Diplomacy & International Security: Online primary sources

Scran is an online learning service from the charity Historic Environment Scotland. It contains over 490,000 images and media from museums, galleries, and archives. It provides access to resources relating to Scotland's culture and heritage.

Digimap is an online map and data delivery service, offering a number of data collections. Historic Digimap contains historical Ordnance Survey maps of Great Britain.

Please note - downloading data for use in GIS or CAD applications requires specialised software which is NOT available on PCs in the Library.

Scran is an online learning service from the charity Historic Environment Scotland. It contains over 490,000 images and media from museums, galleries, and archives. It provides access to resources relating to Scotland's culture and heritage.

Access to over 65,000 digitised items selected from the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera covering everyday life in Britain in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Contents include materials relating to the history of: theatre, the book trade, crime and punishment, design and advertising.

Useful for: Design, History and Journalism.

Previously known as Archival Sound Recordings, British Library Sounds is an archive of sound recordings from all over the world. Topics include: oral history, accents and dialects, environment and nature and music. Recordings come from the British Library's sound archives.

This service from Alexander Street provides more than 100,000 videos, images, and sound recordings covering a wide range of academic subjects. Formerly known as JISC MediaHub.

Access to data from the ESDS (Economic and Social Data Service) and Census data for 1971-2021.
Includes data from International Energy Agency, World Bank, OECD, United Nations, Human Rights Atlas, International Monetary Fund.

Complete digital edition of the Times (London) newspaper from 1785-2019. Access is on the Gale platform and this product can also be searched as part of Gale Primary Sources.

Please note that we also have electronic access to current issues of The Times on the Gale platform and also via other databases. Current content can be accessed via the SUPrimo record for 'The Times', or can be searched as part of Gale OneFile News.

Queen Victoria's Journals are a key primary source for scholars of 19th Century British political and social history, and for those working on gender and autobiographical writing. The website provides access to the entire sequence of Queen Victoria's diaries.

Gale Primary Sources allows users to search across various primary source archive collections from the provider Gale. The archives are:

17th and 18th Century Burney Collection,
British Library Newspapers - parts 1 and 2 (19th century),
19th Century UK Periodicals,
The Economist Historical Archive,
The Financial Times Historical Archive,
The Times Digital Archive, and
Archives Unbound.

This database provides access to the searchable full text of hundreds of periodicals from the late seventeenth century to the early twentieth, comprising millions of page images. Topics covered include literature, philosophy, history, science, the social sciences, music, art, drama, archaeology and architecture.

The London Stage is a reference work documenting theatrical performances in eighteenth-century London. The resource covers performances from the period 1660-1800. Information has been compiled from the playbills, newspapers and theatrical diaries of the period. It is possible to search by actor, role, performance, theatre or date.

Nineteenth Century UK Periodicals (Part One) covers the advent of commercial lifestyle publishing in Britain. Content is drawn from the collections of the British Library, National Library of Scotland, National Library of Australia, and National Library of South Africa. Topics covered include the rarely documented aspects of women, children, humour, and leisure activity in the Victorian age. The rise of magazine publishing is reflected in the selection of publications, which spans publications aimed at and tailored to various audiences, including women and children.

You can either search Nineteenth Century UK Periodicals on its own here, or with other primary sources using Gale Primary Sources.

Charles Booth's London enables you to search a catalogue of over 450 original notebooks from the Inquiry into Life and Labour in London (1886-1903), view 41 digitised notebooks and explore the London poverty maps. As well as poverty maps this site provides access to police notebooks and contextual information. Useful for History and Social Policy.

Mass Observation Online provides access to digitised versions of manuscripts and papers collected by the Mass Observation organisation in Britain during the period 1937 to the mid 1950s. It provides insights into daily lives and routines and provides access to primary sources of interest to those researching or studying historical, sociological or anthropological subjects.

See also Mass Observation Project.

