Publishing team Archives - Page 3 of 5

Etiquette and Advice, 1631-1969 – Good Manners as Prescribed by “Polite Society”

October 3, 2023July 19, 2022 by Gale Review Team

Etiquette and Advice from Archives Unbound

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

Gale’s Archives Unbound collection Etiquette and Advice, 1631-1969 is a fascinating digital archive of material from Winterthur Museum and Library in Delaware. A collection of 429 British and American etiquette books and rare print ephemera, it allows us to explore the question, “who gets to decide what behaviours are ‘good’ or ‘polite’?” The materials span from the seventeenth to twentieth century, offering tidbits on everything from table manners to travelling, conversation to courtship, home furnishing to hospitality. Author Dena Attar observes, in the face of fears about the “decay of modern manners and the instability of society, [etiquette] writers often described their books as necessary correctives for wider social problems.”¹ This collection will therefore interest not only book historians, but also social historians, literary critics, cultural studies scholars, feminists, and other lifelong students of transatlantic history.

Declassified Documents Online: Twentieth Century British Intelligence, Monitoring the World

October 3, 2023March 15, 2022 by Gale Review Team

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

It is now common knowledge that the German Enigma codes were broken during the Second World War in huts at Bletchley Park, and that this feat helped sway the tide of war in the Allies favour. Most people are also aware that Alan Turing was there, that early computers were being developed, and that after the war these codebreakers and the hundreds of people employed at Bletchley Park vanished into obscurity until the 1970s. These details have become part of popular culture: the shabby huts in the middle of a quiet countryside where great and secret things were happening providing the setting for the book Enigma by Robert Harris, or The Imitation Game starring Benedict Cumberbatch in tweed, and even a BBC Radio sitcom, Hut 33.

Tracing the Young Women’s Christian Association through Women’s Studies Archive: Female Forerunners Worldwide

October 3, 2023March 8, 2022 by Gale Review Team

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

Rachel is the Acquisitions Editor managing Gale’s Women’s Studies Archive series.

This month Gale is proud to announce the launch of the fourth module in its multi-award-winning Women’s Studies Archive series, Female Forerunners Worldwide. Publishing in March 2022 this latest edition to Gale’s Gender Studies programme coincides not only with International Women’s Day but with Women’s History Month, hopefully giving scholars of women’s history, social history, and gender studies much to celebrate.

Rediscovering China and the World in the Nineteenth Century, Part II

October 3, 2023October 26, 2021 by Gale Review Team

Learn more about China and the Modern World: Imperial China and the West Part II, 1865–1905 in this blog post – or register below for a live webinar!

|By Liping Yang, Publishing Manager, Digital Archive and eReference, Gale Asia|

Gale has recently released China and the Modern World: Imperial China and the West Part II, 1865–1905. Consisting of volumes 873–1768 in the highly acclaimed FO 17 series of British foreign office files plus seven volumes of Law Officers’ reports relating to China from FO 83, Part II covers the latter half of the nineteenth century (see my first blog post about this module – Rediscovering China and the World in the Nineteenth Century for the main topics covered in Part I). The complete Imperial China and the West provides a vast and significant primary source archive for researching every aspect of Chinese-Western relations from 1815 to 1905.

Here, with the help of Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technology, researchers will be able to conduct full-text searches across more than one million pages of manuscripts relating to the internal politics of China and Britain, their relationship, and the relationships among Britain and other Western powers—keen to benefit from the growing trading ports of the Far East—and China’s neighbours in East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. Imperial China covers a wide range of topics including diplomacy and war, trade, piracy, riots and rebellions, treaty ports, Chinese emigration, and railway building. In this blog post I’ll walk you through some of the fascinating topics and themes covered in the approximately 600,000 pages of manuscripts included in Part II.

