Blog

One of the most common remarks about life as a soldier in the Second World War, from those who experienced it first-hand, is that when you weren’t scared stiff you were bored to death. For many, the episodes of fighting were interspersed with long and tedious months of waiting around for orders, or being shipped to and fro between different bases, wondering what was coming next.

In September 1940, a British diplomat named Wilfred Hansford Gallienne embarked on a two-week journey from Moscow to Tokyo via the Trans-Siberian Railway. A year into the Second World War, neither the Soviet Union nor Japan had explicitly taken sides, and Gallienne’s objective was to assess travelling conditions and evidence of military activity. His impressions are recorded in an official memorandum, included in our recently-published resource, Foreign Office Files for Japan, 1919-1952.

Despite its lacklustre nickname, "The Psalter Map", which is held in the British Library and featured in AM's Medieval Travel Writing, is a rare example of c13th Century medieval cartography.

The Stationers' Company Court Books are essential to understanding the history and workings of the company, but Court Minute Book k stands out for the simple reason that it contains photographs, depicting WW2 bomb damage to the Stationers' Hall.

Adam Matthew Digital is the first primary source publisher to utilise Artificial Intelligence to offer transformative search capabilities with Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technology, which we will be showcasing in the third module of our Matthew’s award-winning resource Colonial America: The American Revolution. Whilst the vast selection of material covering the American Revolutionary period in this collection was sure to pique many a budding American history enthusiast’s interest, this new HTR software has catapulted our latest collection to the forefront of academic and digital curation discussion.

What links W.H. Smith, Rudyard Kipling, Edward VIII, and Harold Macmillan? They were all members of the Stationers’ Company, the 600-year-old London livery company whose records are digitised in AM's resource Literary Print Culture.

On 25 January 1911 a party of 50 British boys arrived in Wellington, New Zealand as part of an unusual colonial experiment. Varying in age from 16 to 20 and coming predominantly from lower class occupations such as domestic service, the lads were part of a trial scheme to ascertain the feasibility of sending city boys with no previous agricultural experience to rural farms within the British Dominions. This three-year apprenticeship scheme was the brain child of Thomas E. Sedgwick and other like-minded philanthropists, who felt increasing alarm at the enforced idleness of youth.

The Colonial Office 5 records cast useful light on high-level administrative aspects of the American Revolution. However, not all who documented these events were as well-placed as colonial governors and secretaries. CO 5 records reveal glimpses of much more obscure figures, too.

If, like me, you find that celebratory occasions for family and friends tend to cluster together (birthdays, weddings, baby showers, hen parties, anniversaries), you may find yourself struggling to think of appropriate and thoughtful gifts year after year.

One of best parts of my role in the Academic Outreach team here at AM is working with faculty and instructors to integrate our primary source collections into undergraduate teaching. While there is a significant user base of independent scholarly researchers, we also have many undergraduate instructors who want to build specialist primary source content into their students' learning.

Scarcely a week goes by at the Adam Matthew office without a report landing in my inbox from colleagues returning from conferences in far-flung locations such as Utrecht, Florida and Budapest. One or other of us is forever off to an academic gathering somewhere in the world, often as an exhibitor with a booth of leaflets and goodies, and other times as an inquisitive delegate attending papers and workshops.

'If you can send to me a little French girl, one or both of whose hands have been cut off by the Germans, we will take care of her and her presence will do more to help us raise large sums of money than anything else.'So wrote a member of the Westchester County Chapter of the Red Cross in November 1917, five months after the United States' entry into the First World War.

Singapore was the British military stronghold in the East. However, when in 1942 the Japanese took the British by surprise, it led to one of the greatest military defeats in British history. Singapore would not be back in British hands until the war was over.

Almost two million people emigrated to the United States and Canada on Red Star Line vessels between 1873 and 1934. Good rail connections ensured that many emigrants from Switzerland and Germany booked their passage from Antwerp.

