Modern Britain 1688-Present

"We have published a selection of datasets to crowdsource answers to our key research questions and support collaboration between our staff and external researchers."

"The Bomb Sight project is mapping the London WW2 bomb census between 7/10/1940 and 06/06/1941. Previously available only by viewing in the Reading Room at The National Archives, Bomb Sight is making the maps available to citizen researchers, academics and students. They will be able to explore where the bombs fell and to discover memories and photographs from the period." Copyright Internet Scout Project 1994-2009.

Aerial photography of Great Britain

"The British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII) provides access to the most comprehensive set of British and Irish primary legal materials that are available for free and in one place on the internet. In August 2007, BAILII included 76 databases covering 7 jurisdictions. The system contains around 11 gigabytes of legal materials and around 200,000 searchable documents."

"British Pathé is one of the oldest media companies in the world. Their roots lie in 1890s Paris where their founder, Charles Pathé, pioneered the development of the moving image. They were established in London in 1902, and by 1910 were producing their famous bi-weekly newsreel the Pathé Gazette. After the First World War they started producing various Cinemagazines as well. By 1930 they were producing the Gazette, the Pathetone Weekly, the Pathé Pictorial and Eve's Film Review, covering entertainment, culture and womens' issues. By the time Pathé finally stopped producing the cinema newsreel in 1970 they had accumulated 3500 hours of filmed history amounting to over 90,000 individual items."

The Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership has been established at UCL with the generous support of the Hutchins Center at Harvard. The Centre will build on two earlier projects based at UCL tracing the impact of slave-ownership on the formation of modern Britain: the ESRC-funded Legacies of British Slave-ownership project (2009-2012), and the ESRC and AHRC-funded Structure and significance of British Caribbean slave-ownership 1763-1833 (2013-2015).

"This website allows you to search millions of records from around fifty datasets, relating to the lives of 90,000 convicts from the Old Bailey. Use our site to search individual convict life archives, explore and visualise data, and learn more about crime and criminal justice in the past. In December 2019 this website was updated with the addition of two datasets on convict tattoos and a new search feature allowing you to search by convict occupations. A substantial number of additional punishment outcomes have been linked to trials. We have made a number of corrections to convict genders and ages, and new visualisations have been added to the visualisation gallery. 58,002 convicts in this database had tattoos. You can now search for specific tattoos and for specific types of tattoos on specific parts of the body. You can also create visualisations of tattoo design by body location, tattoo subjects according to religion, tattoo designs by place of birth and tattoo designs by occupation."

"One platform, over 460,000 late 15th to 19th century texts. Historical Texts brings together four historically significant collections for the first time: Early English Books Online (EEBO), Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) 65,000 texts from the British Library 19th Century collection and the UK Medical Heritage Library (UKMHL)."

"Locating London’s Past will create an intuitive GIS interface that will enable researchers to map and visualize textual and artefactual data relating to seventeenth and eighteenth-century London against a fully rasterised version of John Rocque’s 1746 map of London and the first accurate modern OS map (1869-80). More than this, it will make these data and maps available within a Google Maps container, allowing for the analysis of the data with open source visualization tools. The interface will be readily expandable to include additional data sets and maps (both modern and historic)."

"The reports were produced each year by the Medical Officer of Health (MOH) of a district and set out the work done by his public health and sanitary officers. The reports provided vital data on birth and death rates, infant mortality, incidence of infectious and other diseases, and a general statement on the health of the population. As the work of public health departments expanded, so too did the reports: by the 1930s we are given details on such matters as: numbers visiting maternity and child welfare clinics, pints of free milk dispensed, statistics for use of venereal disease clinics,
numbers of tubercular children attending open-air schools, Poor Law infirmaries and municipal hospitals ... "

"London Lives makes available, in a fully digitised and searchable form, a wide range of primary sources about eighteenth-century London, with a particular focus on plebeian Londoners. This resource includes over 240,000 manuscript and printed pages from eight London archives and is supplemented by fifteen datasets created by other projects. It provides access to historical records containing over 3.35 million name instances. Facilities are provided to allow users to link together records relating to the same individual, and to compile biographies of the best documented individuals."

The British and Irish section of the online French biographical dictionary of labor and social leaders. In French, it is a very useful source for biographies of these figures, along with the sources.

