Includes rare manuscript and early printed material, illustrated maps and documents, diaries and ships' logs. Covers the earliest voyages of Vasco da Gama, the opening of trade with the Spice Islands, the colonization of the Americas and Australasia, the search for the Northwest and Northeast Passages, and finally the race for the Poles.
Eighteenth Century Drama features three distinct areas:
Primary source documents; the focus of which is the Larpent collection of plays and Anna Larpent's Diaries
John Larpent was the English Inspector of Plays from 1778-1824 and responsible for executing the Licensing Act of 1737, a landmark act of censorship which required the Lord Chamberlain's office to approve any play before it was staged. The main focus of Eighteenth Century Drama is the John Larpent plays from the Huntington Library; this is the collection of plays that Larpent preserved from the original licence submissions. There are over 2,500 plays which make up the majority of the collection. Also included are the diaries of Larpent's wife and professional collaborator Anna, recording her criticisms of plays as well as insights into theatrical culture and English society. The resource also features correspondence between key theatrical figures, biographical information, portraits, advertisement, historical information, and visual material.
The London Stage Database
The companion text, The London Stage 1660-1800, which lists every traceable performance 1660-1800, has been made available as a searchable database. The information from this database has been used to power the text analysis tool, The London Stage Data Associations in order to illustrate trends within and between theatres, across years, between works performed, roles enacted and actors included in The London Stage. Users can also view The London Stage in its original printed format.
The Biographical Dictionary Database
The companion text A Biographical Dictionary of Actors etc. 1660-1800 has also been made available as a searchable database.
Document types include: personal narratives, diaries, newspapers, posters, postcards, photographs, printed books, military and government files, ephemera, artwork, personal artifacts and film. Also includes secondary source materials such as interactive maps, and chronologies.
Modules include: Personal Experiences; Propaganda and Recruitment; Visual Perspectives and Narratives; A Global Conflict
Includes access to guidebooks and brochures, periodicals, travel agency correspondence, photographs, personal travel journals posters, and ephemeral items.
Based at Fisk University from 1943-1970, the Race Relations Department and its annual Institute were set up by the American Missionary Association to investigate problem areas in race relations and develop methods for educating communities and preventing conflict. Documenting three pivotal decades in the fight for civil rights, this resource showcases the speeches, reports, surveys and analyses produced by the Department’s staff and Institute participants, including Charles S. Johnson, Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., and Thurgood Marshall.
Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre is a ‘best guess’ reconstruction based on modern scholarship of the 1599 theater of the same name that William Shakespeare part owned, wrote for and played in. The new theater stands not far from the original Globe on London's Southbank. The performance archive shows how productions at the reconstructed Globe and Sam Wanamaker Playhouse were conceived, rehearsed, dressed, marketed, sound tracked, how props were used, how the audiences behaved and the theater history and performance lessons that were observed and learned. The architectural archive contains material on how the reconstruction of the theater was designed and planned and some of the conversations and debates that informed construction decisions.
The Folger Shakespeare Library has collected prompt books (scripts of the plays marked up for performance) of Shakespeare’s plays, as well as prompt books of other plays performed by influential Shakespearean actors, since the library’s founders, Henry and Emily Folger, purchased their first copy. Alongside these prompt books, the Folger has acquired other material related to performance, such as playbills, scrapbooks, newspaper clippings, theatrical account books, photographs, sketches, costumes, props, cue sheets, lighting plots, musical scores, and the correspondence and writings of Shakespearean actors, directors, and managers.
This resource features over 1,000 prompt books of 34 of Shakespeare’s plays, including editions owned by notable actors and directors such as Charles and John Philip Kemble, Henry Irving, Ellen Terry and Laurence Olivier. Of these 1,000 prompt books, approximately 10% are for Hamlet, and 6% are for Merchant of Venice and Macbeth, respectively. Seventeen performances of particular cultural importance have been selected as case studies, featuring additional archival material such as photographs, costume designs and music scores. These case studies include David Garrick’s revised 1772 production of Hamlet, Henry Irving’s famous 1879 production of The Merchant of Venice, and Laurence Olivier’s Academy Award-winning cinema release of Hamlet in 1948.
Documents the communist world from the Russian Revolution until the 1980s. The digitized film covers all aspects of socialist life from society, war, culture, the Cold War, memory and contemporaneous views on current affairs. Footage includes documentaries, newsreels and feature films. Geographically the films deal with the Soviet Union alongside significant groupings of material on Vietnam, China, Korea, the German Democratic Republic and Eastern Europe, Britain, Spain, Latin America and Cuba. Includes access to three modules: Module I: Wars & Revolutions, Module II: Newsreels & Cinemagazines, and Module III: Culture & Society.
Contains four modules:
Spiritualism, Sensation and Magic
This section explores the relationship between the popularity of Victorian magic shows and conjuring tricks and the emergence of séances and psychic phenomena in Britain and America. Contains material from the Harry Price Library of Magical Literature at Senate House, University of London, as well as the Harry Houdini archive at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas.
Circuses, Sideshows and Freaks
This section focuses on the world of travelling entertainment, which brought spectacle to vast audiences across Britain, American and Europe in the 19th and early 20th century. From big tops to carnivals, fairgrounds and dime museums, it covers the history of popular shows and exhibitions from both audience and professional perspectives. The collection features hundreds of posters, postcards, photographs, cabinet cards and illustrations, in addition to handbills, pamphlets, manuscripts, printed ephemera, memorabilia, rare books, children’s literature and memoirs of celebrity showpeople.
Music Hall, Theatre and Popular Entertainment
This section features material on music halls, theatre (legitimate and illegitimate), pantomime, pleasure gardens, exhibitions, scientific institutions, and magic lanterns shows and dioramas. Also includes rare books, periodicals aimed at industry and fans, titles from the scarce popular series ‘Dicks’ Standard Plays’, posters and playbills, visual ephemera, and the archives of May Moore Duprez, the American music hall star who topped international bills with her ‘Jolly Little Dutch Girl’ act.
Moving Pictures, Optical Entertainments and the Advent of Cinema
Provides thorough coverage of Victorian and Edwardian visual entertainments, early optics, magic lantern shows, panoramas, dioramas, early photography, and early motion pictures. The source material is drawn from the collections of the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum. Based at the University of Exeter, the UK’s largest research center for the history of international cinema and pre-cinema.
Offers insight into the phenomenon of international expositions by presenting official records, monographs, personal accounts and ephemera for more than 200 fairs. The first fair represented in this resource is what many consider the first world’s fair, the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations at the Crystal Palace in London, 1851. The latest case study is Montreal’s Expo 1967, but there are documents as recent as Milan’s (successful) bid to host Expo 2015. The largest concentration of documents relate to fairs from the late Victorian-early Edwardian era of 1880-1920; the ‘golden age’ of expositions when neighboring cities raced to outdo each other – sometimes hosting rival fairs in the same year. While there are documents for host nations from every continent, the historical focus of international expositions (and therefore this resource) is Northern European, North American and – in the twentieth century in particular – East Asian.