An in-development list of useful resources on the history of modern Britain and the British Empire.
General
Connected Histories
“Connected Histories brings together a range of digital resources related to early modern and nineteenth century Britain with a single federated search that allows sophisticated searching of names, places and dates, as well as the ability to save, connect and share resources within a personal workspace.”
London Lives 1690 to 1800: Crime, Poverty, and Social Policy in the Metropolis
“London Lives makes available, in a fully digitised and searchable form, a wide range of primary sources about eighteenth-century London, with a particular focus on plebeian Londoners. This resource includes over 240,000 manuscript and printed pages from eight London archives and is supplemented by fifteen datasets created by other projects. It provides access to historical records containing over 3.35 million name instances. ”
Newspapers/Periodicals
British Newspaper Archive
“The British Newspaper Archive is a partnership between the British Library and brightsolid online publishing to digitise up to 40 million newspaper pages from the British Library’s vast collection over the next 10 years.”
Papers Past (National Library of New Zealand)
“Papers Past contains more than two million pages of digitised New Zealand newspapers and periodicals. The collection covers the years 1839 to 1945 and includes 80 publications from all regions of New Zealand.”
Readex World Newspaper Archive (institutional subscription required)
Both the African (1800-1922) and South Asian (1864-1922) collections offer invaluable insights into the intellectual lives of British subjects in Africa and on the Indian subcontinent.
Legislative/Politics/Government
Hansard 1803-2005 (Parliamentary debates)
Legal Records
Old Bailey Online
“A fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London’s central criminal court.”
Maps/GIS/Spatial
Locating London’s Past
“This website allows you to search a wide body of digital resources relating to early modern and eighteenth-century London, and to map the results on to a fully GIS compliant version of John Rocque’s 1746 map.”
(Im)migration/Empire Strikes Back
Moving Here
“Moving Here explores, records and illustrates why people came to England over the last 200 years and what their experiences were and continue to be. It offers free access, for personal and educational use, to an online catalogue of versions of original material related to migration history from local, regional and national archives, libraries and museums.”
Royalty/Monarchy
Queen Victoria’s Journals (institutional subscription required)
“Queen Victoria’s Journals is the product of a unique partnership between ProQuest, the Royal Archives and the Bodleian Libraries. It reproduces as high-resolution, colour images every page of the surviving volumes of Queen Victoria’s journals, from her first diary entry in 1832 to shortly before her death in 1901, along with separate photographs of the many illustrations and inserts within the pages.”
Queen Victoria Tweets
“Real-time. Tweeting Victoria’s authentic 1839 diary entries on the day they were written. Project started on her Coronation.”