A Foucaldian February

If on these wintery rainy days of February, the structures of power are getting you down, consider coming to the History, Philosophy, and Newspaper Library and having a Foucaldian February. The library has a great many books by Foucault, about Foucault, about his writings, and generally inspired by Foucault, which will hold you in good stead until the last day of February (The 29th this year!) and even through to the next leap year (and well beyond.) 

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Reading the Women’s Pages

For those interested in cultural and social history, one of the most invaluable resources made available through the University of Illinois Library are the historical newspaper databases. Containing the decade-spanning backfiles of such major newspapers as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Chicago Tribune, these databases provide readers the opportunity to envision what it might have been like to live during a certain era and experience world-changing events as they were initially recorded. Continue reading “Reading the Women’s Pages”

Over 200 Illinois Newspapers Digitized

Now available: over two hundred digitized Illinois newspapers: https://go.library.illinois.edu/npcom. Access currently restricted to computers with a campus IP address, but will soon be freely available through the Illinois Digital Newspaper Collections (IDNC) to researchers everywhere. Continue reading “Over 200 Illinois Newspapers Digitized”

Colonial Caribbean New Module: Colonial Government and Abolition, 1833-1849

Now available: the second module of the digital collection Colonial Caribbean. Like the first module, Module 2 covers British colonialism in the Caribbean, and comprises documents from the British National Archives, digitized in full color. Continue reading “Colonial Caribbean New Module: Colonial Government and Abolition, 1833-1849”

Trial Access to ProQuest’s Electronic Resources Concluding August 2022

[Post by Heather Murphy]

In 2019, the University Library secured trial access to the ProQuest “Access and Build Program” giving faculty, staff, and students at Illinois the ability to search 115 electronic resources. Over the years, the Library supported this evidence-based acquisition program, ProQuest added new databases, and the Library used accumulated credits to purchase those that demonstrated the most use. These multidisciplinary resources spanned the humanities, music and the arts, the social sciences, and some scientific disciplines, and each resource available through the ProQuest Access and Build program was marked in the Library’s catalog as being available on a trial basis. Continue reading “Trial Access to ProQuest’s Electronic Resources Concluding August 2022”

6 New Digital Collections

Early Modern England: Society, Culture, and Everyday Life, 1500-1700

Published and unpublished sources selected for their capacity to document the history of everyday life. Sources include court records, administrative records, petitions, wills, inventories, tax records, financial documents, military records, church records, memoirs, diaries, unpublished essays, commonplace books, printed broadsides, and printed books. Also included are 164 objects, such as clothing, jewelry, and home furnishings. The collection is organized around twenty themes: Family life; Birth, marriage, death; Health and medicine; Land and property; Possessions; Work and employment; Poverty; Agriculture; Finance; Trade and economics; Law and order; Politics and government; Foreign affairs; War; Monarchy; Religion; Scholarship, science, and the humanities; Arts, literature, and culture; Travel; and Women’s history. In addition to these themes, documents can be browsed by region and date of creation. Continue reading “6 New Digital Collections”

New Digital Collections for Fall 2020

We have acquired several new digital collections for Fall, 2020, including major historical newspaper collections, module three of British Periodicals, two collections for the study of LGBTQ history, the latest release of records from the Mass Observation archive (1981-1990), over  two centuries of U.S. government documents, and a major collection of Chinese gazetteers.

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