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.
The Bodleian Library has unparalleled holdings of over 30,000 ballads in several major collections. The original printed materials range from the 16th- to the 20th-Century. The Broadside Ballads project makes the digitized copies of the sheets and ballads available to the research community.
The Early Americas Digital Archive (EADA) is a collection of electronic texts and links to texts originally written in or about the Americas from 1492 to approximately 1820.
Through rare primary resources and new editorial matter, this four-volume facsimile edition moves away from the personality cult of the pirate to encourage a more comprehensive view of Golden Age piracy. This new approach allows an exploration of how and why crews actually arose and how they responded to the complexities of eighteenth-century life. Highlighted are hitherto unexplored topics, such as the period's conflicting attitudes to 'entrepreneurial' pirates, once employed by wartime navies; incentives to piracy within the law; religion and piracy; the function of criminal biography; and the unfiltered voice of the underclass. The edition includes descriptions of the actions of individuals alongside contemporary discussions of the piracy problem through books, journals, newspaper articles, essays, reviews, proposals, pamphlets and sermons from Britain and its colonies. Piracy law and the prosecution of pirates are illustrated in parliamentary bills, treaties, trials, legal instructions and commentaries, proclamations and privateering commissions. Imaginative works that appeared in various forms such as verse, broadside ballads and fiction also feature.
Books, journals, newspapers, and other print materials scanned by member libraries (including many of the largest research libraries in the US). Publication dates: Ca. 1500 to present
Collection is full text searchable. Materials in the public domain are available for reading online. Copyrighted materials are not available in full text, but often indicate page numbers where words occur. Includes many US government documents. hathi trust
British Piracy in the Golden Age