Internet resources: New site brings together digital resources relating to early modern and 19th c. British history

Millions of historical records have become more accessible to the public. “Connected Histories” provides a single point of access to a wide range of distributed digital resources relating to early modern (1500—1800) and nineteenth-century British history.

“Connected Histories” brings digital humanities research to a new level by providing integrated access to several key resources, moving beyond simple keyword searching to allow structured searching of millions of pages of text by names, places, and dates. 

In the process, at the click of a mouse, researchers can find rich bodies of evidence for virtually any topic in British history; whether royal weddings, parliamentary reform movements, famous criminals, or the lives of plebeian Londoners.

The Connected Histories website is fully searchable and provides access to books, newspapers, historical documents, and thousands maps and images. It incorporates the following digital sources:

- “British History Online” - the digital library of primary and secondary sources for the history of Britain, from the Middle Ages to c.1900;

- “British Museum Images” - the collection, which provides searchable access to almost 100,000 images, relating to early modern and 19th-century Britain; 

- “British Newspapers, 1600—1900” - the most comprehensive digital historic British newspaper archive in existence, with 3 million pages of historic newspapers, newsbooks and ephemera from national and regional papers;  

- “Charles Booth Archive” – the online archive provides access to guides, digitised images and maps from the Booth archive collections at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the University of London Library;   

- “Clergy of the Church of England Database 1540—1835” - a database containing details of the careers of more than 130,000 clergymen of the Church of England between 1540 and 1835, from over 50 archives in England and Wales;

- “London Lives 1690—1800” provides a fully searchable edition of 240,000 manuscript pages from eight London archives and 15 datasets, giving access to 3.5 million names;  

- “The Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online, 1674—1913” contains accounts of the trials conducted at London's central criminal court between 1674 and 1913; and also the Ordinary's Accounts - detailed narratives of the lives and deaths of convicts executed at Tyburn, published between 1676 and 1772; 

- “Origins Network” (Origins.net) offers online access to some of the richest ancestral information available. The collection searchable through Connected Histories focuses on the early modern history of London;

- “House of Commons Parliamentary Papers” gives access to page images and searchable full text for over 200,000 House of Commons sessional papers and supplementary information from 1688 onwards; 

- “John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera” collection provides access to more than 67,000 scanned items from the Bodleian Library's holdings documenting various aspects of everyday life in Britain from the 18th to the early 20th century;  

- “John Strype’s Survey of London Online” - a full-text electronic version of John Strype's enormous two-volume survey of 1720, complete with its celebrated maps and plates, which depict the prominent buildings, street plans and ward boundaries of the late Stuart capital.

The resource will grow substantially over time as new sources are added. The first update, due in September, will include 65,000 British Library books from the Historic Books Platform, 19th century pamphlets from JSTOR, and abstracts of wills from The National Archives.