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This time next week, I’ll be spending my bank holiday at The Hay Festival, the annual celebration of literature, art, politics, history (and more) held in the beautiful ‘town of books’, Hay-on-Wye. There’s a huge amount to do at the festival but when the programme came out there was one event I knew I had to see for a second time: Letters Live.

The month of May, for many cultures, is associated with a variety of weird and wonderful events as communities have historically come together to celebrate May Day. Even today many of us will have clear memories of partaking in May Day celebrations, whether it be dressed in ribbons dancing (slightly confused) around a Maypole, or painted up alongside ‘Jack-in-the Green’. As fate would have it, I’ve recently enjoyed delving into The Newberry Library's Chicago Commons Collection used in our up-coming resource Migration to New Worlds: The Modern Era, where the May Day festivities of Chicago are depicted in full swing.

As a development editor at Adam Matthew, I have had the pleasure of working on some fascinating resources from their earliest days. One such project was our World’s Fairs: A Global History of Expositions resource, which is a veritable treasure trove of documents, objects and oral histories that trace the fascinating phenomenon of world’s fairs; another is our exciting partnership with Shakespeare’s Globe archive.

The images above are of the eighteenth-century actresses, Mrs Anne Cargill and Mrs Mary Wells; they have been taken from scanned copies of, Dramatic Annals: Critiques on Plays and Performance and an anthology of performers' letters. They are represented here in their famous stage personas of ‘Clara’ and ‘Cowslip’, characters from The Duenna, and The Agreeable Surprise respectively, performed consistently during the last quarter of the eighteenth century.

For many WWI servicemen, the return to pre-war normality seemed a physical impossibility. According to contemporary data, around one in every seven soldiers was discharged after receiving life-changing and debilitating injuries during the war.

The famed Soviet city of Magnitogorsk came to embody the guiding principles of the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary experiment. The result was the realisation that science and politics could be used to landscape and engineer the perfect society, a socialist utopia.

In the imagination, the iron curtain between East and West during the Cold War era seems to be something impermeable. Especially in terms of cultural exchange and particularly in terms of popular culture. The mind may conjure up a picture of drab, dour and joyless scenes in the East versus a liberated and fun West. Not fair at all it seems - the documentaries and cinemagazines from Socialism on Film give a quick put down to this assumption. In this case the cultural export in question is disco music and the place is East Germany (the German Democratic Republic). It turns out we weren't so different after all.

In 2010, I was introduced to the Lawrence B. Romaine Trade Catalog Collection (RTCC) as an undergraduate student working on rehousing, sorting and listing hundreds of individual trade catalogs at UCSB Library, Special Research Collections (SRC). The bulk of RTCC was purchased in 1966 and since then, it has grown to include well over the 40,000 items reported in our online finding aid. Decades of additional purchases were made to supplement the various subject areas in this collection. But by 2010, the collection consisted of items that were both catalogued and uncatalogued, some falling apart, others misplaced and all very dusty.

Enumerating the reasons why San Francisco rather than New Orleans should receive federal sanctioning for the 1915 exposition celebrating the completion of the Panama Canal, this illustrated pamphlet urged readers to acquaint themselves with the wonders of the Pacific Coast and to “See America First”. As the first global gatherings of mass audiences, expositions – or world’s fairs – assembled the world in a single site. Designed to showcase the host nation’s progress and achievements, world’s fairs also played an important nationalising function; a task of particular significance for a nation of relative youth like the United States.

Adam Matthew's collection 'Trade Catalogues and the American Home' contains hundreds of catalogues and leaflets related to home remedies, ‘quack’ cures, and items for at-home personal care. These documents provide a fascinating insight into domestic remedies before the days where most people had access to a certified doctor.

By 1889 the name of ‘Thomas Cook & Son’ was no stranger abroad. From its humble beginnings in 1841 through to railway journeys to the Great Exhibition in 1851 and the first European excursion in 1855, the company had grown into a trusted household name, refining the idea of the organised, inclusive holiday. It is therefore no surprise that in 1889, Thomas Cook & Son organised excursions from both Britain and the US to the next great spectacle in the European cultural calendar; the opening of the Eiffel Tower and the Universal Exhibition in Paris.