Film fans and Anglophiles alike will want to check out the British Film Institute's interactive Map of Britain On Film. Here, the British Film Institute (BFI) has mapped out the settings of hundreds of films throughout the United Kingdom and Ireland. Visitors can search for films by location by clicking on a pin that indicates how many film scenes the institute has identified in a particular place (for example, visitors will find 52 films set in Manchester and 122 set in Belfast). Visitors can also search for films by decade or by subjects (tagged subjects range from "pageants" to "football matches" to "factories." Best of all, visitors are able to instantly watch short clips of identified films. There are clips from throughout British film history in this collection, including those that date back to the earliest days of film. This remarkable and engrossing tool illustrates both the importance of geography in film as well as how film can play a role in constructing and representing space. [MMB (via the Scout Report)]

Arguably the most important post-war Prime Minister (1979-1990). Thatcher's significance is undeniable and her reforms predated the Reagan Revolution. This is her personal foundation which has a number of resources.

"Measuring Worth is a place where you can ask questions of comparative value covering prices, purchasing power, earnings, GDP, interest rates, exchange rates and other economic variables. The comparators allow you to convert past values into current values (and vice versa)."

"The Map of Early Modern London is comprised of seven distinct, interoperable projects: a digital edition of the 1561 Agas woodcut map of London; an Encyclopedia of London people, places, topics, and terms; a Library of marked-up texts rich in London toponyms; an anthology of old-spelling and modern editions of all the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline mayoral shows (modern editions forthcoming); a versioned edition of John Stow’s Survey of London (1598 is nearly complete; the early stages of 1633 are in draft); the London Parish project (by Christopher Highley; forthcoming); and Browsing the Bookstalls of St. Paul’s project (by Erica Zimmer; forthcoming). MoEML’s six databases support all the interoperable projects: a Gazetteer of locations (e.g., streets, sites, playhouses, taverns, churches, wards, and topographical features); a Personography of early modern Londoners both historical and literary; an Orgography of organizations (e.g., livery companies and other corporations); a Bibliography of primary and secondary sources; a Mapography of early modern city maps; and a Glossary of terms relevant to early modern London. All of the files in the databases use a common TEI tagset that enables users to work with primary and secondary texts simultaneously. The Map allows users to visualize, overlay, combine, and query the information in the MoEML databases."

"For the first time on The National Archives' website you can view complete public information films from 1945 -2006. Joining with the Central Office of Information (COI) to celebrate their 60th Anniversary, we have featured a selection some of the most memorable and influential COI public information films that cover some fasinating events from Britain’s post-war history. Many of the films have both historic and nostalgic value. Historically, they reflect the issues of the day..."

Orlando provides entries on authors' lives and writing careers, contextual material, timelines, sets of internal links, and bibliographies. Interacting with these materials creates a dynamic inquiry from any number of perspectives into centuries of women's writing.

AD - Another navigation example. Here the side bar is redundant on the home page but adds additional functionality when you go into other sections by displaying sub-pages. This makes it easier to navigate between those than it is in the Whitman site.

"The Records of the Parliaments of Scotland to 1707 (RPS) is a fully searchable database containing the proceedings of the Scottish parliament from the first surviving act of 1235 to the union of 1707. The culmination of over ten years’ work by researchers from the Scottish Parliament Project based in the School of History at the University of St Andrews, the online edition seeks to make this key historical source freely available to all in a technologically advanced and user-friendly format."

"The Shelley-Godwin Archive will provide the digitized manuscripts of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft, bringing together online for the first time ever the widely dispersed handwritten legacy of this uniquely gifted family of writers. The result of a partnership between the New York Public Library and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, in cooperation with Oxford’s Bodleian Library, the S-GA also includes key contributions from the Huntington Library, the British Library, the Houghton Library, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. In total, these partner libraries contain over 90% of all known relevant manuscripts."

"We capture, preserve, and make accessible UK central government information published on the web. The web archive includes videos, tweets, images and websites dating from 1996 to present."

"VADS provides a national collection of over 140,000 images from over 300 art and design collections across the UK, which are freely available for non-commercial use in education. The images cover the broad range of the visual arts including applied arts, architecture, design, fashion, fine art, and media. VADS is a service of the Library at the University for the Creative Arts (UCA)."

"A vision of Britain between 1801 and 2001. Including maps, statistical trends and historical descriptions." Includes "Search by place name to view historical statistics, maps, writings and more maps," Election Results, Census reports, Travel writing ...

"The Library’s film, video and audio collection is one of the largest of its kind. It covers all aspects of medicine, health and welfare throughout the 20th century and beyond"