A collection of primary source material exploring the migration of peoples from Great Britain, Ireland, mainland Europe and Asia to the New World and Australasia. Sources include: letters, travel journals, diaries, oral histories, maps, pamphlets, official publications and shipping papers. Covers the period 1800 - 1924. Also includes access to the New South Wales Convict Database, a fully transcribed list of convicts and former convicts sent to New South Wales between 1780-1819. This database can be searched by name, occupation, trial court, sentence, transportation ship and eventual settlement in Australia.

The Runaway Slaves in Eighteenth-Century Britain project provides access to over 800 newspaper advertisements placed by masters and owners seeking the capture and return of enslaved and bound people who had escaped. The principal sources for this project are English and Scottish newspapers published between 1700 and 1780.

This resource provides access to declassified information about the US intelligence community in the Far East during the Cold War. It covers the period 1945-1991. Countries covered include: China, North Korea, North Vietnam, Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore and Australia.

A collection of over 4,000 formerly classified U.S. government documents provides a comprehensive survey of the U.S. intelligence community’s activities in Europe between 1945 and 1995.

Documents on British Policy Overseas is a collection of 20th century primary source documents from Britain's Foreign and Commonwealth Office. It is based on three print series covering peacetime diplomacy: British Documents on the Origins of the War 1898-1914, Documents on British Foreign Policy 1918-1939 and Documents on British Overseas Policy.

Statistical Accounts of Scotland provides access to both the 'Old' Statistical Account (1791-99), under the direction of Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster, and the 'New' Statistical Account (1834-45). These accounts offer rich and detailed parish reports for the whole of Scotland, covering a vast range of topics including agriculture, education, trades, religion and social customs. Please note, we do not have a subscription to this resource, but the content is freely available.

Colonial State Papers provides access to over 7000 hand-written documents and 40,000 bibliographic records about colonial history. It covers Britain's colonial relations with the Americas and other European rivals for power and also covers the Caribbean and Atlantic world. Covers the period 1574-1757.

Part I: The Tudors, 1509-1603: State Papers Domestic. Part II: The Tudors, 1509-1603: State Papers Foreign.

State Papers Online provides access to the British State Papers, the papers of the Secretary of State from Henry VIII’s accession in 1509 to 1782. Covering a wide range of documents, subjects, and importance, they concern internal English/British affairs and administration of the country, and foreign affairs, marriage alliances, treaties and wars. Here are original letters written by Henry VIII and subsequent monarchs, ministers, officials and clerks, together with those sent from European rulers and their officials, and the people of Britain of all social levels. These papers are a major source for Early Modern Studies of Britain and Europe.

UK Parliamentary Papers (formerly House of Commons Parliamentary Papers) contains Sessional Papers (e.g. House of Commons Papers, Command Papers and Public Bills) from 1715 to the 2009/10 parliamentary session. UKPP also provides access to supplementary parliamentary material back to 1688 including material from the House of Lords. Full-text of papers from session 2010-11 onwards is available via the Public Information Online service.

Spanning four key twentieth-century conflicts, with a spotlight on the Second World War, Secret Files from World Wars to Cold War provides access to British government secret intelligence and foreign policy files from 1873 to 1953. This resource is cross-searchable with British Society, 1939-1951 on the History Commons platform.

Archives Unbound contains subject based digital collections of historical documents covering a broad range of topics including: American history, British history, European history, Gender Studies, History of Health and Medicine, Journalism and Literature.

Full text or page images of over 400,000 books published in England from 1475 to 1900. The service includes EEBO (Early English Books Online), ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online), Nineteenth Century Books from the British Library Collection, and also the UK Medical Heritage Library.

Early European Books traces the history of printing in Europe from its origins to the end of the seventeenth century. It provides full text access to materials from up to the end of the seventeenth century. Strathclyde has access to Early European Books Collections 1 to 4 on the ProQuest platform.

Full text of Medieval and Early Modern books. Searches digitised versions of documents relating to Colonial, English, Irish and Scottish history. Covers the period 1100 - 1800.