Centuries before America could lay claim to saving France in the Second World War, the French nation entered the American Revolutionary War and potentially changed the trajectory of the bitter conflict with its mother country. But how was this facilitated? Was the Declaration of Independence more of a declaration of love, a wooing of a nation with a common enemy in the form of Britain?

Just 3 months into 2017 Adam Matthew have already published a wealth of exciting new collections, one of which I particularly had my eye on: East India Company Module 1: Trade, Governance and Empire, 1600-1947.

Here at Adam Matthew HQ we spend our days jumping from one patch of history to another. This week I travelled to Tokyo, 1941, via the Foreign Office Files for Japan, 1919-1952 collection. It was the 8th December 1941 and like a ghostly time traveller I found myself in the offices of the British ambassador to Japan.

Socialism on Film, the new archive resource recently launched by Adam Matthew Digital, offers many fascinating insights into the practice of cultural propaganda during the Cold War period. It also tantalizingly poses intriguing questions about censorship and repression as the authorities would evidently have mobilized against what would have been seen as subversion in its midst.

Lá Fhéile Pádraig Sona Daoibh! Or for those not fluent in Gaelic (myself included), Happy St Patrick’s Day! Today is the day to honour Ireland’s patron saint; celebrated for converting the pagan Irish to Christianity in the 5th century. Traditionally, festivities include parades, special church services, wearing green clothing or a shamrock and celebrations of Irish music and culture. But, for some, the Irish national holiday has become too commercialised, associated more with drinking Guinness and generally having a good time.

In the Cold War battle for hearts and minds there was documentary film making. In this struggle a small British distributor of left-wing films tried to play its part by showing documentaries made in socialist countries as a counterpoint to Western interpretations of those places behind the iron curtain as menacing and dangerous. Its motto was ‘See the other side of the world’. These were films that often shone a light back on the West and its own misdemeanours. Many of the films it distributed came from East Germany – home of some skilled documentary makers – and one these films in particular led to a legal and political kerfuffle that raised questions of libel, censorship and diplomatic niceties in Cold War Britain.

On Thursday 24 August 1848, the Ocean Monarch entered the open seas, leaving Liverpool for Boston, Massachusetts with almost 400 souls aboard. Six miles from the Welsh coast, perhaps 25 miles out of Liverpool, the wooden steam-powered barque caught fire. Attempts to control the conflagration quickly failed, and passengers panicked - some throwing themselves overboard clutching their children.

“Experience has taught us the white and red men cannot always live together in peace,” Joel Palmer informed leaders of the Chenook tribe at treaty negotiations, estimated to have taken place on Saturday, June 23rd, 1853: “When there are but few whites they can get along very well and not quarrel, but when there are a great many they will have difficulty. When they live together there will be difficulties; little difficulties will get to be great difficulties” (25).

The latest POTUS recently signed the 13776th Executive Order - his twelfth since taking office. Last Sunday, however, marked the 75th anniversary of an earlier order – no. 9066 – which was issued by FDR in 1942. Harmless as this anonymous directive may sound, it gave the US military the authority to designate zones from which ‘any or all people may be excluded’. With this power, the government were able to enact a policy of interning and relocating thousands of its citizens.

Jewish Life in America makes available the papers of Marion E. Kenworthy, who with the Non-Sectarian Committee for German Refugee Children lobbied the US Government to pass the Wagner-Rogers Bill. U.S Senator Robert Wagner and Congresswomen Edith Rogers introduced legislation to admit 20,000 German Jewish Children to the United States outside America’s strict immigration quotas, in a bid to provide an escape from the abhorrent treatment being received in Nazi Germany.

Founded in 1937, Mass Observation sought to explore the "anthropology of ourselves" and, to this day, illuminates societal sentiments throughout history. This pioneering social research organisation conducted a survey in 1938 surrounding the subject of happiness in everyday British lives.

The revolution which brought the Islamic republic to power was a singular event in the twentieth century, and is still considered something of an enigma by many scholars, despite the existence of diplomatic reports that disclosed opinions on the upheavals.

Whilst the census data and Institute speeches available in Race Relations in America offer the opportunity to study the top-level experiences of non-white Americans, the true significance of segregation can be felt in records such as the studies carried out by the Race Relations Department fieldworkers. Parent and pupil interviews, that formed part of the Chattanooga desegregation survey, have the ability to inform, shock and inspire in equal measures.