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Getting to know Isabel Fry (1869-1958)

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Isabel Fry (1869-1958)

| By Phil Virta, Senior Acquisitions Editor, Gale Primary Sources |

Please note that this blog post refers to historical terms found in the archive which may be offensive to the modern reader.

The Isabel Fry Papers, 1878-1958 released this September in Archives Unbound. The papers are a series of diaries and personal papers detailing the life of a remarkable social reformer and keen observer of the events of her day. Isabel Fry (1869-1958) was one of nine children born to Mariabella Hodgkin (Lady Fry) and Sir Edward Fry, a judge and zoologist. Her family were Quakers, and the values of the Religious Society of Friends were apparent in her various pursuits and those of several of her siblings – Edward was a barrister; Joan was a social reformer; Roger was an art historian and member of the Bloomsbury Group; Agnes (Isabel’s twin) was a writer and botanist; Sara was a penal reformer and magistrate; and Anna was a humanitarian and peace activist.

The Isabel Fry Papers offer the opportunity to get to know Isabel through her writings and correspondence. The archive includes materials recording her thoughts from as early as 1878, and she kept detailed journals beginning in 1907 up until her death in 1958. Isabel’s diaries describe not only her thoughts and feelings about everyday relationships, events, and occurrences, but of the rapidly changing world around her. She was well-read, compassionate, intelligent, and well-travelled. In her diaries she commented on major events during her lifetime including the Suffrage Movement, the First and Second World Wars, Russia and the Bolsheviks, and the political situations in Ireland and Türkiye. Her diaries cover 80 years of history; this blog post explores some examples of what can be found within the collection.

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Queen Victoria’s Handwriting and State Papers Deciphered by AI-driven Transcription Solution

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A montage of images of sources from State Papers Online: Nineteenth Century: The State Papers of Queen Victoria and King Edward VII combined with a photograph of Queen Victoria taken in 1882, available in Wikimedia Commons

|By Paul Schummer – Senior Manager, Gale Content Production, and Chris Houghton – Head of Academic Partnerships|

We often use tools without understanding how they work. Chris, for example, has a hazy memory of learning how a vacuum cleaner works in a school physics lesson, but if you asked him to explain it now, he’d struggle! Most of the time, that’s fine – it’s why we take our car to a garage rather than learning how to fix it ourselves. So it’s understandable that researchers or students working with databases might not know how these collections came to be, and what is actually happening when they run a search. However, to be a truly effective researcher, it’s important to understand how these databases work, so that you can adapt your investigations and not miss vital information that is significant to your scholarship. 

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Small Books, Big Ideas: Eighteenth‑Century Miniatures in ECCO

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│By Eleanor Leese, Acquisitions Editor, Gale Primary Sources│

As an editor at Gale, I’ve been lucky enough to visit some of the most prestigious archives in the country, but nothing has been as exciting as when I was invited to see the conservation lab at the British Library. By sheer good luck, the week that I was there they were working on their collection of miniature books ahead of scanning them for Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Part III which sparked something of an obsession in both myself and the rest of the Gale team.

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Inside ECCO Part III: The Eighteenth‑Century Obsession with Insuring Everything

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│By Eleanor Leese, Acquisitions Editor, Gale Primary Sources│

As we approached a significant milestone in the life of Eighteenth Century Collections Online – the launch of Part III in March 2026 – I found myself minded to go looking for significant milestones inside the archive itself. And what more significant milestones are there than births, marriages, and deaths? But what I found in ECCO Part III weren’t emotional tracts about these major life events. Instead, I found tables of mortality data, and an eighteenth-century specialty: the insurance of births, marriages, and deaths. Turns out, there’s little that you couldn’t insure in the 1700s.

In the first decades of the eighteenth century, insurance policies developed into a thriving financial marketplace, where policies could be taken out on homes, fire damage, on the birth of a baby, the length of a marriage or apprenticeship, or the length of a life.

Friendly Society logo. A proposal for insuring houses by the Friendly Society.
Friendly Society. A proposal for insuring houses by the Friendly Society. N.p., [1715?]. Eighteenth Century Collections Online, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/UAGSDQ724157587/ECCO?u=webdemo&sid=bookmark-ECCO&xid=4d368d51&pg=1.

