History Newsletter October 2023

We issue this newsletter twice yearly.  Old newsletter issues.

Announcements

Unabridged 2024 (for graduate students)

This multi-day library research intensive for graduate students helps you lay the groundwork for a career in academic research. Session topics span the entire research process, and a host of expert instructors offer a multi-disciplinary perspective on research practices. Our goal is to make visible to you the network of research support staff across campus, and to give you the tools you need to develop an effective, resourceful, and creative research practice. 

Unabridged 2024 will take place in-person, January 8th-12th, 2024. Applications for the program open October 1st, 2023.

Map Collection Class Visits

The Harvard Map Collection welcomes class visits to view maps.  Contact the new map librarian Molly Taylor-Poleskey (molly_taylorpoleskey@harvard.edu) to make arrangements for your visit.

Digital Scholarship Workshops

The DSSG website lists other workshops and general information about digital scholarship support. 

Zotero workshops

Attend a Zotero class to learn how to:

  • Easily save references
  • Organize PDFs
  • Create in-text citations & footnotes
  • Create bibliographies automatically

 Find dates for online and in-person classes and register at: https://bit.ly/Harvard-Zotero-classes  

Introduction to Library Preservation Workshop: November 18, 2023, 10 a.m. - 4 p.m., Lamont Library Forum Room

Join Harvard Library Preservation Services for a unique, immersive learning experience, introducing Harvard students to the world of library and archival preservation. During this full day workshop, you will tour the Collections Care lab in Widener Library, visit rare book collections at Harvard Library, as well as engage in hands-on activities. You will learn about the proper storage and handling of rare books, and how to access rare book collections. You will also learn fundamentals of various book structures and try your hand at elementary bookbinding and conservation treatment techniques. Lunch, refreshments, and supplies will be provided at no cost.

Applications are accepted at https://forms.gle/FZjBLCjMZUhM2NV4A and must be submitted by November 10, 2023.

For questions about the program or filling out the application, please contact Keala Richard directly at keala_richard@harvard.edu, or 617.495.2433.    More Information.

HOLLIS

You can NO LONGER limit your HOLLIS Library Catalog search to just Harvard finding aids in Advanced Search, although the finding aids are still searched in the HOLLIS Library Catalog.  HOLLLIS for Archival Discovery searches only digitized finding aids. Remember that many finding aids are not digitized, and for these you must rely on HOLLIS Library Catalog.

HOLLIS has been updated to display subject headings from African Studies Thesaurus, Homosaurus, and First Nations House of Learning.  These are authorized thesauri with assigned source codes already found in our catalog from OCLC records:

Examples:

Government Gazettes

Official gazettes are periodicals published by countries or states/provinces within countries to promulgate new laws, regulations and other official government information. They are issued by national and subnational (provincial) governments. In the English-speaking world they very often have the word Gazette in the title.  The US gazette is titled Federal Register.

Find them in HOLLIS or WorldCat with searches of the form Subject contains: 

  • Malaysia "Politics and government" Periodicals
  • Gazettes "Turks and Caicos Islands" Periodicals
  • Law "Turks and Caicos Islands" Periodicals

Foreign Legal Gazettes in the Law Library of Congress. The Library of Congress has the largest collection of foreign gazettes

“Collection Items” lists gazettes available online. (No British colonial)

With links to:

Guide to Law Online: Nations of the World (Library of Congress). Legal Guides (under each country) offers information on national gazettes with links to online versions where available.

Foreign Legal Gazettes (Library of Congress): A detailed catalog of national and subnational gazettes in the LoC

Government Gazettes Online (Michigan) offers links to currently published gazettes

FLARE Foreign Official Government Gazettes search (for European and Latin American countries plus Canada, China, Djibouti, Hong Kong, Japan) and Union List of Official Gazettes: Europe (PDF) (Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, Univ. of London).  For current gazettes.

Many gazettes are available in the Internet Archive. Search the particular title for your country.

Official Gazettes (Center for Research Libraries guide) offers links to CRL digitized gazettes and to the Foreign Official Gazette Database, an online catalog of gazettes published worldwide held by North American repositories: 

Foreign Official Gazettes (LLMC Digital) offers gazettes for about 40 countries.

Families In British India Society (FIBIS) Newspapers and journals online has links to Gazettes of India Collection on the Internet Archive,  Gazette of India online, and several other gazettes from India, Ceylon, and Hong Kong,

Government gazettes (National Library of Australia) offers Australian and a few Pacific and Indian ocean gazettes.

