Early Modern History – Page 2

Teaching with Eighteenth Century Collections Online

October 3, 2023March 30, 2021 by Gale Review Team

Primary Source image combined with female using laptop and writing on paper.

│By Julia de Mowbray, Publisher at Gale│

Now Eighteenth Century Collection Online (ECCO) is approaching its eighteenth birthday, and has been significantly upgraded, with a focus on enhancing ECCO’s user-friendliness as a teaching and student-learning resource, it seems an apt time to see what evidence there is for its use in teaching and student learning. Plus, with more of the students’ learning experiences moving online, to platforms such as Zoom for lectures, seminars and tutorials, and to online e-resources for primary and secondary source materials, what can be learned from past use of ECCO as a teaching tool, and how can this be applied in a remote learning environment?

New ECCO Experience and Advanced Search Updates Launching on December 18, 2020

October 3, 2023November 26, 2020 by Gale Review Team

│By Megan Sullivan, Gale Primary Sources Product Manager│

We are thrilled to announce that on Friday, December 18, 2020, Gale will release an enhanced user experience for Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). On this date, we will retire the current version of ECCO, and your library’s ECCO links will seamlessly redirect to the new experience.

The Wacky World of Early Modern Patents

October 3, 2023March 13, 2020 by Gale Ambassadors

Harrison, Charles. "Farmers! Protect your Crops by Using 'Bink's Patent Futurist Scarecrow. ' Specially Designed by an Eminent Cubist. No Bird Has Ever Been Known to Go within Three Fields of It." Punch, July 17, 1918, 33. Punch Historical Archive, 1841-1992

│By Ellen Grace Lesser, Gale Ambassador at the University of Exeter│

The famous wizarding twins Fred and George Weasley first introduced patents to me, explaining them to be the legal right granted to an inventor to prevent others from copying their invention. State Papers Online taught me that patents can be more than that: they are the official and legal conferring of a right or a title of any kind to anyone for a set period of time. In practice, this means that as long as a right or a title is temporarily conferred to a named entity (whether that be an individual person or a company) the right is a patent. It was interesting to discover that patents do not necessarily have to apply to inventions. While looking into the State Papers Online archive, I discovered many other kinds of patents as well as patents for inventions. From the contents of the patents to the physicality of the documents, I will share with you three of the patents I found in the archives and why each is interesting in a different way.