Blog

Between 1788 and 1868, the British government transported more than 160,000 convicts to Australia. A popular punishment since the early seventeenth century, transportation was second in severity only to execution. Following the War of Independence, however, the defeated Crown could no longer banish undesirable elements of society to their American colonies. Conditions in overcrowded gaols and prison hulks began to deteriorate following the outbreak of war, and continued to slide until some bright spark suggested the establishment of a penal colony far, far removed from English shores.

Among the gems in the Foreign Office Files for Japan are two files that consider the role of the enemy’s “civilian morale” in war and diplomacy. In both, British officials presupposed that targeting civilians might be an effective means of deterring or defeating the Japanese war machine.

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.

When tasked with finding a suitable name for a c13th English illuminated psalter containing, amongst other things, a beautiful miniature world map, the historians and prestigious manuscript experts of the last century settled on the disappointing sobriquet “The Psalter Map”. Despite its lacklustre nickname however, Ms 2861, which is held in the British Library and featured in Adam Matthew’s Medieval Travel Writing, is a rare example of medieval cartography.

The Court Books included in Literary Print Culture: The Stationers' Company Archive, 1554-2007 are essential to our understanding of the history and workings of the Stationers’ Company. The Court Books, ranging from 1602 to 1983, contain the official minutes of the Court of Assistants. For each meeting, the decisions of the court are recorded as orders. The collection contains the rough Court Minute Books and the Court Books; the former being draft minutes taken while court was in progress, and the latter being the formal and final version. All minutes are signed by the Master and typically the following information is included: place, date and time of court meeting and a list of those present.

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 have just been digitised by Adam Matthew as Literary Print Culture: The Stationers' Company Archive, 1554-2007.

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 Adam Matthew 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.