British History

Sources for Background Information

Biography

• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
• British Biographical Archive
• Oxford Kings and Queens of Britain

Encyclopedias, Dictionaries and Handbooks

• Oxford Companion to British History
• Oxford Companion to Scottish History
• Oxford English Dictionary
• Oxford Reference
• Oxford Handbooks
• Oxford Bibliographies

Journal articles

History Periodical Indexes, Bibliographies, Full-text Articles

• Bibliography of British and Irish History
• Historical Abstracts

Multidisciplinary Databases

• Academic Search Complete
• British Humanities Index
• Humanities Full Text
• JSTOR
• Project Muse
• ProQuest Research Library

Primary sources

Published books

• Early English Books Online (EEBO)
• Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO)
• English Short Title Catalogue (ETSC)
• Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue (NSTC)
• HathiTrust Digital Library

Government Documents

• Parliament Rolls of Medieval England (1275-1504)
• State Papers Online (1509-1714)
• House of Commons Parliamentary Papers
• Stormont Papers: 50 Years of Northern Ireland Parliamentary Debates Online

Newspapers

• 17th-18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers
• 17th and 18th Century Nichols Newspapers Collection
• 19th Century British Newspapers
• Gale NewsVault
• The Guardian (1821-) and The Observer
• Scotsman (1817-)

Periodicals

• 19th Century UK Periodicals
• British Periodicals (late 17th-early 20th century)
• The Economist Historical Archive, 1843-2003
• Eighteenth Century Journals
• Periodicals Index Online

Thematic Primary Source Collections

• British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries
• British History Online
• British Pathé (1896-1976) - news and entertainment video film archive.
• Charles Booth's London
• Defining Gender, 1450-1910
• Empire Online
• The Making of the Modern World
• Mass Observation Online
• Nineteenth Century Collections Online
• Proceedings of the Old Bailey
• Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice, 1490-2007

Statistics

• HISTPOP - all population reports, including censuses, for Great Britain and Ireland through 1937.
• Statistical Accounts of Scotland (1791-1845)
• UK Data Archive