History

Bess of Hardwick’s Letters

Economic and Social History, History | 16th-century, Early Modern, England, letters

Bess of Hardwick (c.1521/2 or 1527-1608) is one of Elizabethan England's most famous figures. She is renowned for her reputation as a dynast and indomitable matriarch and perhaps best known as the builder of great stately homes like the magnificent Hardwick Hall and Chatsworth House. The story of her life told to date typically emphasises her modest birth, her rise through the ranks of society, her four husbands, each of greater wealth than the last, and her ambitious aggrandisement of her family. Bess of Hardwick's letters, which number almost 250 items of correspondence, bring to life her extraordinary story and allow us to eavesdrop on her world. Her letters allow us to reposition Bess as a complex woman of her times, immersed in the literacy and textual practices of everyday life, as her correspondence extends from servants, friends and family, to queens and officers of state.

Data type: images, temporal, text

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Becoming Coolies: Rethinking the Origins of the Indian Labour Diaspora, 1772-1920

History, Post-Colonial Studies | 19th-century, asia, colonialism, migration

A webpage presenting a carefully selected and redacted sample of 4,600 Migrants who left from Calcutta (Kolkata) to work in sugar plantations Mauritius, Natal (South Africa), Trinidad and Guyana between 1857 and 1869. The database was compiled for research on immediate post-1857 migration from north India.

Data type: text

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Afterlives of Muslim Asia: 2022-2023

Cultural History, History | ethnic minorities, ethnography, interviews, Islam, Judaism, Middle East, migration, Sikhism

The data collated is largely gathered through individuals with members of diaspora Afghans from a variety of religious backgrounds, including those identifying as Muslim, Sikh, Hindu and Jewish. The study focuses on diaspora settings in which these communities are especially established, notably London and New York. Individuals were selected to be interviewed on the basis of their playing an active role in the life of the communities and also on the basis of ethnographic fieldwork undertaken by the researcher. The data also includes a discussion of the ethnographic work undertaken by the researcher in the form of a series of reports. Included also are notes in a book on Afghanistan's Hindu community (translated from Persian).

Data type: text

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Afterlives of Urban Muslim Asia: Muslim Perspectives on Non-Muslim Minorities in Aleppo, and Life Histories of Aleppine Armenians in Kuwait, 2022-2024

Cultural History, History | 21st-century, Christianity, ethnic minorities, ethnography, interviews, Islam, Middle East, war and conflict, working class

Questionnaires in Arabic were distributed electronically to Muslim residents and former residents of popular / working-class (sha‘bi) quarters of Aleppo through an Arab Muslim former resident of the Hilluk district of Aleppo who had migrated to Gaziantep during the Syrian civil war (2012-). Life history interviews were also conducted with prominent Aleppine Armenian members of the Armenian community in Kuwait: the priest of the Armenian church in Aleppo, and two leading Syrian Armenian merchants who run successful businesses in Kuwait and play a prominent role in the Armenian community there.

Data type: text

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Who Were the Nuns?

Economic and Social History, History | 17th-century, 18th-century, Christianity, religion, women's studies, womens-history

The data is derived from surviving manuscript and printed sources from the English convents in exile. Where membership records are missing or have gaps, details have been sought in other sources such as biographical writings, histories and chronicles. Significant data has also been located in continental archives from visitation records and examinations of candidates for clothing and profession. Where possible data has been included for candidates who failed to complete a full career in convents for a variety of reasons including health or unsuitability. External documents have been attached to the database to provide additional data regarding family connections and networks: much of the detail is derived from sources external to the convents.

Data type: text

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Universal Short Title Catalogue

Cultural History, History | 15th century, 16th-century, 17th-century, books

The Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC) is a project aimed at bringing together information on all books published in Europe in the first age of print. At present this comprises 755,000 editions and around 4 million surviving copies, located in over 9,500 archives and libraries worldwide.

Data type: text

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Whittingehame College Old Boy Interviews

Cultural History, History | England, ethnic minorities, interviews, Judaism, Middle East, migration, twentieth century

Whittingehame College was a Jewish boys' school located in Brighton and Hove between 1931 and 1958 and in Handcross Park from 1958 until 1967. Whittingehame's founder was the British Zionist, Jakob Halévy (1898 - 1978). During the years of its existence, the school underwent significant transformations. From educating British Jewry in the early 1930s, Whittingehame attracted Jewish students from Germany and central Europe in the mid-1930s. After the war, Jewish students from Muslim-majorities countries in West Asia and North Africa (especially Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, Sudan, Iran and Afghanistan) increasingly sought admission to the school. This data comprises twelve videos of interviews conducted by Magnus Marsden and Paul Anderson with former students at the College. The interviews were conducted and recorded in Brighton on 10th September 2023, in the context of a College reunion.

Data type: video

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War Widows’ Stories

Economic and Social History, History | gender, interviews, oral history, twentieth century, United Kingdom, war and conflict, women's studies, World War II

The War Widows' Stories website hosts all transcripts and recordings of the oral history interviews we have conducted in the course of the War Widows' Stories project, and they can be access and downloaded for free by anyone. Recordings can be streamed or downloaded; transcripts can be read and searched online or downloaded as PDFs.

Data type: audio, text

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The Windrush Scandal in a Transnational and Commonwealth Context

History, Political History | ethnic minorities, interviews, migration, oral history, race, twentieth century, twenty-first century, United Kingdom

From the Project Abstract on the UKRI Grant List website: The key outputs will be 60 oral history interviews which will be available electronically and a searchable database of existing oral history resources on the 'Windrush generation'. 30 of the interviews will focus on the response of Caribbean governments and their representatives in London to the legal restrictions imposed on immigration to the UK from the Caribbean from the early 1960s, and the plight of those members of the diaspora community whose right to remain in the UK was challenged by the British state. The other 30 interviews will focus on members of the diaspora community, those who found themselves under threat of deportation or actually deported, and their supporters and legal and political representatives. The interviews will explore the extent to which the complexities and ambiguities of the law governing nationality exacerbated confusion around competing notions of Caribbean and British identity and belonging. They will seek to identify the extent to which members of the diaspora community were aware of changes to their rights and obligations brought about by successive acts of parliament from 1962, and the stages by which it became clear that significant numbers of people were having their right to remain in the UK challenged. This oral history research will be supplemented by archival research in collections in the UK and the Caribbean. Selected documents will be digitized and made available on the project website alongside the recordings of the interviews and supporting explanatory materials including a series of podcasts produced by the project team.

Data type: text

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The Poetry of the Lancashire Cotton Famine (1861-65)

Economic and Social History, History | 19th-century, american-civil-war, class, poetry

This database brings together for the first time poems written in response to the Lancashire Cotton Famine of 1861-65. They are presented with commentary, audio recitations and musical performances. The crisis was caused by the American Civil War and, as well as poems from British local newspapers, poems published in America are included commenting on the relationship between the US, Britain, cotton, and slavery.

Data type: audio, text

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