LibGuides: CSPT500 / POLI 433 Politics of Colonialism: Online Archives

Online Archival Collections

UVic Libraries subscribes to a number of digitized archival collections that may have useful information for your topics. Keyword search these (people, places, and things work best) or use the indexes provided to browse by place or commodity. Searching for "Victoria" in many of these will bring back lots of items about Queen Victoria, or the Victoria cities around the world, so be sure to add something about Canada to your search!

19th Century UK Periodicals Fully-searchable facsimile resource for the study of British life in the 19th century - from art to business, and from children to politics. Few of the materials in this extensive online collection have ever been reissued, in any format since original publication. All the original colour work has been specially captured for this programme.
American West From early topographical sketches and pioneers’ accounts, to photographs of Buffalo Bill and his ‘Wild West’ stars, explore the fact and the fiction of westward expansion in America from the early eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century.
British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries 1500-1950 Collection of British and Irish women's diaries and correspondence spanning more than 300 years, illuminating the personal experiences of nearly 500 women. Includes 100,000 pages of published letters and diaries from individuals writing from 1500 to 1900. Represented are all age groups and life stages, all ethnicities, many geographical regions, the famous and the not so famous.
Confidential Print: North America, 1824-1961 This collection consists of the Confidential Print for the United States, Canada and the English-speaking Caribbean, with some coverage of Central and South America, and covers such topics as slavery, Prohibition, the First and Second World Wars, racial segregation, territorial disputes, the League of Nations, McCarthyism and the nuclear bomb. The bulk of the material covers the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century.
Early Encounters in North America Early Encounters in North America contains 1,482 authors and over 100,000 pages of letters, diaries, memoirs and accounts of early encounters. Particular care has been taken to index the material so that it can be used in new ways. For example, you can identify all encounters between the French and the Huron between 1650 and 1700. The collection is centered on present-day Canada and the United States with some limited coverage of Mexico.
Place index
Empire Online This project has been developed to encourage undergraduates, postgraduates, academics and researchers to explore colonial history, politics, culture and society. Material in the collection spans five centuries, charting the story of the rise and fall of empires; from the explorations of Columbus, Captain Cook, and others, right through to de-colonisation in the second half of the twentieth century and debates over American Imperialism.
European Views of the Americas: 1493 to 1750 This bibliographic database is a valuable index for libraries, scholars and individuals interested in European works that relate to the Americas. EBSCO Publishing, in cooperation with the John Carter Brown Library, has created this resource from European Americana: A Chronological Guide to Works Printed In Europe Relating to the Americas, 1493-1750, the authoritative bibliography that is well-known and respected by scholars worldwide.
Frontier Life: Borderlands, Settlement & Colonial Encounters This digital collection of primary source documents helps us to understand existence on the edges of the anglophone world from 1650-1920. Discover the various European and colonial frontier regions of North America, Africa and Australasia through documents that reveal the lives of settlers and indigenous peoples in these areas.
Global Commodities: Trade, Exploration and Cultural Exchange Provides a vast range of visual, manuscript and printed materials sourced from over twenty key libraries and more than a dozen companies and trade organisations around the world. These original sources will help scholars to explore the history of fifteen major commodities and to examine the ways that these have changed the world
Historical Debates of the Parliament of Canada The Historical Debates of the Parliament of Canada portal provides a centralized, streamlined means of accessing historical debates of the Senate and House of Commons, in both official languages.
Making of the Modern World This collection follows the development of the modern western world through the lens of trade and wealth — the driving force behind many of the major events during the period (1450-1850). It can be used to support research in slavery, colonization, the Atlantic world, Latin American/Caribbean studies, social history, gender and more.
North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral Histories North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries and Oral Histories includes 2,162 authors and approximately 100,000 pages of information, so providing a unique and personal view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada between 1800 and 1950.