News

Jewish Life in America, c1654-1954 has been awarded Library Journal 'Best Reference' title for 2011. Described as 'eclectic works to match a tumultuous year', the names of the winning 'outstanding databases' for the year were announced by Brian E. Coutts (Professor and Head of Department of Library Public Services, Western Kentucky, Bowling Green) and Cheryl LaGuardia (Research Librarian for the Widener Library, Harvard University).

From the austerity of the 1950s to the excess of the 1970s, discover this dramatic period through a wealth of printed and manuscript sources, visual material, ephemera and video clips. Digitised in full colour, the material covers key areas and major events of the period.

The following review appeared in CHOICE in June 2012 (ref 49-5439): 49-5439 Reference \ Social & Behavioral Sciences Popular Culture in Britain and America, 1950-1975 [formerly Rock and Roll, Counterculture, Peace and Protest]. Adam Matthew Education, reviewed in June 2012 by CHOICE.

"Confidential Print: Africa provides scholars with unprecedented electronic access to the United Kingdom’s confidential correspondence covering almost the entire period of European conquest and colonisation of Africa.” Professor Jeremy Martens Chair of History, University of Western Australia.

From the aftermath of Spanish and Portuguese colonialism and post-colonial state-building, to wars, relations with Indigenous peoples, slavery, immigration, foreign financial influences and the fitful progress towards democracy, the documents presented in Confidential Print: Latin America offer fundamental research opportunities to students and scholars of nineteenth and twentieth century Latin American history.

“This is an extraordinary resource for students and scholars of the Romantic period worldwide” Jared Curtis, Simon Fraser University This powerful digital resource enables scholars and students of Romanticism to forge new pathways of innovative research into the literary lives and artistic aspects of the movement. Presenting manuscript collections of the Wordsworth Trust, this digital resource offers students and scholars of the Romantics period...

The second section to Foreign Office Files for India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, 1947-1980: South Asian Conflicts and Independence for Bangladesh, 1965-1971 is now available.The continued fighting over Kashmir and the separation of Bangladesh from Pakistan meant that further conflict dominated the period between 1965 and 1971. It saw Indira Gandhi, Nehru's daughter, gain power in India, ...

As one of the ‘newbies’ of the editorial team at Adam Matthew, my first research expedition took me on a fascinating tour through the archives of the Bill Douglas Centre at Exeter University. Along with Senior Development Editor Martha Fogg and Project Editor Beth Hall, I was there to help assess and select material for an upcoming resource on early moving pictures and cinema.

I have been very lucky to work on our Rock and Roll, Counterculture, Peace and Protest digital collection, which brought back so many memories of the period. Yes - I have to confess, I do remember the 1960s! I lived in London from 1968 for a few years before I went to work in Spain and it is all still very vivid.

I have been fortunate enough to be involved in the development of two of our most visually stimulating resources: Popular Culture in Britain and America, 1950-1970; Rock and Roll, Counterculture, Peace and Protest and most recently Moving Pictures, Optical Entertainments and the Advent of Cinema, the fourth part of our Victorian Popular Culture series.

This week marks the beginning of London 60s Week (22-31 July), an annual festival commemorating the golden anniversary of the 1960s. A programme of London-based activities and events celebrate the creative spirit of the age through music, film, photography and dance.

I have recently finished working on one of Adam Matthew’s newest resources, Romanticism: Life, Literature and Landscape, the digitisation of The Wordsworth Trust’s unique manuscript collection covering William Wordsworth, his family and contemporary Romantics.

I recently attended the third meeting of the annual Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) hosted by the Department of Native American Studies at UC Davis. Founded in 2008, NAISA is an organization dedicated to supporting scholarship in the academic field of Native American and Indigenous studies.

Mass Observation was an extraordinary attempt to chart the experiences of so-called “ordinary” people and the diaries offer the chance to consider how national and international issues were felt at a local level, adding fresh and hidden perspectives on the time.

I was very fortunate to be able to spend some time studying the material in our collection Jewish Life in America, c1654-1954 and was particularly fascinated by the Moss Family Scrapbooks which provide a wealth of information for the study of Jewish life and culture in New York in the second half of the nineteenth century.

London Low Life: Street Culture, Social Reform and the Victorian Underworld is the latest resource to be published by Adam Matthew. This compelling collection sheds light on the darker side of Victorian society, containing street literature on crime, sex, murder, gambling and all things insalubrious.

The third section of Foreign Office Files for India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, which was published towards the end of last month, covers the British Foreign Office material on the whole of South Asia for the period 1972 to 1980. The proportion of material relating to each country in each section reflects international events and so the preoccupations of the British Government at the time.

We are currently hard at work redeveloping our popular Empire Online resource, and I have the good fortune of being the Project Editor for updating this fascinating digital collection.Empire Online has proved to be one of our most popular projects since its initial release in 2003, so we felt it deserved a modern facelift worthy of its excellent content. ...

The conviction this month in The Hague of Thomas Lubanga, a Congolese warlord, for forcing children to fight in his army in the early 2000s is merely the latest in a long line of cases of abuse of this kind that have blighted what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. The civil wars which began in 1996 bled out of the nation’s borders to involve, in time, eight other African countries – leading to the label ‘Africa’s world war’ – as well as numerous unofficial militias, of which Lubanga’s was one. By the time a peace of sorts was established in 2003, about five and a half million people had died due to the fighting and the disease and starvation it caused.

Britain in the nineteenth century was a country of emigration. The British Empire covered a quarter of the globe, and the British people went forth in their thousands to settle in its most promising regions. Australia, Canada and New Zealand owe their current form to the British enthusiasm for improving one’s lot overseas: as, of course, does the United States.

In the latest addition to our Eighteenth Century Journals portal – Eighteenth Century Journals V – we have included the full run of the Lady’s Magazine, a periodical that ran for sixty-two years from 1770 to 1832 when it merged with its rival, The Ladies Museum.

Last week saw the release of Global Commodities: Trade, Exploration and Cultural Exchange, a large multi-library resource which explores the history of fifteen major commodities that changed the world. I have worked on the resource as Project Editor for many months now and it has been a truly exciting project to manage.

I had the pleasure of recently working on the re-launch of one of our most popular resources, Empire Online, which was published last month. The resource has been upgraded to meet the specifications of our latest resources, including full-text searchability and registered user functions such as 'My Archive'.

With the release of our newest resource, Moving Pictures, Optical Entertainments and the Advent of Cinema – the fourth instalment in the successful Victorian Popular Culture series – I would like to draw attention to, in my opinion, its most visually impressive feature: the online virtual exhibition, Optical Delights.Standing in the Bill Douglas Centre’s public museum, surrounded on all sides ...