Researching Cults using Gale’s Online Resources

|By Rais Asylnaz, Year 11 Student at Nazarbaev Intellectual School in Pavlodar|

Throughout the years, cults have captured the attention of many people. Whenever cults are discussed it’s impossible to avoid talking about the controversies surrounding them. These organisations have sparked interesting debate as to why people engage with and end up involved in cults. In this blog post, I will explore cults’ characteristics, the psychology of those involved, and the reasons behind their appeal.

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Global Communist and Socialist Movements – The Third Instalment of Political Extremism and Radicalism

Socialism

│By Emma Harris, Associate Editor, Gale Primary Sources

Global Communist and Socialist Movements is the third instalment of the award-winning Political Extremism and Radicalism series. For researchers interested in the workings of radical thinking, rhetoric, and twentieth century politics, this module offers a broad scope of material on left-wing thinking and political ideologies such as Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, Trotskyism, and anarchism, adding to the material on far-right groups and some areas of the far left already in the Political Extremism and Radicalism series.

This module provides excellent international coverage, including material from the USA, UK, Europe, Latin America, and South Africa. This grants researchers the opportunity to study the historical trajectories of left-wing radical movements across the globe, considering how these groups saw themselves, as well as the reactions of the capitalist nations in which they emerged. The twenty-one collections digitised from eight source libraries contain approximately 870,000 pages, with documents ranging primarily from 1880 to 1960.

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Writing Sensitive Personal Histories

Sensitive documents

│By Jade Burnett, Gale Ambassador at the University of Sheffield│

Throughout this academic year I have been working on an MA dissertation on the marriages of members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). In working on this dissertation, I have tried to piece together the personal lives of people who existed largely in the political sphere. While this work is hugely interesting and deeply fulfilling academically, it can also be very tricky, with the writing of personal histories bringing up a range of difficulties surrounding how academics can seek to sensitively piece together the intimate lives of individuals. I hope that this blog post can offer readers some tips and tricks on how to approach writing these histories. 

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The Historical Context Behind Projections of the ‘Dangerous Drag Queen’ by the Far Right

LGBTQ protest header

Disclaimer: This blog post is written by an undergraduate student. Becca uses materials from Gale’s Political Extremism and Radicalism: Far-Right Groups in America archive which contains visual and textual material representing various historical viewpoints related to race, gender, sexuality, terrorism, and other subjects, including terminology and concepts that may be considered offensive by modern standards. … Read more

How to Make Use of British Security Service Documents

│By Jade Burnett, Gale Ambassador at the University of Sheffield│

British Security Service files from Gale’s Political Extremism and Radicalism archive have a huge amount to tell us about British political life in the twentieth century. These files deal with the activities of extreme British political figures and movements. At first, these files may seem somewhat inaccessible, compiled in large folders, containing information which spans long periods of time and refers to a range of different figures, often with little context. However, once you get an understanding of how the archival documents are best used and approached, there are huge benefits to using them for academic research. 

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Can Digital Humanities teach us more about Political Extremism?

Graphs generated by Gale Primary Sources Term Frequency tool

│By Chris Houghton, Head of Digital Scholarship, Gale International

Studying extremist groups has, sadly, never been more relevant or more important. Can text mining and data analysis be used to enhance this study, and potentially make discoveries that could help with the ongoing fight against political extremism? In this blog, I provide some suggestions of how scholars might benefit from utilising these research methods, by showing what can be uncovered by combining Gale’s Political Extremism and Radicalism archive with the Gale Digital Scholar Lab.

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Gale’s Political Extremism and Radicalism Archive: Why create it and why is it important now more than ever?

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

When telling friends and family that I was working on a digital archive focusing on right-wing extremists, far-left militants and a wide range of radical movements in between, the most common response was ‘why’? To answer that I must explain the motivation that triggered this project, as well as why such an archive is important now more than ever.

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Twenty-Five Years Later: The Murder of Stephen Lawrence

By Rebecca Bowden, Associate Acquisitions Editor

‘The community was already in mourning… they were really frightened when their young ones go out, because they don’t know when the police be knocking the door.’

Interview with an anonymous source by Dr Gavin Bailey, Manchester Metropolitan University and Dr Ben Lee, Lancaster University, 2015, which will be featured in Gale’s new archive Political Extremism and Radicalism in the Twentieth Century archive, releasing in June 2018.

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