Glam Rock to Georgian Riots: Bowie’s Last Notebook

│By Eleanor Leese, Acquisitions Editor, Gale Primary Sources

If, like me, you frequently find yourself wondering what David Bowie would be up to if his time with us mortals hadn’t been so tragically short – last week we got some answers. The BBC reported that David Bowie spent his last months deep in research about eighteenth-century Britain.

The appeal of the eighteenth century is something we know a little about here at Gale Primary Sources, as publishers of Eighteenth Century Collections Online, the largest collection of digital primary sources emerging from that century which is shortly to receive a large additional module in the form of ECCO, Part III. So, of course, the first thing that I did after learning about Bowie’s interest in our favourite historical era was to set about looking for the sources he had been reading. I wanted to see if I could find what had captured his imagination and ECCO did not disappoint.

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Spanish Flu in the Time of COVID-19

│By Eleanor Leese, Acquisitions Editor, Gale Primary Sources

The first half of the 2020s brought with it political and social upheaval on a scale not seen for generations. Nothing touched the lives of more people than the COVID-19 infections that were reported in the opening days of the decade, and led to the deaths of more than seven million people worldwide. To understand these once-in-a-lifetime events, journalists turned to the most recent example of a global pandemic – still just within living memory: the ‘Spanish Flu’.

With the addition of issues for 2020 to 2024 in The Times Digital Archive, it’s possible to research the development of these two in parallel for the first time.

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