16th Century Women and Gender Studies
The following resources are major tools for finding digitized texts related to the history of women and gender.
- Library of Congress Digital CollectionsOnline access to manuscripts, ephemera, images, maps, and more. Includes several sets of materials related to the suffrage movement.
- Age of Exploration This link opens in a new windowIncludes five centuries of journeys across the globe, scientific discoveries, the expansion of European colonialism, conflict over territories and trade routes, and decades-long search and rescue attempts in this multi-archive collection dedicated to the history of exploration. Collection also includes images, video, and audio.
- Colonial State Papers This link opens in a new windowThousands of papers concerning English activities in the American, Canadian, and West Indian colonies between the 16th and 18th centuries.
- Defining Gender, 1450-1910 This link opens in a new window
Contains primary source material from British and European archives, and includes four thematic areas: Conduct and Politeness, Domesticity and the Family, Consumption and Leisure, Education and Sensibility, and The Body.
- Early English Books Online (EEBO) This link opens in a new windowCitations from early English texts from 1475 to 1700, presented as digital images. Includes works by Malory, Bacon, More, Erasmus, Boyle, Newton, Galileo; musical exercises by Henry Purcell and novels by Aphra Behn; prayer books, pamphlets, and proclamations; almanacs, calendars, and many other primary sources.
- Early English Books Online — Text Creation Partnership This link opens in a new windowSearchable SGML/XML text editions of image files contained in Early English Books Online.
- Empire OnlinePrimary source manuscripts and secondary essays relevant to 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, 1783-1969.
- Perdita Manuscripts: Women Writers, 1500-1700 This link opens in a new window
Contains over 230 digitized manuscripts from the Perdita Project, which aims to rediscover lost manuscripts written or compiled by women in the British Isles during the 16th and 17th centuries. Includes physical descriptions along with bibliographic information and also provides contextual essays from academics in the field.
- State Papers Online This link opens in a new windowState Papers Online offers original historical government materials, including correspondence, reports, memoranda, and parliamentary drafts from ambassadors, civil servants and provincial administrators present a full picture of Tudor and Stuart Britain. Dates of coverage include 1509-1782.
- Women Writers Online This link opens in a new windowA full-text collection of early women's writing in English, published by the Women Writers Project at Northeastern University. It includes full transcriptions of texts published between 1526 and 1850, focusing on materials that are rare or inaccessible and women's literate culture in the early modern period.
- Archives of Latin American and Caribbean History, Sixteenth to Twentieth Century This link opens in a new windowOver 1.3 million pages of archival material (manuscripts, monographs, newspapers and periodicals) concerning Latin America and the Caribbean, including major collections about Latin American independence, Brazilian popular groups, Diplomatic activities in Cuba and more. Under this database's former name, Gale World Scholar: Latin America and the Caribbean included some periodicals and reference books that have been moved to Gale’s Dictionary of Literary Biography and Gale eBooks.
Manuscripts and Ephemera: Finding Aids and Indexes
Many historical materials are not available online, and housed only in archives or in harder to find publications. These discovery tools can help identify their holdings and locations.
- Online Archive of California (OAC) This link opens in a new windowCollection of online finding aids for special collections materials across California.
- UCLA Library Special CollectionsUCLA Library Special Collections is comprised of Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections; the Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library History of Science and Medicine Special Collections; the Performing Arts Special Collections; the University Archives; and the Center for Oral History Research. Collections include a wide variety of literary rare books, as well as manuscripts and archival collections relating to specific individuals and organizations.
- ArchiveGrid This link opens in a new windowSearches finding aids for historical documents, personal papers, and family histories held in libraries, museums, and archives around the world. Researchers searching ArchiveGrid can learn about the items in each of these collections, contact archives to arrange a visit to examine materials, and order copies.