Next Steps
For more sources, see United Kingdom > Primary Sources Online > History libguide.
Humanities Librarian
David C. Murray
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5787-2609
Contact:
TCNJ Library,
Room 216
Room 216
609-771-3217
Reference Shelf
Companion to Urban and Regional Studies by Call Number: Gitenstein Library E-BOOKISBN: 9781119316916Publication Date: 2021-05-14The 23 chapters here are concerned with urban history since the turn of the millennium.
The New Blackwell Companion to the City by Call Number: Gitenstein Library E-BOOKISBN: 9781444395112Publication Date: 2011-01-11This book consists of 65 chapters; many are historiographical. London is the subject of Chapters 4 and 38. Browse chapter titles to identify areas of possible interest. Chapter 23, for example, titled "Cities on Wheels: Cars and Public Space," addresses the benefits (e.g., personal mobility) and problems (e.g., parking, pollution, sprawl) associated with the rise of automobiles in the twentieth century. References that accompany this chapter lead to important secondary histories such as Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America (c2008). The information gleaned can also be used to generate search terms with which to query The Times [of London] Digital Archive (see below) for primary sources. Perhaps, for instance, you are curious to know how Londoners responded to the dangers posed by cars, or, as in the United States, if urban planners and local politicians sacrificed minority neighborhoods and historic architecture to build highways and surface parking lots.
The encyclopedias listed below are made available from Internet Archive, a non-profit library unaffiliated with Gitenstein Library. Consult these books by creating an Internet Archive account. "Borrow for 1 hour"—plenty of time to consult an encyclopedia. If you need more time, renew for an additional hour.
London: A Historical Companion by Call Number: Internet Archive E-BOOKISBN: 0752425773Publication Date: 2002-09-01This encyclopedia makes it easy to discover an aspect of London history that you might wish to locate a primary source about. The Introduction in particular serves as a helpful chronology of major milestones in London's long history from Roman outpost to world city. By reading it I learned, for example, that London's growing wealth in the mid-to-late nineteenth century facilitated investments in "quality of life" projects and the creation, in 1855, of a "Metropolitan Board of Works" (16). Searching that name in The Times [of London] newspaper database results in over 6,500 (primary source) articles, the earliest of which dates to 1854.
The London Encyclopedia by Call Number: Internet Archive E-BOOKISBN: 0333576888Publication Date: 1993-06-01This encyclopedia is quite dated but again still perfectly adequate to help you discover an aspect of London history that you might wish to locate a primary source about.
The Oxford Handbook of Cities in World History by Call Number: HT111 .O94 2013 (print only)ISBN: 9780199589531Publication Date: 2013-04-06This is perhaps the best recently published comparative history of world urbanization from the earliest cities in Mesopotamia through to contemporary metropolitan cities.
The Routledge History Handbook of Gender and the Urban Experience by ISBN: 9781138815940Publication Date: 2017-02-02 (print only)The purpose of this volume, according to its editor, Deborah Simonton (University of Southern Denmark), is to "interject gender into urban historiography." Its 36 chapters divided into six thematic parts derive from the Gender in the European Town conference (2013): I) Economy, Circulations and Exchanges; II) Space, Place and Environment; III) Civic Identity and Political Culture; IV) Material Culture in Gendered Urban Settings; V) Intimacy and Emotion; and VI) The Colonial Town. It covers European history from 1650-1950.
Find Primary Sources
Best bet:
- The Times [of London] Digital Archive [1785-2019] New!This Gitenstein Library database contains full-text, full-page image access to the digital facsimile of the Times of London. Users can browse, keyword search, view, and download as PDF (or PNG image) files newspaper articles, a whole newspaper page or range of pages. Boolean searches, truncation, and proximity operators are supported. Advanced search allows users to limit searches by article type (e.g., advertisements, news, people, pictures).
More to explore:
- 1000 Years of London's History in Documents, Photos, Maps and FilmsLondon Metropolitan Archives
open access - Victorian Britain (Articles)Find here 10 encyclopedia-like articles on various aspects of British society in the nineteenth century. Picard's articles incorporate primary source illustrations and text excerpts drawn from the collections of the British Library.
- The Victorian Dictionary: Exploring Victorian LondonUse this comprehensive online "dictionary" created by Lee Jackson, who recently completed a Ph.D. at Royal Holloway University, to explore Victorian London. Although called a dictionary, this is not a reference work. Rather this open access "[web]site contains several thousand pages of primary sources which reveal the social history of Victorian London, including nineteenth century journalism, diaries, social investigation, guidebooks, cartoons and much more..."
Find Articles
- Historical AbstractsUse this Gitenstein Library database to find citations to peer-reviewed journal articles on the history of London and other cities in Europe and other parts of the Eastern Hemisphere.
Find Books
Click the following Library of Congress Subject Headings to locate books and e-books held by our library.
Add the search term History in the second search box, select "Subject" from the accompanying drop-down menu, and then re-execute your search to see records for mostly history monographs (e.g., see here). To narrow even further, add a country name or region (e.g., England, "Great Britain", "United Kingdom") to the third search box, again selecting "Subject" from the accompanying drop-down. See this search, for example.
Historiography
What Is Urban History? by Call Number: Gitenstein Library E-BOOKISBN: 9781509501342Publication Date: 2016-09-12This book explores the methods and sources used by historians of urban places. See especially Chapter 1, "The Development of Urban History."
