Uncovering India with Gale Primary Sources

│By Mickey Mehta Arorra, Digital Product Trainer│ India’s history unfolds across centuries of transformation – colonial rule, the struggle for independence, post-colonial reconstruction, and global diplomacy. Much of this complex narrative has long remained buried in distant or hard-to-reach archives. Now, Gale Primary Sources brings these rich and rare documents into the digital realm, making … Read more

A Moment of Anguish: Revisiting the Separation of Singapore from the Federation of Malaysia Through British Library Newspapers

|By Liping Yang, Senior Manager, Academic Publishing, Gale Asia| On the morning of August 9, 1965, a visibly shaken Lee Kuan Yew, prime minister of Singapore, stood before journalists and television cameras. His voice trembled and his eyes welled with tears when he talked about the moment when the agreement “which severed Singapore from Malaysia” … Read more

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

│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 … Read more

Revisiting South Africa through Gale Primary Sources

│ By Tom English, Strategic Initiatives Manager – EMEA │ Was South Africa the first African state to gain independence from colonising powers or the last? This question is posed by Frank Welsh’s telling of the country’s colonial history in his book, A History of South Africa, and it speaks to the rich and complex … Read more

An Eighteenth-Century Intersectional Feminist? Exploring the Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Eighteenth Century Collections Online

│By Leila Marhamati, Associate Editor, Gale Primary Sources│ Maybe “Intersectional Feminist” is taking it a bit far, but Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) has certainly been described as a woman ahead of her time. Best known today for the correspondence she maintained while traveling with her husband through the Ottoman Empire from 1716 to 1718, … Read more

Treaty Ports and Modern China

Map of China

|By Liping Yang, Senior Manager, Academic Publishing, and Lindsay Whitaker-Guest, Associate Editor, Gale Primary Sources| Gale has just released China and the Modern World: Regional China and the West, 1759-1972. As the ninth instalment in the series, this new archive features a compilation of 39 series of mostly British Foreign Office (FO) files. These include general … Read more

The History of West Malaysia and Singapore as Refracted Through British Colonial Office Files

|By Liping Yang, Senior Manager, Academic Publishing, and Emma Harris, Associate Editor, Gale Primary Sources| Gale Primary Sources’ State Papers Online Colonial: Asia digital archive welcomed its third instalment in September 2024 – State Papers Online Colonial: Asia, Part III: Malay States, Malaya, and Straits Settlements – providing a continuation of and perfect complement to … Read more

Lost (and Found) in Translation: Language in Archives of Latin American and Caribbean History

│By Leila Marhamati, Associate Editor, Gale Primary Sources│ Post-colonialist thinker Frantz Fanon declared the importance of language in a world globalised through empire and colonisation: “To speak… means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization”. It is ironic to cite this quotation in translation from the original French, as … Read more

Archives Unbound: Preserving Cultural Heritage That Might Otherwise Be Lost in War

│By Philip Virta, Senior Acquisitions Editor│ The Archives Unbound program provides multiple perspectives on global history. Through our institutional partners and archival collections, we preserve, protect, and provide access to government documents, personal papers, organisational records, and heritage collections. In a historic period that has seen conflicts threatening lives, freedom, and cultural heritage, Gale Primary … Read more

China and Australia: Trade, Migration, and Politics in the Nineteenth to Early Twentieth Centuries

│By Liping Yang, Senior Manager, Academic Publishing│ The Flodden was a barque or three-masted sailing ship originally constructed in Britain and later sold to Australia and registered in Melbourne. On June 22, 1883, the ship departed from Fremantle, Western Australia, bound for Shanghai, carrying a cargo of 806 tons of sandalwood. Unfortunately, on August 23, … Read more