activism

Global Communist and Socialist Movements – The Third Instalment of Political Extremism and Radicalism

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Socialism

│By Emma Harris, Associate Editor, Gale Primary Sources│

Global Communist and Socialist Movements is the third instalment of the award-winning Political Extremism and Radicalism series. For researchers interested in the workings of radical thinking, rhetoric, and twentieth century politics, this module offers a broad scope of material on left-wing thinking and political ideologies such as Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, Trotskyism, and anarchism, adding to the material on far-right groups and some areas of the far left already in the Political Extremism and Radicalism series.

This module provides excellent international coverage, including material from the USA, UK, Europe, Latin America, and South Africa. This grants researchers the opportunity to study the historical trajectories of left-wing radical movements across the globe, considering how these groups saw themselves, as well as the reactions of the capitalist nations in which they emerged. The twenty-one collections digitised from eight source libraries contain approximately 870,000 pages, with documents ranging primarily from 1880 to 1960.

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Exploring the Rise of Black Consciousness in South Africa using Gale Primary Sources

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Anit-apartheid protest

│By Sasha Mandakovic, Gale Ambassador at Erasmus University, Rotterdam│

In the midst of finishing the final year of my Bachelor’s degree, I wrote a comparative analysis between the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa and La Négritude, a literary black resistance movement in Senegal. Inspired by this, in this blog post I will be focusing on the rise of Black Consciousness in South Africa and what it sought to be. This topic is also of great personal relevance to me, as it delves into the experiences of individuals who share my own racial and cultural identity. Furthermore, as someone who has lived in West Africa and had the opportunity to visit South Africa, I find it truly captivating to delve into the nuances of this movement and acquire a more profound understanding of it.

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Writing Sensitive Personal Histories

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Sensitive documents

│By Jade Burnett, Gale Ambassador at the University of Sheffield│

Throughout this academic year I have been working on an MA dissertation on the marriages of members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). In working on this dissertation, I have tried to piece together the personal lives of people who existed largely in the political sphere. While this work is hugely interesting and deeply fulfilling academically, it can also be very tricky, with the writing of personal histories bringing up a range of difficulties surrounding how academics can seek to sensitively piece together the intimate lives of individuals. I hope that this blog post can offer readers some tips and tricks on how to approach writing these histories. 

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Digging into Datasets in Gale Digital Scholar Lab

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│By Sarah L. Ketchley, Senior Digital Humanities Specialist, Gale│

This dataset post is a follow-up to Working with Datasets, a Primer which discussed text datasets of primary sources and explored how to access and work with them in Gale Digital Scholar Lab. Here, we’ll look at the topics of the first eight datasets in the Lab in more detail, the types of documents included in each set, and consider how a user may work with them for analysis. Our next blog post will showcase classroom-based use of the Lab’s datasets as an introductory pathway into the field of digital humanities.

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The Historical Context Behind Projections of the ‘Dangerous Drag Queen’ by the Far Right

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LGBTQ protest header

Disclaimer: This blog post is written by an undergraduate student. Becca uses materials from Gale’s Political Extremism and Radicalism: Far-Right Groups in America archive which contains visual and textual material representing various historical viewpoints related to race, gender, sexuality, terrorism, and other subjects, including terminology and concepts that may be considered offensive by modern standards. … Read more

Using Archives Unbound to Explore the Agency of the Oppressed

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Montage of images from this blog post

│By Phoebe Sleeman, Gale Ambassador at Durham University│ As a historian, I have become increasingly aware of the power of archives to silence and oppress. Over the last few decades historians have been seeking to work against the grain of the traditional archive to uncover the agency of the oppressed, and some feminist historians have … Read more

Decolonization: Politics and Independence in Former Colonial and Commonwealth Territories

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Decolonization header

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

Last week, I was lucky enough to go to India for the first time. I visited Mangalore in the state of Karnataka, as well as Kerala with its famous backwaters and cool green tea plantations in old hill stations. The British planted pine forests there and hid from the sun; in Mangalore old warehouses built along the river by the Portuguese for tile manufacture were visible from the high rise buildings around them. And everywhere – at busy roundabouts, by old government buildings and in front of smart new colleges – were statues and busts of solemn figures who I could not identify. The names Gandhi, Nehru and Modi are essentially the limit of my knowledge of modern India.

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How to Make Use of British Security Service Documents

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│By Jade Burnett, Gale Ambassador at the University of Sheffield│

British Security Service files from Gale’s Political Extremism and Radicalism archive have a huge amount to tell us about British political life in the twentieth century. These files deal with the activities of extreme British political figures and movements. At first, these files may seem somewhat inaccessible, compiled in large folders, containing information which spans long periods of time and refers to a range of different figures, often with little context. However, once you get an understanding of how the archival documents are best used and approached, there are huge benefits to using them for academic research. 

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Peyote Rights, Religious Freedom and Indigenous Persecution in the Women’s Missionary Advocate Papers

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Woman's Missionary Advocate header image

|By Lola Hylander, Gale Ambassador at University College London|

I am a student of the History and Politics of the Americas at University College London, and my dissertation will analyse Employment Division v. Smith (1990),a Supreme Court ruling that overturned almost a century of activism surrounding the Native American Church’s (NAC) right to practice peyotism, a religion based on the ceremonial use of the psychedelic cactus, peyote, in the United States. Religious debates largely define the discourse around peyote use, examining whether or not it should be protected under the First Amendment’s freedom of religion clause. Wanting to further understand the role of religion in the peyote debate, I turned to Gale’s Archives Unbound collection to see what I could find.

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Launch of British Library Newspapers, Part VI: Ireland 1783-1950

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Irish newspapers

|By Rachel Holt, Gale Primary Sources Acquisitions Editor|

It is with great excitement that Gale announces the launch of the sixth instalment of the British Library Newspapers series. This latest module entitled Ireland 1783-1950 will add an additional 80 titles to the series and, as the name suggests, these were all published in Ireland in the late eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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