Liberal Arts

The Nineteenth Century Index comprises tens of millions of records and provides integrated access to finding aids for books, periodicals, official publications, newspapers, archives, and reference material. Users can query its many component indexes simultaneously or can conduct more detailed research using search pages for specific indexes or content types.

Covers the events, lives, values, and themes that shaped the nineteenth century world. It provides an invaluable, fully-searchable facsimile resource for the study of British life in the nineteenth century—from art to business, and from children to politics.

American Periodicals Series Online™ (APS Online) includes digitized images of the pages of American magazines and journals published from colonial days to the dawn of the 20th century. Titles range from Benjamin Franklin's General Magazine and America's first scientific journal, Medical Repository; popular magazines such as Vanity Fair and Ladies' Home Journal; regional and niche publications; and groundbreaking journals like The Dial, Puck, and McClure's.

This database provides access to the searchable full text of hundreds of periodicals from the late seventeenth century to the early twentieth, comprising millions of high-resolution facsimile page images. Topics covered include literature, philosophy, history, science, the social sciences, music, art, drama, archaeology and architecture.

A rich digital archive of leading international journals in the Humanities and Social Sciences, spanning more than two centuries. Users can find what they need – the expected and demanded as well as the rare – from hundreds of full-text journals from 1802 to 2005.

Developed with faculty, scholars and librarians, ProQuest Women’s and Gender Studies brings together primary and secondary sources, leading historical magazines and periodicals, primary source collections, document projects and exhibits, government materials, video, and essays by top scholars in the field. This interface can be searched by topic pages, timelines, source types and more.

This database provides a robust and significant collection of primary sources for the historical study of sex, sexuality, and gender.

Let us know what you think about this resource by emailing subject-librarians@bristol.ac.uk

This collection includes the immediate experiences of approximately 500 women, as revealed in over 100,000 pages of diaries and letters which span 300 years. The collection also includes biographies and an extensive annotated bibliography of the sources in the database.

Explore gender through a vast body of British source material from the fifteenth to early twentieth century. Through correspondence, advice literature, periodicals, ephemera and government documents, traditional models of gender and contemporary perceptions of these can be explored. 

Essential primary sources documenting the changing representations and lived experiences of gender roles and relations from the nineteenth century to the present. This expansive collection offers sources for the study of women's suffrage, the feminist movement, the men’s movement, employment, education, the body, the family, and government and politics.

The backfiles of consumer magazines devoted to health and fitness topics. With publications aimed at a male readership (e.g. Flex, Men’s Health) and women’s titles (e.g. Women’s Health, Women’s Health Activist), this collection supports research in topics such as the history of sex roles, body image, fitness/exercise, public health, food/nutrition, and medicine. The backfile of Prevention (from 1950) offers over six decades of content reflecting contemporary developments in these areas.

Archival runs of 26 of the most influential, longest-running serial publications covering LGBT interests. Includes the pre-eminent US and UK titles – The Advocate and Gay Times, respectively. Chronicles more than six decades of the history and culture of the LGBT community. In addition to LGBT/gender/sexuality studies, this material also serves related disciplines such as sociology, political science, psychology, health, and the arts. Some publications may contain explicit content. Coverage: 1954 - 2015.

This is an online resource of books, periodicals, and archival materials documenting LGBT political, social and cultural movements throughout the twentieth century and into the present day. The collection illuminates the lives of lesbians, gays, transgender, and bisexual individuals and the community with content including selections from The National Archives in Kew, materials collected by activist and publisher Tracy Baim from the mid-1980s through the mid-2000s, the Magnus Hirschfeld and Harry Benjamin collections from the Kinsey Institute, periodicals such as En la Vida and BLACKlines, select rare works from notable LGBT publishers including Alyson Books and Cleis Press, as well as mainstream trade and university publishers.

A collection of men’s-interest magazine backfiles serving research in men’s studies/history but also offering important additional perspectives for women’s studies. It includes some of the earliest publications of this type – National Police Gazette and Argosy – and covers key topics such as fashion, sports, health, and arts/entertainment.

Coverage: 1845 - 2015

Sex & Sexuality provides access to a wealth of essential primary sources collated by prominent sex researchers and sexologists, community activists, official organizations, social reformers, and individuals. This resource aims to provide an insight into the wide-ranging breadth and experience of human sexuality from all angles, for example scientific, historical attitudes, sexuality, and sexual behaviours. Note: this resource contains some graphic and potentially distressing material.

Through the writings of women activists, their personal letters and diaries, and the proceedings of conferences at which pivotal decisions were made, this collection lets you see how women’s social movements shaped much of the events and attitudes that have defined modern life.

Covering a century, the database highlights and evaluates activism through individual efforts, organizational initiatives, and socio-cultural projects led by or for women in the Global South. It shows how women have negotiated power and status regarding private or public programs centred on their rights and social inclusion. Stressing the historical problem of the “feminization of poverty,” coupled with women’s invisibility within most foreign aid regimes and approaches to technical assistance, the project documents how women and their allies worked to balance economic growth and social improvement while navigating equity and the fairer allocation of resources.

This collection explores prominent themes in world history since 1820: conquest, colonization, settlement, resistance, and post-coloniality, as told through women’s voices. With a clear focus on bringing the voices of the colonized to the forefront, this highly-curated archive and database includes documents related to the Habsburg Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the British, French, Italian, Dutch, Russian, Japanese, and United States Empires, and settler societies in the United States, New Zealand and Australia.

Organized around the history of women in social movements in the U.S. between 1600 and 2000, this collection seeks to advance scholarly debates and understanding about U.S. women’s history. The collection currently includes 124 document projects and archives with more than 5,100 documents and 175,000 pages of additional full-text documents; book, film, and website reviews; notes from the archives; and teaching tools.

An archival research resource comprising the backfiles of leading women's interest consumer magazines. Coverage ranges from the late-19th century through to 2005 and these key primary sources permit the examination of the events, trends, and attitudes of this period.