Guides:

A guide to official gazettes and their contents, by John E. Roberts. [Washington, D.C. : Law Library, Library of Congress, 1985, ca. 200 leaves
HOLLIS Records
HathiTrust

Roads to foreign legal gazettes (Rechtsgeschiedenis Blog)

ProQuest Black Studies

ProQuest Black Studies is a vast conglomeration of primary and secondary source material.

--Contains numerous "Primary Sources Collections" (List of those included; Select Archival Collections). Some are also in ProQuest History Vault  Black Freedom Struggle.

--Includes the searchable full text of about 300 biographical dictionaries and related works.  Limit to the biographical material at Publication/Collection title. Look up and add to search: African American Biographical Database.  There is no name-form control, so search unique last names alone (Pyrtle), and try various forms of more common names ("James Sanders" OR "Sanders James").

Indexing of these 300 works, not provided by ProQuest Black Studies, is available in print in:
Black biography, 1790-1950 : a cumulative index, ed. by Randall K. Burkett, Nancy Hall Burkett, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Alexandria : Chadwyck-Healey, 1991. 3 v.
HOLLIS Record    In bookcase beside door into the Atkins Reference Room (Widener 2nd floor)
--Index entries include name (in inverted form; useful for browsing similar names), place of birth, birth/death dates, occupation, religion, gender.

--Newspapers  (List of those included; Select Newspapers). Some are also in ProQuest Historical Newspapers

--Includes the former International Index to Black Periodicals Full Text (1900- ; full text 1998- ) which indexes over 150 scholarly and popular journals, newspapers, and newsletters from the US, Africa and the Caribbean.  Under Content Type, choose Journals and/or Magazines and Historical Periodicals.

--Includes the former Black literature Index, 1827-1940.  2997 microfiches and printed guide
HOLLIS Record
----Full text of over 86,000 literary works on microfiche, including fiction, poetry, book reviews and other literary forms by African-Americans and Whites writing in African-American periodicals and newspapers.
List of periodicals indexed with links to lists of article in each.

New Harvard Digital Collections

The Black Teacher Archive (BTA) is a freely available digital portal centralizing materials created by professional organizations of African American educators, historically referred to as Colored Teachers Associations (CTAs). The primary holdings of the portal are 20th century serial publications by CTAs.

City Maps and Urban Environments

Harvard Library Research Guides

Slavic, East European and Eurasian Collections (SLEEEC).   SLEEEC is a central hub for students, faculty and researchers to help them navigate one of the largest Slavic, East European and Eurasian collections outside the Former Soviet Union and East Central Europe.

New Afro-Latin American page on the Library Research Guide for Latin American Studies

Researching Palestine at Harvard

Library Support for Qualitative Research

Media Technology Guides

Non-Harvard Resources

Anthologies of African American Writing (GMU), Lists and indexes anthologies, often citing notices and reviews, with illustrative material.

New News Resources

U.S. Newsstream (largely 1990- ; a few back to 1953) includes newspapers, magazines, blogs, etc.

Canadian Newsstream (largely 1980- ; some earlier) includes  primarily English-language Canadian news publications.

African Newsstream (largely 1990- ; a few earlier) includes largely English-language news publications.

Asian Newsstream (largely 1990- ; some earlier) covers English-language news publications primarily from South and Southeast Asia.

European Newsstream (largely 1990- ; some earlier) offers mostly are English-language publications, although several major publications in other languages.

Middle East Newsstream (largely 1990- ; some earlier) offers primarily English-language news publications from the Middle East and North Africa.

Asahi Shimbun Cross-Search (1879- )

Internet Archive has many newspapers

In the Wayback Machine, an archive of web sites, you can often find online newspapers issues going back sometimes to 2000 or late 1990s. Example Turkish Daily News. Some pages are not fully functional.

Digitized Newspapers

You can search for an individual title.

A search on newspapers in Advanced Search Any Field yields 2,315,559 results.  These include individual issues of newspapers, collections several newspapers (Italian newspapers) or of a single newspaper) and books and other media about newspapers.  On the left-hand side under Media Type, select Collections. This yields 955 collections of single or multiple newspapers . You can do a full text search within each newspaper collection.

