Modern History

Leaning Into The Great Gatsby and Other Primary Sources

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Still from the Film “the Painted Flapper"

│By Caley Collins, Gale Ambassador at University College London (UCL)│

At 100 years’ old, The Great Gatsby is more popular than ever. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s seminal 1925 novel encapsulates the obsessive nature of the American Dream alongside investigating truths about love and desire. Novels like this are one example of a primary source, with primary sources being first-hand accounts of contemporary periods and phenomena.

Needless to say, various types of primary source should be positioned differently within the creation or evidencing of an argument, and each source has many arguments that can be drawn out from it. But what are the best ways to use these primary sources? This post will guide you through the process of finding and using primary sources from Gale Primary Sources, starting with The Great Gatsby.

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Reflecting on the Recent Past with The Independent Historical Archive Supplement, 2017-2021

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│By Leila Marhamati, Associate Editor, Gale Primary Sources│

Through their daily, on-the-ground coverage of current events, newspapers continue to be a rich resource for understanding key societal issues. In March 2025, Gale released a supplement to its digital archive of the major British newspaper The Independent, bringing coverage up to 2021.

The additional 190,000 pages of material offered in this supplement provides a unique opportunity for users to reflect back on events they have lived through as a matter of scholarly interest, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Using this archive, we can paint a retrospective of this major recent event, thinking about questions of hindsight, bias, and personal experience.

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From Chains to Change: The Differences Between African Slavery and the Trans-Atlantic Trade

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│By Rawan Mohamed, Gale Ambassador at the University of Leeds│

Slavery has been a pervasive institution throughout human history that has manifested into multiple forms across different societies. In Africa, indigenous systems of slavery pre-date the trans-Atlantic slave trade. However, the arrival of European powers and the subsequent demand for labour within the Americas transformed existing practices into a dehumanising enterprise. Delving into Gale’s Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive enables us to uncover the distinct differences between indigenous African slavery and the trans-Atlantic slave trade and shed light on their enduring impacts upon entire societies.

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The Mirror and Women: Female Readers, Female Writers

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│By Lucy McCormick, Gale Ambassador at the University of Birmingham│

The Daily Mirror began life in 1903 as a journal for respectable women – a burgeoning demographic at the fin-de-siècle, to whom the major daily newspapers did not cater. It launched staffed by women and pursued a female (although not exclusively) readership. Adrian Bingham’s article for Gale is a fascinating exploration of the Daily Mirror’s relationship with women. Building upon this rich contextual knowledge, this blog stresses the significance of this venture to embolden female readers and female writers in the androcentric tabloid press.

How did the Mirror depict women? Why did Arthur Harmsworth centralise women in his newspaper? How did women forge new roles for themselves as journalists and readers? This Women’s History Month, we are delving into Gale’s archive of the Mirror from 1903 to find out more.

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Leveraging Large Language Models for Post-OCR Correction of Nineteenth-Century British Newspapers

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Montage of images from this blog post, mixed with images from British Library Newspapers archive

│By Alan Thomas, AI Research Engineer at the Centre for Machine Intelligence, University of Sheffield│

Poor optical character recognition (OCR) quality is a major obstacle for humanities scholars seeking to make use of digitised primary sources such as historical newspapers. To improve the quality of noisily OCR’d historical documents, we introduce BLN600 – an open-access dataset derived from Gale’s British Library Newspapers – and showcase the potential of large language models (LLMs) for post-OCR correction using Llama.

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Exploring Genealogy in Gale Primary Sources

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

Gale Primary Sources offers a multitude of digital archives for all manners of historical research. But researchers may not realise that Gale’s archives can be used to explore one popular area of history – family history, or genealogy. Researching family history can often have its limitations, particularly geographical, yet digital archives help to break down these barriers, allowing researchers to find material from a range of locations that would usually not be accessible without travel.

Over the years, my family has been mapping out the history of our relatives, creating a broader picture of where we came from. So, aware of all the useful documents in Gale Primary Sources, I decided to see what extra information I could glean on my relatives, whilst also showing how certain Gale archives are especially useful for genealogical research.

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The Influence of British Media on its Politics: Insights from Gale Primary Sources

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│By Satakshi Rahi, Gale Ambassador at King’s College London│

Exploring the profound influence of British media on its politics unveils a narrative shaped over centuries of transformation. From the advent of print journalism to today’s digital dominance, British media has wielded significant power in shaping public opinion, driving policy agendas, and defining political discourse. Leveraging insights from Gale Primary Sources, this exploration delves into pivotal historical moments and contemporary challenges, providing a nuanced perspective on how British media continues to mould the political landscape.

The material from Gale‘s extensive archives highlights the crucial role of media literacy and informed engagement in navigating today’s complex media landscape, ensuring transparency and accountability in public discourse while acknowledging British media’s pivotal role in shaping the nation’s political narrative.

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Studying Colonialism in Complementary Archives: Nineteenth Century Collections Online and Decolonization

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│By Louis Venter, Gale Ambassador at the University of the Free State│

If you ask any seasoned historian what makes historical research unique, they will emphasise the crucial role of primary sources, which define and distinguish history from other forms of academic writing. In an ever-digitising world, historians can now access digital scans of genuine archival material from anywhere, eliminating the need to travel to distant archives, and making research more efficient.

Bringing together primary sources from multiple archives can enhance one’s research, and Gale Primary Sources offers two key complementary digital archives that can be used in tandem to study colonialism – Nineteenth Century Collections Online: Europe and Africa, Colonialism and Culture and Decolonization: Politics and Independence in Former Colonial and Commonwealth Territories.

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Celebrating South Africa’s Independence “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika”

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│By Carolyn Beckford, Gale Product Trainer│

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a prominent South African anti-apartheid activist and Nobel laureate, coined the phrase “Rainbow Nation” to describe his country.  South Africa is home to a wide range of ethnic, cultural, and linguistic groups, including indigenous African tribes, Afrikaans and English-speaking communities, and people of Indian and Asian descent. This post will explore the country’s complicated history and its journey to independence.

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New Environmental History Archive: Colonial Policy and Global Development, 1896-1993

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

On sitting down to write a brief explanation of what environmental history is, I have spent the last twenty minutes staring into space thinking about Pando. Pando is, as I’m sure the sophisticated and well-travelled audience of this blog will know, the largest and heaviest living organism on earth. Pando covers 100 acres and is around 10,000 years old. That means that when Pando first began its long, slow life, there were woolly mammoth and sabre-toothed cats still living, although increasingly finding their parties a little light on company.

Pando is a tree. It is a quaking aspen in Utah; in appearance it is over 45,000 individual quaking aspens, but below ground it has a single root system. Each ‘tree’ is a clone of its neighbours, a stem of one single organism. And it is on my mind because I am trying to think of a pithy way to describe environmental history, an area of study where many different disciplines and topics meet, connected at their roots as different expressions of one phenomenon: human interaction with the natural world.

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