A miscellany of useful and interesting historical websites.
Anterotesis – My other, more general blog. You can also follow me on twitter: @anterotesis
British History Online – Piles of documents; some of which, unfortunately, require a subscription, and most of which, infuriatingly, are very badly curated.
Connected Histories – federated search engine for selected historical records, 1500 – 1900.
Early Modern Web – Currently unavailable. However, the very useful blog aggregator Early Modern Commons is still online.
English Broadside Ballad Archive – A comprehensive, very well researched and presented collection of early modern English popular songs and poems, some of which have accompanying recordings.
English Prose Drama Database – Over 1,600 plays from 350 authors, from the Renaissance to the end of the nineteenth century.
Historical Thesaurus of English – A ‘test website’ run by Glasgow University, based on the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. Wikipedia entry
Locating London’s Past – ambitious project mapping London’s records onto Rocque’s map.
London Gazette – The official journal of record for the UK, with the entire run dating back to the 1660s digitised, if somewhat unevenly. Wikipedia entry
London Lives – 240 thousand manuscripts relating to London life.
Many Headed Monster – Excellent collective blog covering “‘the unruly sort of clowns’ and other early modern peculiarities,” and doign some hard thinking about historiography.
Old Bailey Online – “A fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London’s central criminal court.” Best digital history project today; and a frightening time sink if you’ve any interest in London’s people.
Open Library – “One web page for every book.’ Indispensable for reference hunting and gathering.
Open Street Map – “the free editable map of the whole world”, used here for its London data.
Past Tense – “a publishing project based in South London, exploring London radical history.” The core of the South London Radical History Group, with some fine histories-from-below online.
The Statutes Project – putting historic British legislation online.
Transpontine – ‘on the other (i.e. the south) side of the bridges over the Thames; pertaining to or like the lurid melodrama played in theatres there in the 19th century’. Excellent South London blog.