twentieth century history

Global Development and Humanitarian Aid: The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, 1919-1997

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

Note: Links to documents in this blog post will be provided on publication of the digital archive.

Like many people in the UK, my first experience of humanitarian appeals was through charity campaigns at school or through Blue Peter. The first one I strongly recall is sending care packages to Romania. Famine in Ethiopia and the need for wells in Africa also loom large in my memories of this era; if Matt Baker told me to give money I said how much (up to a limit of £2)?

Years later, studying history at University, I took a module on the Greek famine of 1941-1942. It was something I had known nothing about, illustrated with stark numbers of Axis requisitions, of the dead and the starving, and by accounts from survivors.

Primary sources for situations such as famines can be a real challenge for scholars; data is shaky, accounts are limited. Few people in a famine zone are there to count heads or write a dissertation; they are either struggling to survive the disaster or there to provide aid.

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Using Newspaper Articles to Uncover the History of Eating Disorders from the Nineteenth to the Twentieth Century

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│By Lebohang Seganoe, Gale Ambassador at the University of Johannesburg│

As a child, you absorb everything you are taught within the community you are raised in. Because your mind is still developing you rarely question how different someone’s reality might be from your own. I grew up in a society that had strong views on beauty standards. These include that a woman in her prime must have a full face and big curves, and she must look like she is eating well so that her potential spouse can see that she can bear as many children as possible. This post will explore different beauty standards and their impact on women’s bodies.

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Treaty Ports and Modern China

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Map of China

|By Liping Yang, Senior Manager, Academic Publishing, and Lindsay Whitaker-Guest, Associate Editor, Gale Primary Sources|

Gale has just released China and the Modern World: Regional China and the West, 1759-1972. As the ninth instalment in the series, this new archive features a compilation of 39 series of mostly British Foreign Office (FO) files. These include general correspondence and registers composed by the British legation in Beijing as well as British consulates based in more than 20 Chinese coastal and inland treaty ports.

Also included are the private and semi-official correspondence of Sir Henry Pottinger, Sir John N. Jordan, and Lord Edmund Hammond as well as the records and photographs of the British concession in Tianjin. This post will explore a few of the topics and events which can be studied through this new archive.

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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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Lost (and Found) in Translation: Language in Archives of Latin American and Caribbean History

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│By Leila Marhamati, Associate Editor, Gale Primary Sources│

Post-colonialist thinker Frantz Fanon declared the importance of language in a world globalised through empire and colonisation: “To speak… means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization”. It is ironic to cite this quotation in translation from the original French, as Fanon’s point is that the language we speak is both a product of and perpetuates the culture we live in. As an English speaker, what do I know about his thinking? His worldview?

For societies and nations founded through colonialism, language is crucial. The language of the coloniser is often forced upon the colonised. Holding onto a language despite imperialist pressures then becomes a form of resistance and a declaration of selfhood. All of these implications of language can be explored in Gale Primary Sources’ Archives of Latin American and Caribbean History, Sixteenth to Twentieth Centuries.

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Archives Unbound: Preserving Cultural Heritage That Might Otherwise Be Lost in War

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│By Philip Virta, Senior Acquisitions Editor│

The Archives Unbound program provides multiple perspectives on global history. Through our institutional partners and archival collections, we preserve, protect, and provide access to government documents, personal papers, organisational records, and heritage collections. In a historic period that has seen conflicts threatening lives, freedom, and cultural heritage, Gale Primary Sources is proud to do its own small part in preserving the past for the benefit of future generations.

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New Environmental History Archive: Colonial Policy and Global Development, 1896-1993

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

On sitting down to write a brief explanation of what environmental history is, I have spent the last twenty minutes staring into space thinking about Pando. Pando is, as I’m sure the sophisticated and well-travelled audience of this blog will know, the largest and heaviest living organism on earth. Pando covers 100 acres and is around 10,000 years old. That means that when Pando first began its long, slow life, there were woolly mammoth and sabre-toothed cats still living, although increasingly finding their parties a little light on company.

Pando is a tree. It is a quaking aspen in Utah; in appearance it is over 45,000 individual quaking aspens, but below ground it has a single root system. Each ‘tree’ is a clone of its neighbours, a stem of one single organism. And it is on my mind because I am trying to think of a pithy way to describe environmental history, an area of study where many different disciplines and topics meet, connected at their roots as different expressions of one phenomenon: human interaction with the natural world.

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Down To The Wire: The Impact of the Newswire in the Post-World War Two Period

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│By Charlotte Steffen, Gale Ambassador at the University of Portsmouth│

One of the greatest revolutions in journalism was the introduction of the newswire which allowed the sending of information around the world at a much faster pace than ever before. As a History PhD student, and a frequent user of Gale Primary Sources, I have come to heavily rely on newspapers for information in my research but also use them to get an insight into public opinions or changes in opinion. Using Gale’s Associated Press Collections, I investigated how these historic documents give an insight into the civil population’s daily life during the post-war period and its importance for the present-day historic discourse. 

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

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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

Tourism and Technology within The International Herald Tribune Historical Archive

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Exposition Universelle de Paris 1889

|By Lorna Ashton, Field Sales Executive – France|

The International Herald Tribune, founded in Paris in October 1887 as the European Edition of the New York Herald, was a newspaper for American expatriates in Paris, often referred to as “The Paris Herald”. It offered vast coverage of not only Parisian or French culture and events, but of Europe more broadly. Sought out by readers seeking international news throughout Europe and beyond, it became a leading international newspaper worldwide. By 2007, it was published in as many as 33 different countries.

Covering the years 1887 to 2013, The International Herald Tribune Historical Archive traces the history of the twentieth century and evolutions in society, from luxury travel and entertainment to technological developments. Thus I decided that I would use this archive to explore the development of tourism in France and beyond, and how it was linked to innovation and technological progress.

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