The British Politics and Society archive, part of the newly acquired Nineteenth Century Collections Online, consists of primary sources related to the political climate in Great Britain during the nineteenth century, including papers of British statesmen, Home Office records, ordnance surveys, and working class autobiographies. This is a rich resource for scholars exploring such topics as British domestic and foreign policy, trade unions, Chartism, utopian socialism, public protest, radical movements, the cartographic record, political reform, education, family relationships, religion, leisure and many others.
Each of the collections in the archive is browsable. Basic and advanced searching of the collections is also possible, although the results will vary from collection to collection depending on how much machine-readable content is included. The full text of handwritten documents is not searchable.
Search tip: In advanced search, you have the option to “Allow variations.” This is a good option to choose, since it will look for British and American spelling variations (harbor/harbour) and also may compensate for some Optical Character Recognition (OCR) errors that inevitably occur during the scanning process.
