibility onto Black communities themselves, pathologising race and obscuring the lived implications of racial inequality.

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

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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.

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