History and American Studies Resources at Northumbria

In the past four years Northumbria University has invested heavily in digital resources in History and American Studies subjects.  The Northumbria Library has created handy, one-stop shop webpages for resources in English and History.  (Both have numerous American Studies links as well.)

History "Core Resources" includes the following.  There are numerous other "Additional Resources" on the page as well.

19th Century British Library Newspapers

19th Century U.S. Newspapers

America's Historical Newspapers

America: history and life with full text

American Civil War: Letters and Diaries

British Newspapers 1600-1950

Cambridge Histories

Churchill Archive

Civil War: Antebellum Period to Reconstruction

Historical Abstracts (EBSCO)

Historical Newspapers: Atlanta Constitution, The (1868-1945)

Historical Newspapers: Boston Globe (1872 - 1979)

Historical Newspapers: Chicago Tribune (1849-1987)

Historical Newspapers: New York Times,The (1851-2008) with Index (1851-1993)

Historical Newspapers: Washington Post (1877-1994)

Irish Newspaper Archive

JSTOR Collections

Mass Observation Online

Nineteenth Century Collections Online

Popular Culture in Britain and America 1950-75

Ralph J. Bunche Oral Histories Collection on the Civil Rights Movement

State Papers Online 1509-1714

Taylor & Francis Library Journals Collection

The Sixties: Primary Documents and Personal Narratives 1960–1974

Times Digital Archive

U.S. Congressional Documents (HeinOnline)

Henry Knight Lozano Writes about Teaching American Studies with iPads for US Studies Online

Henry Knight Lozano, “Teaching American Studies with iPads,” US Studies Online, January 18, 2016

Technology-enhanced learning. Among the many buzzwords in higher education at the moment, ‘TEL’ is among the most pervasive. In 2015 HECFE funded an in-depth programme, “Changing the Learning Landscape,” designed to explore Technology-Enhanced Learning as a “key part of modern UK higher education,” while universities increasingly employ tools such as Textwall and Panopto to augment teaching. And yet for many lecturers, TEL arguably remains an elusive if not daunting proposition: how, exactly, can I incorporate “technology” (broadly conceived) into a particular seminar or lecture? Apart from following the vogue, why should I? Above all, in what ways is student learning actually going to be enhanced?

Recent experience from my final-year American Studies module on California has given me some food-for-thought on these questions that I wanted to share. For the first time I chose to involve iPads regularly within our weekly three-hour session. This experiment had two broad aims in mind: firstly, to get students familiar with an excellent online repository of California-related primary source materials [Calisphere] that could prove useful to their research; and, secondly, to deepen our discussion of topics like the Gold Rush, the anti-Chinese movement, and the marketing of California citrus. The iPad activity was straightforward enough. In pairs, students navigated to the Calisphere site and then searched out particular collections, selecting, analysing, and introducing one of the primary sources which I would put up on the screen. read on >>>>>

Mapping Tyneside Radicalism

Joseph Hardwick

The members of Northumbria University's Histories of Activism group are currently putting together a website that maps moments of radical activity that have occurred on Tyneside since the seventeenth century. The project was inspired by our belief that Tyneside’s rich and diverse radical history is only fitfully commemorated in the urban fabric of Newcastle and Gateshead. Mapping Tyneside Radicalism is designed to create a space where academics, researchers and local communities can work together to build a permanent memorial to the region’s tradition of radicalism and activism. This interactive website has gathered an archive of historic activism, and it allows users to map this archive on to the modern Tyneside landscape. Every event comes with a short commentary and links to further readings, and so this resource will be of considerable use to students, schoolchildren, researchers and members of the public. The website is currently being developed by the Community IT Academy and will go live in May 2015.

We are looking for members of the public to help us to develop our understanding of Tyneside radicalism. If you have an event that you think should be commemorated on this website, then please get in touch with the project coordinator, Dr Joe Hardwick, at joseph.hardwick@northumbria.ac.uk.

The Newcastle YMCA First World War Memorial at Northumbria University

James McConnel

The Newcastle YMCA war memorial.

In late 2014, the Estates Office at Northumbria University contacted me about an interesting discovery they had made in a storage area in the University’s Wynne Jones building. Following my research into the war-related features of Trinity Building (formerly Trinity Presbyterian church), they knew I was interested in information about any war memorials on campus. It turned out that staff from Estates had discovered in Wynne Jones a hitherto unknown First World War memorial. The memorial was accompanied by a brass plaque commemorating the opening of the Newcastle YMCA building on Blackett Street in 1900. This building was knocked down in the 1970s to make way for the Eldon Square shopping centre. Various architectural features of the Victorian building were salvaged when it was demolished. These included stone carvings and door surrounds, which were mounted onto one of the exterior walls on Prudhoe Chare in 1976 (the alley by the side of Marks and Spenercs). But it appears that the YMCA’s war memorial was also rescued from the old building, which was then transferred to the Association’s new premises on Ellison Place. The University acquired this building twenty years later in the 1990s and – seemingly without realising it – also inherited the YMCA’s war memorial.

The memorial is made of wood and includes the names of about 100 men who ‘Gave Their All’ in the First World War. Three Northumbria history students are now researching the names of the men as part of a work placement module all students undertake in their second year. With the help of a
Masters student who is undertaking a project on war memorials in Newcastle schools, they have been introduced to the use of digitised local newspapers, the 1911 census, CWGC records, and military archives, in order to research the lives of those named on the memorial. We have also made contact with the modern-day YMCA in Newcastle and it is interested in collaborating with Northumbria on this project, with some of the young people from the Association helping with elements of the research . Ultimately, the hope is that the biographical information collected will contribute to a permanent online resource about Newcastle YMCA’s role in the First World War.