Also in Advanced Search, if you search Collection is: Newspapers, you get 1,915,748 items (that is, issues) in 649 Collections (=newspapers).  You can search full text over this whole collection of 649 newspapers. But this does not include all the newspapers in the Internet Archive.

To do a full text search within a newspaper that does not exist as a collection, use searches of the form: title:Maine State Labor News AND "International Brotherhood of Pulp"  Shift from Search metadata to Search text contents

British Online Archives

British Online Archives includes the following resources. Listed and described here.  These are either new or were included, often under different names, in the British Records of the Atlantic World database.

  • America in Records from Colonial Missionaries, 1635-1928
  • American Slave Trade Records and Other Papers of the Tarleton Family, 1678-1838
  • Antigua, Slavery and Emancipation in the Records of a Sugar Plantation, 1689-1907
  • 'Bray Schools' in Canada, America and the Bahamas, 1645-1900
  • Bristol Shipping Records: Imports and Exports, 1770-1917
  • The British Union of Fascists: 1933-1953
  • Colonial Missionaries' Papers from America and the West Indies, 1701-1870
  • Development of Canadian Governance and Foreign Policy, 1883-1904
  • Indigenous Cultures and Christian Conversion in Ghana and Sierra Leone, 1700-1850
  • Liverpool Shipping Records: Imports and Exports, 1820-1900 
  • Liverpool Through Time: From Slavery to the Industrial Revolution, 1766-1900
  • Scottish Trade with Africa and the West Indies in the Early 18th century, 1694-1709
  • Slave Trade Records from Liverpool, 1754-1792
  • Slave Trading Records from William Davenport & Co., 1745-1797
  • Slavery in Jamaica, Records from a Family of Slave Owners, 1686-1860
  • South American Missionaries' Records, 1844-1919
  • Walt Whitman and his Fellowship of Supporters in Bolton, 1891-1913
  • The West Indies in Records from Colonial Missionaries, 1704-1950

New E-Resources

General  --  Europe  --  Middle East  --  Latin America  --   North America  --  Russia/Central Asia

General

Rare Book Hub Click on "Institution Login" for Harvard access. Rare Book Transaction History offers records from current and historic auctions, recent and classic bookseller and collector catalogues and bibliographies,

Sources Chrétiennes Online offers critical editions of texts from the first 1,400 years of the Church, accompanied by a French translation. Full text searchable. Includes oriental languages, such as Syriac, Armenian and Georgian as well as Greek and Latin.

Voting rights & election law offers books, treatises, reports, legislative histories, congressional hearings, scholarly articles, and a bibliography. Includes material worldwide. Largely 1850s on, a few into 18th century

Europe

Art Sales Catalogues online offers citations for European auction sales catalogs published from 1600-1900 

La Guerra Civil Española = the Spanish Civil War collection offers about 3,000 pamphlets of the Spanish Civil War era, including publications from Spain, Portugal, Latin America and the Philippines, and over 100 German pamphlets published in Spanish.

Northern Ireland, a divided community, 1921-1972: Cabinet Papers of the Stormont Administration. Government documents of the British administration in Northern Ireland 

Socialism and National Unity in Yugoslavia, 1945-63: Records of the U.S. State Department Classified Files

Latin America

Cuban Culture and Cultural Relations, 1959- .

Cuban Periodicals: Cultural Magazines Published by Casa de las Américas, 1960-2009

Middle East

 Eastlaws = Shabakat qawānīn al-sharq = شبكة قوانين الشرق. Cairo, Egypt : East Laws. Language: Arabic.  Law and Law reports, digests, etc. for Arab countries

North America

Latinx thought and culture : the NPR archive, 1979-1990 offers digitized audio with transcripts for two radio programs: the weekly Spanish-language Enfoque nacional (San Diego), and its successor, the daily English-language Latin file. 

The music in The Music of Black Americans (Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library, Harvard) offers inventory of the musical examples in the first edition of The music of Black Americans, and provides full-text access to the complete scores of almost all of these examples, from sources in the collections of Harvard Library and other institutions

Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted Digital Edition

Race relations in America offers speeches, reports, surveys, photographs, posters, scrapbooks produced by Fisk University's Race Relations Department from 1943-1970. 

Russia/Central Asia

LGBTQ+ Communities of the Former Soviet Union & Eastern Europe Web Archive (Archive-It)

Introduction to Library Preservation Workshop