The world's largest documentation and research centre in the field of social history. See its Social History Portal to digitised collections of social and labour history.
Amazing archives (many relating to London) documenting the experiences of everyday people, and the individuals and organisations who have strived for social, political and cultural change
This database offers approximately 60,000 images of original documents linked to essays by leading scholars in the field of Empire Studies. The sections cover Cultural Contacts, 1492-1969; Empire Writing and the Literature of Empire; The Visible Empire; Religion and Empire; and Race, Class and Colonialism, c1783-1969. The images are sourced from about ten different libraries and archives around the world, including a strong core of document images from the British Library, including the Oriental and India Office Collections at the British Library; the University of Birmingham Library; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; and the Public Record Office and the State Records, New South Wales, Australia.
This collection provides access to thousands of items selected from the John Johnson Collection of printed ephemera, offering unique insights into the changing nature of everyday life in Britain in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Categories include Nineteenth-century entertainment, the booktrade, popular prints, crimes, murders and executions, and advertising.
London Lives makes available, in a fully digitised and searchable form, a wide range of primary sources about eighteenth-century London, with a particular focus on plebeian Londoners. The resource includes over 240,000 manuscript and printed pages from eight London archives and is supplemented by fifteen datasets created by other projects.
This resource offers revolutionary access to one of the most important archives for the study of social history in the modern era (1937-1956). Explore original manuscript and typescript papers created and collected by the Mass Observation organisation, as well as printed publications, photographs and interactive features.
Launched in 1981 by the University of Sussex as a rebirth of the original 1937 Mass Observation, its founders' aim was to document the social history of Britain by recruiting volunteers to write about their lives and opinions. Still growing, it is one of the most important sources available for qualitative social data in the UK. This collection consists of the directives (questionnaires) sent out by Mass Observation in the 1980s and 1990s and the thousands of responses to them from the hundreds of Mass Observers. The directives and responses from the 2000s will follow in 2022.
Extensive library housed at Salford, recording over 200 years of activism by working people in Britain.
See also the TUC Library, housed at London Met University, a huge resource for British labour history, includes the digitised TUC annual reports 1868-1968
