nineteenth-century history

G is for Golden Age: Exploring a Golden Age of Children’s Literature with Gale’s Nineteenth Century Collections Online

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│By Elizabeth Gaglio, Academic Customer Success Specialist│

The nineteenth century is known as a “Golden Age” of children’s literature. Advancements in printing and new views on childhood transformed the genre that was overwhelmingly moral and didactic, finally allowing for tales of adventure, nonsense verse, and imaginative illustration.

Rather than reading just to learn proper behaviour and lessons, children got to find out what happened to Alice when she fell down the rabbit hole and follow the woodland adventures of “a silly old bear” and his friends. Reading for pleasure, curiosity, and wonder became a valued part of childhood in this golden age.

By looking at one popular style of book, the alphabet book, we can see echoes of trends found across children’s literature in the nineteenth century, laying the foundations of modern works. Didactic by nature, but with growing whimsy and creativity, these alphabet collections found in Gale’s Children’s Literature and Childhood archive (part of Nineteenth Century Collections Online) help us track the evolution of children’s literature.

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Femininity and Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century European Aesthetics

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│By Sofía Sanabria de Felipe, Gale Ambassador at the University of Oxford│

In March 2022, an exhibition entitled Fashioning Masculinities opened at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Its manifesto was to show a ‘history of changing ideas of masculinity’. The exhibition greeted visitors with a gallery of plaster-casts of statues in a Greco-Roman idiom. Amongst them stood Pietro Francavilla’s statue of Apollo, a Renaissance sculpture depicting the apparent timelessness of the nude masculine ideal of Western classical epistemology.

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Solving the Third Condiment Mystery with Primary Source Documents

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Dinner table from 1895 combined with source from the article showing a photo of a cruet

|By Kevin Kohls, Marketing Manager| The internet loves a good mystery. They allow content creators to put on their detective hats to try to determine fact from fiction and provide a real opportunity to answer questions that had previously been unknown. When I saw a YouTube video which mentioned the “Victorian third condiment mystery” earlier … Read more

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

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│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 using abstract terms like ‘universality’ and ‘contingency’, often leaving your audience none the wiser as to what exactly it is you do.

So, when Gale Primary Sources offered me the opportunity to write a blog post centred on my research, I decided to use their archives and digital humanities tools as a way of finally perfecting my elevator pitch.

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Fabricating History: Empire Lines, Modern Designs, and the Politics of Dress in Regency Representations

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│By Megan Harlow, Gale Ambassador at Durham University│

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Regency fashion has become a cultural touchstone, romanticised amid the contemporary resurgence of early nineteenth-century period dramas. The global reception of Bridgerton (2020–), alongside the proliferation of the ‘Regencycore’ aesthetic, exemplifies the symbiotic relationship between historical narrative engagement and a renewed preoccupation with sartorial historiography, positioning fashion as a dynamic site of aesthetic and ideological negotiation.

Yet, as screen portrayals negotiate between historical fidelity and modern sensibilities, they often obscure the constructed nature of costume, selectively resurrecting aspects of the past while neglecting the intricate social, political, and economic meanings embedded in dress. 

Drawing on Gale Primary Sources, this analysis interrogates how Regency fashion was originally represented and how its legacy is reshaped in adaptation. Ultimately, questioning what histories are made visible through costume, and what is strategically forgotten, highlighting the historiographical implications of fashion in contemporary media.

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How Gale Primary Sources Supports Students Taking Exeter University’s ‘Approaches to Criticism’ Module

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│By Poppy Sargent, Gale Ambassador at the University of Exeter│

The first year ‘Approaches to Criticism’ module taught to English students at the University of Exeter is notoriously one of the hardest compulsory modules, spanning across both first and second term. Throughout this module, you learn to think about yourselves as infinitely complex social and political subjects and how our social and political being shapes reading practices, focusing on systems and subjects in relation to one another.

Leveraging literature from Gale Primary Sources, this blog will highlight how Gale supports this module, sourcing manuscripts and monographs to aid students and lecturers in their work. By focusing on three of (in my opinion) the most interesting and crucial topics of this module, I will show you how Gale’s extensive archives highlight articles covering Marxism, Bodies and Medicine, and Critical Race Studies.

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The American Civil War: The International Perspective – The First Digital Archive of Its Kind

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

A fundamental topic in American history, the American Civil War (1861-1865) was a major event of the nineteenth century, not just in America but also in global politics, with ramifications for the future of slavery and ideas of popular, democratic government. Lecturers and researchers have increasingly been looking to study the war in its international context as the trajectory and outcome of the war impacted those beyond just America—especially in Europe.

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An Exploration of Women’s Liberation: Insights from Gale Primary Sources

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│By Poppy Sargent, Gale Ambassador at the University of Exeter│

Exploring women’s liberation throughout the years reveals a journey of bravery, courage, and transformation. From the beginning of the women’s liberation movement to the twentieth century, women have held a powerful position in society, whether this be in the workplace, politics, or simply social aspects of society.

Leveraging insights from Gale Primary Sources, this exploration delves into the ways in which women’s liberation was advertised, highlighting key events which led up to the result of women’s suffrage in the United States, various leaflets and posters used to advertise suffrage, and how these can be used to influence modern day suffrage articles. Gale’s extensive archives highlight the crucial role of the media in advertising women’s suffrage.

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

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|By Liping Yang, Senior Manager, Academic Publishing, and Emma Harris, Associate Editor, Gale Primary Sources|

Please be aware that this blog posts includes primary sources which describe extensive violence and oppression; the decision to read the post is at your own discretion.

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 Part II through a thematic collection on the history of West Malaysia and the earlier history of Singapore.

Made up of mostly original correspondence, as well as two series of maps and plans, and a series of historical photographs, Part III contains over 625,000 newly scanned pages from twelve Colonial Office series sourced from The National Archives, UK.

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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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