Today is the 50th anniversary of the release of the Beatles’ classic single All You Need Is Love. This blog, however, isn’t about the Beatles, but it is about love with a little socialist industrialism thrown in. I’ve recently been working on Module II Newsreels & Cinemagazines of Adam Matthew’s Socialism on Film: The Cold War and International Propaganda resource, and thought I’d share one of my favourite clips (so far)!

The issue of race and public memory ignites fierce debate in American cities and states on recording and representing the past, as discussed in this guest blog by Professor John Giggie.

The words that Nathaniel Kinsman hastily penned to his “dearly beloved Wife” aboard a fast boat that carried him against the current of the Pei-ho River, from Macao (Macau) to Canton (Guangzhou) in China, reveal how Americans experienced China in the nineteenth century. They are emblematic of stories that reveal the human side of the Old China Trade, and lie beneath the conventional narrative that regales in opium sales and opium wars, pirates and typhoons, and, of course, tea, porcelain and silk.

Ninety years ago this week, a rollercoaster called the Cyclone opened in Coney Island, on the Atlantic coast of the New York borough of Brooklyn. I am no particular rollercoaster fan – though not a tall man I’m always convinced I’ll be decapitated in the tunnels; in the merry photos taken at the end I’m the pale one hunched over – but when I found myself in Coney Island a few years ago I felt obliged, since the Cyclone is still there, to toddle along (fortified by a Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog) and have a go.

Wonder Woman has kicked down doors for female superheroes everywhere this summer with her Lasso of Truth, steely commitment to peace and wholly impractical wardrobe – raking in $600 million in the process. ... While working on Adam Matthew’s upcoming resource Medical Services and Warfare, I stumbled across a biographical collection charting the real-life women who dedicated their lives to the war effort.

My dazzling career prospects as a ballet dancer were brought to an abrupt end at the age of five, when my family moved house and my lessons in the village hall were discontinued. Who knows what I could have achieved, had I stayed? Unfortunately, my insistence on doing the exact opposite of the teacher’s instructions would probably not have gone down well in the strict world of ballet. In my mildly non-conformist way, perhaps I was really empathising with the bad boy of Russian ballet in the 1960s – Rudolph Nureyev who, on this day in 1961, defected from the Soviet Union and caused an international sensation.

Maryland’s Glorious Revolution (1689-1690) removed the Catholic Lords Baltimore from government in perpetuity. The family would only return in 1715 as Anglican converts. Maryland’s revolution coincided with the Glorious Revolution in England (1688), which replaced the Catholic King James II with the Protestant William III, and the Nine Years War (1689-1697) with France, known in the American colonial context as King William’s War. In 1684 rumour of a Catholic-American Indian conspiracy circulated amongst colonists. The rumours implicated Colonels Henry Darnall and William Pye, and Major William Boreman Sr., a former mariner and Indian trader, each of whom was a wealthy and distinguished planter in Maryland.

Thomas Carnan was an enterprising individual who had moved from Reading to London and had his eye on the profitable market for almanacs and other such useful items with equally nebulous definitions. In his way, was the Stationers’ Company.

Summer holidays are in full swing at Adam Matthew with road trips to Germany, honeymoons in Italy and sailing in Croatia. It’s always an interesting time of year to find out what plans people are making, instilling wanderlust in the rest of us. After hearing a few of my colleagues’ holiday plans it inspired me to delve into Mass Observation Online to see what holiday plans people were making in 1949 (and Leisure, Travel & Mass Culture for some nice visual aids).

The object I’ve chosen to highlight this week has been inspired by the fact that no less than five of the staff here at Adam Matthew towers are tying the knot this summer. And it’s clear from discussions during coffee breaks that whether it’s wishing we had our own J-Lo with her slick headset, or wondering what Wilson Phillips might actually charge, representations of weddings form a big part of our understanding of and expectations for the big day.Browsing through the entertainment memorabilia collection in our resource Popular Culture in Britain and America, I came across a press kit for the 1969 film How to Commit a Marriage. A fascinating primary source contemporary to a dynamic time in American cultural life, this item offers insight into Hollywood’s approach to marriage.