Decolonization: Politics and Independence in Former Colonial and Commonwealth Territories

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

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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Using Primary Sources to Study Gun Control

Studying gun control

|By Rachel Holt, Gale Primary Sources Acquisitions Editor|

This week (July 2022), US President Joe Biden was heckled by the father of a mass shooting victim during a White House event celebrating the passage of a federal gun safety law. This comes in the wake of the mass shooting that killed nineteen children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24, 2022. But how did we get here?

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How Gale’s Archives Supported My Thesis on the Politics of Contraception in South Africa, 1970s–80s

Contraception plus archive article images

│By Nonkoliso Andiswa Tshiki, Gale Ambassador at the University of Johannesburg│

Having to complete my Honours research paper in the era of Covid-19 left myself and many other students feeling stranded so far as to how to obtain valuable and relevant academic resources. Access to digitised resources quickly became vital to one’s success in academia and I am happy that I came across Gale Primary Sources when I did because they contributed greatly to the completion of my thesis. This blog will show how I utilised Gale’s Archives of Sexuality and Gender, and Women’s Studies Archive collections to explore my thesis topic – the Media and Technologies of Contraception in South Africa between the 1970s and 1980s.

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Tracing the Legacy of William Blake with British Literary Manuscripts Online

| By James Carney, Gale Ambassador at King’s College London |

William Blake is widely considered one of Britain’s finest artists of all time. From painters of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to writers of the Irish Literary Revival, Blake’s influence permeates the artistic tradition. Therefore, it can come as a surprise to many that Blake’s work passed largely unrecognised during his lifetime. It is only posthumously that his legacy as we know it today has developed. This can be extensively explored using Gale’s British Literary Manuscripts Online: c. 1660-1900 archive.

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Pride and Protest: LGBT+ Disability Activism in the US, 1985-1995

Disabled activists

│By Mo Clarke, Gale Ambassador at the University of Exeter│

Disabled. A word many find uncomfortable. Indeed, it seems much of society still assumes that to be disabled is to be broken, but while it is true that many people with disabilities experience ableism and insufficient support, resources and facilities, activists have long fought against the presumption that to be disabled is inherently bad. Rather than a curse or insult, their disability is a part of their identity and a source of pride. Gale’s Archives of Sexuality and Gender reveal that disability rights have also been a focus for another minority group in the United States: the LGBT+ community. In the 1980s and 1990s LGBT+ activists made great strides towards improving the lives of disabled people.

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The Power of Voice: Oral Histories in Gale’s Political and Extremism and Radicalism archive

│By Vicky Fielding, Senior Marketing Manager │

There are currently 61 oral histories in Political Extremism and Radicalism in the Twentieth Century Far-Right and Left Political Groups in the US, Europe and Australia. These interviews, which are available as audio recordings and transcripts, were recorded in 2015 by researchers from the University of Northampton in collaboration with Gerry Gable and the Searchlight network with anti-fascist activists active from the 1940s–1990s. They are exclusive recordings with anti-fascists about their experiences, discussing the post-war history of anti-fascism and what caused them to become engaged in the movement.

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Power, Protest & Presidential Profanity: The ‘Race’ for Civil Rights

By Megan Bowler, Gale Ambassador at the University of Liverpool

On 16th October 1968, two black-gloved fists were raised in solidarity on the podium of the Olympic Games in Mexico City as a silent, yet powerfully emotive protest against racial injustice. The American sprinters, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, immediately caught the attention of the world’s media as agitators, acting in defiance to the starred and striped flag and all that it appeared to represent. This transpired just six months after the assassination of Martin Luther King.

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Feminist protests over the years – the continued fight for equality

By Anita Klich, Gale Ambassador at Portsmouth University, UK

Women have been fighting for equality for decades; in the 1980s and ‘90s, there were many protests addressing the issue of inequality in the workplace and society overall. The Gale resource Archives of Sexuality & Gender provides students and scholars with documents to examine and critically assess issues concerning LGBTQ history and culture as well as Feminist movements, thus allowing academics to compare and determine how the situation has – or has not – changed over the years.

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Occupying Alcatraz: The Native American Experience Then and Now

Alcatraz

Whilst the media widely documents the racial tensions still present in American society, there tends to be greater coverage of the plight of African Americans, leaving other racial and ethnic minorities under-represented. Given that this Friday, 20th November, is an anniversary of the day a group of Native Americans occupied Alcatraz island to highlight what they claimed to be historical and contemporary exploitation of Indian rights by successive governments, it seems opportune to spend time exploring Gale’s databases and archives to find out what occurred 46 years ago, and what it means for Native Americans today.

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