Primary Texts
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British Newspaper ArchiveA digital archive of British (and other) newspapers published since 1603 and held at the British Library. Cornell does NOT have licensed access to full text, but the database can be used to search for and identify articles that could then be requested through Interlibrary Loan.
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East India Company"Offers access to a unique collection of India Office Records from the British Library, London. Containing royal charters, correspondence, trading diaries, minutes of council meetings and reports of expeditions, among other document types, this resource charts the history of British trade and rule in the Indian subcontinent and beyond from 1595 to 1947." User's guide
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Eight CenturiesFormerly known as 19th Century Masterfile. Searchable index to a variety of 19th century Anglo-American periodical articles, documents and other primary and secondary sources published before 1930. Many links to full text. Aggregates indexes to books, periodicals, newspapers, government documents and patents into a single resource.
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British PeriodicalsA fully searchable database that provides the full text of periodical articles published in Britain from the 1680s to the 1930s. Topics covered include literature, philosophy, history, science, the fine arts and the social sciences, literature, music, art, drama, archaeology and architecture.
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Illustrated London News Historical Archive, 1842-2003Historical archive full color digitized images of the complete run from 1842-2003 of illustrated newspaper. This database includes full-text searching of articles and captions and issues can be browsed.
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Times of London Digital Archive, 1785-2006Full-text and full-image articles from the Times of London for the years 1785-2006. It is a digital reproduction, cover to cover, of the paper in PDF files.
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Sunday Times Digital Archive, 1822-2006Database coverage begins with the Sunday times, issued October 20, 1822-December 24, 1903; The Sunday special, issued January 3, 1904-January 24, 1904; The Sunday times and Sunday special, issued January 31, 1904-January 4, 1931; and Sunday times, January 11, 1931-December 31, 2006. Includes the Sunday times magazine, issued February, 1962.
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Victorian Popular CultureAn essential resource for the study of popular entertainment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Consists of four components: Spiritualism, Sensation and Magic; Circuses, Sideshows and Freaks; Music Hall, Theatre and Popular Entertainment; and Moving pictures, optical entertainments & the advent of cinema. Includes full-text, full-color reproductions of books, ephemera, handbills, pamphlets, photos, posters, programs, scripts, and other types of materials. Coverage is most extensive for Great Britain; but there is also a fair range of materials for the U.S.A.
Rare Book & Manuscript Collections
The Library's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections (RMC) includes 500,000 printed volumes, more than 80 million manuscripts, and another million photographs, paintings, prints, and other visual media. A number of collections contain material related to the history of literature and theatre in England and the U.S.
Digital Book Archives
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Google Books
Full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical character recognition, and stored in its digital database. -
HathiTrust
Collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world -
Internet Archive
A digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts (print, film, etc.) in digital form. Freely accessible to the public. Contains raw OCR. -
Oxford Text Archive
Catalogues, preserves and distributes high-quality digital resources for research and teaching. Currently holds thousands of texts in more than 25 different languages. Many texts are coded in TEI. -
Project Gutenberg
A source of free, downloadable ebooks. Fairly clean plain text.