Finding Black Female Authors in the Women’s Studies Archive

October 3, 2023October 5, 2021 by Gale Review Team

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

Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, Octavia E. Butler and Toni Morrison are just a handful of names of influential Black female novelists whose writing has arguably changed the modern world. Historically, however, women of colour were largely excluded from publishing due to poor literacy, lack of financial means, racism and prejudice. The odds were more often than not stacked against them. As a result, discovering such authors can be tough, so I would like to use the opportunity of Black History Month to showcase four wonderful examples of Black female authors who can be found in Gale’s Women’s Studies Archive: Rare Titles from the American Antiquarian Society, 1820-1922.

The History of Extradition in Hong Kong

October 3, 2023September 28, 2021 by Gale Review Team

|By Winnie Fok, Assistant Editor, Gale Asia|

In February 2019, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government proposed a bill regarding extradition, to establish a mechanism for the transfer of fugitives to Mainland China, Taiwan, and Macau, which are currently excluded in the existing laws. The bill sparked fears over a potential loss of freedom and deterioration of the business climate in Hong Kong. As a result, protests erupted over the next few months, and lasted till early 2020. Extradition has a long and complex history in Hong Kong, owing in no small part to its colonial background. China and the Modern World: Hong Kong, Britain and China 1841–1951, a collection of rare historical materials from the British Colonial Office records, sheds light on this fascinating subject.

Gale Primary Sources Learning Centers – Built by Experts

October 3, 2023September 14, 2021 by Gale Review Team

Workshop with laptops and icons from Gale Learning Centers

|By Becca Bowden, Associate Acquisitions Editor, Gale Primary Sources|

Launching in a selection of Gale’s archives in autumn 2021, Gale Primary Sources Learning Centers will bring a new level of support for students and instructors looking to get the most out of using primary sources, both in their research and in the classroom. Shaped by feedback from Gale Primary Sources users, the Learning Centers are intuitive, all-in-one instructional resources that are designed to orient users with the content in our archives, spark inspiration for research and act as a best practice guide when it comes to skills like searching, citing and using primary sources. Tailored to each unique archive, they will include key topics, sample searches, case studies and contextual materials.

Beyond Notting Hill Carnival: Re-visiting the life of Claudia Jones

October 3, 2023September 7, 2021 by Gale Review Team

│By Dr Lucy Dow, Gale Content Researcher│

Once again this year, the Notting Hill Carnival was sadly cancelled due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. In this blog post I will explore the life of Claudia Jones, often credited with starting the Notting Hill Carnival. Using Gale Primary Sources, I will look at what was written by and about Jones during her lifetime, and how she is remembered.

Know Your Authors: Dictionary of Literary Biography

October 3, 2023August 24, 2021 by Gale Review Team

Examples from Dictionary of Literary Biography, and online product interface

|By Masaki Morisawa, Senior Product Manager, Library Reference, Tokyo|

If you watched the recent Olympics, you’ll know that August in Tokyo is brutally hot and humid. This was more or less true two and a half decades ago when I was an English Literature student. Cash strapped, with nothing better to do, I would often spend my August days in the air-conditioned university library, just to avoid the intolerable heat! My favourite place was the reference area where they had rows and rows of Gale Literature volumes (I’m not making this up). There were literally hundreds of volumes stacked in those rows, from the rainbow-coloured Contemporary Authors volumes, to the brown buckram Literature Criticism volumes; but my personal favourite were the light-blue Dictionary of Literary Biography volumes. I would often pull out several of those DLB volumes and browse through the entries while I passed time in my favourite corner seat by the windows.

Coming Soon: Learning Centers for Gale Primary Sources

October 3, 2023August 17, 2021 by Gale Review Team

| By Megan Sullivan, Product Manager, Gale Primary Sources |

I’m delighted to announce the upcoming launch of Learning Centers for Gale Primary Sources, available in select archive products this autumn 2021. The culmination of a year of research and development, the Learning Centers will provide comprehensive teaching and learning support for faculty and students.

Built with the student researcher in mind, the goal of the Learning Centers is to orient new users with the content and topics available in a digital archive; spark inspiration for new research topics; and provide guidance and best practices for searching, browsing, citing, and reusing primary sources. The Learning Centers will also prove invaluable for faculty and librarians, providing an all-in-one instructional tool that helps students get acclimated with a primary source database.