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Douglas MacArthur – A Life in Service

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│By Phil Virta, Senior Acquisitions Editor, Gale Primary Sources│

Douglas MacArthur was an American military commander whose career spanned World War I, World War II, and the Korean War. One of the few U.S. military leaders to achieve a five-star rank, MacArthur was described by admirers as heroic and patriotic, while critics considered him to be overly ambitious and narcissistic.

The archive Asia in the Twentieth Century: General MacArthur and War, Occupation, and Reconstruction in the Pacific, 1941-1972 is about more than just MacArthur, but his figure permeates the sources. His leadership shaped the Pacific War, the rebuilding of Japan, the course of the Korean War, and U.S. policy across Asia.

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Queen Victoria: The Unexpected Feminist Icon Explored Through State Papers Online: Nineteenth Century: The State Papers of Queen Victoria and King Edward VII

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│By Rachel Holt, Senior Acquisitions Editor, Gale Primary Sources│

When we think of feminism, names like Harriet Martineau or Mary Wollstonecraft often come to mind—not Queen Victoria. After all, in an 1870 letter to Sir Theodore Martin she called women’s rights activists “mad, wicked folly.”

Her reign from 1837 to 1901 however tells a more nuanced story and although Queen Victoria may not have embraced the women’s suffrage movement, her life and leadership challenged the rigid gender norms of her time, making her an inadvertent feminist icon.

The latest expansion of the extensive State Papers Online programme sees the launch of State Papers Online: Nineteenth Century with its first instalment as the State Papers of Queen Victoria and King Edward VII. Hosting two unique collections from the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, this resource contains correspondence between the monarchs and their governments, representing Queen Victoria and King Edward VII’s state papers. It enables researchers to explore questions such as these.

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A Right Won, A Civic Duty to Learn: Women’s Civic Education After the Nineteenth Amendment

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│By Kat Weiss, Gale Academic Intern |

In the years leading up to the Nineteenth Amendment and after its ratification in 1920, American women realised that equality did not end with the right to vote. They recognised that they now had a civic duty to their country, to use this newfound right responsibly. With that realisation came a new question: now that women could participate in democracy, how would they learn to practice it?

They did not have access to the same education and resources as their male peers because the system was not built for them; they needed to find new ways to educate themselves and each other. With that in mind, the Nineteenth Amendment opened a new chapter in women’s history, one centred on learning how to exercise civic power. Using primary sources from Gale’s Nineteenth Century Collections Online, we can trace how women across the USA began to define and teach the responsibilities of citizenship.

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El País – El Periódico Global en Español

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│By Phil Virta, Senior Acquisitions Editor, Gale Primary Sources│

¡Bienvenidos a todos! En este artículo aprendemos detalles sobre El País, el periódico global en Español. La palabra “país” se refiere a una nación o territorio que forma una unidad geográfica, política y cultural, con su propio gobierno y leyes.

In English, welcome everyone! In this article we are going to learn about El País, the global Spanish newspaper. The words “el país” mean “the country”, and in this case refer to Spain itself.

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The Punchy One-Liner! The Daily Mirror’s Tabloid Evolution

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|By Rachel Holt, Senior Acquisitions Editor, Gale Primary Sources|

In January 2026 Gale Primary Sources will be updating The Mirror Historical Archive with five more years of historical British journalism, bringing the newspaper into the millennium. To mark that we will be exploring some traits that the Daily Mirror is best known for, its populist and accessible tone plus its sensational headlines combined with human interest stories and strong visuals.

The Daily Mirror has a long history of publishing headlines that not only catch the eye but resonate with the British public and linger in our collective, social memory. Each of these iconic front pages reflects a moment when the Daily Mirror’s journalism intersected with public emotion and tracks the newspapers evolution to the tabloid we know it to be today.

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China in Print: Two Centuries of English-Language Reporting, 1827-1974

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│By Lindsay Whitaker-Guest, Associate Editor, Gale Primary Sources│

Gale Primary Sources has recently released its latest addition to the groundbreaking series China and the Modern World. China and the Modern World: The English Language Press in China, 1827-1974 features 25 English-language newspapers and periodicals published over the course of 150 years of immense change and transformation in China.

These newspapers and periodicals played a significant role in the cultural and political life of major Chinese cities, offering critical and diverse reporting on milestone events. In this post I will delve into these newly digitised titles and discuss some of the stories and insights which can be researched through this unique new resource.

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