LibGuides: History: Modern British and Irish History

Introduction to Modern British and Irish History

The University of Cambridge has an international reputation as a centre of excellence in modern British and Irish history, and members of the History Faculty are at the forefront of innovative research on the histories of politics, race and empire, social and economic change, feminism, sexuality, fertility and mortality, religion, heritage, national identity, education and transnational cultural exchanges.

Complimenting this, Cambridge University Libraries boasts a large and varied collection of both physical and digital resources to help you in your studies. This not only includes books but online databases, newspapers, official publications, journals, music and film repositories, and much more. Here in the Seeley, texts on Modern British and Irish History can be found across the library, though the sections 'DA - History of Great Britain' and '13 - British History & Biography' in the Main Library may be of specific interest. We also hold the library collections of the Land Economy Department, and Social and Political Sciences (SPS) which itself includes material focusing on POLIS and Sociology courses, and all together hold a range of texts on British and Irish politics, literature, society, law, economics and more.

You also have access to the University Library (UL), where the classmark range 500-698 covers Geography and History and is then organised by region, all Faculty Department Libraries (FDLs), and your own College Library, so explore these for useful books and resources as well.

As with any library, searching on iDiscover for the text, journal or database that you require is a good starting point, and if you have any questions then please reach out to a member of staff who would be happy to assist.

Seeley Library Modern British and Irish History Collection

Audio-Visual Material

Album (Tupman 2)

George Lyon Tupman, ‘Album (Tupman 2)’ (1922 1858),.

Physical Location: Tupman Archive
Classmark: Tupman 2
Author(s): Tupman, George Lyon
Date of Creation: 1858-1922
Author(s) of the Record: Rebekah Higgitt

Transit of Venus : Album

Geological diary: Brazil coast, 1809-01-01 - 1882-04-30 (DAR 32.1)

Charles Darwin, ‘Geological diary: Brazil coast, 1809-01-01 - 1882-04-30 (DAR 32.1)’.

Classmark: DAR 32.1: 49va
Title: Geological Diary Abrolhos Islands (map),
Extent: 1 sheet
Material: Paper

Darwin Manuscripts : Geological diary: Brazil coast, 1809-01-01 - 1882-04-30

A Mill (P.1358-R)

David Lucas, A Mill (June 1830).

Physical Location: Fitzwilliam Museum
Classmark: P.1358-R
Date of Creation: 1832
Note(s): Published state, impression touched with bodycolour and indian ink. Published in English Landscape, part I, June 1830
Extent: 1 print Sheet height: 218 mm, width: 290 mm. Plate height: 184 mm, width: 250 mm.
Material: Paper
Format: Print
Author(s) of the Record: TEI created from spreadsheet.

Walking with Constable : A Mill

Hufton+Crow. "Kettle's Yard House and Gallery." Kettle's Yard, July 2023, Fobert-Architects_Kettles-Yard_Cambridge_HuftonCrow_022-scaled.jpg (2256×2560)

Press Downloads | Kettle's Yard

Shells & post Beagle zoological materials: (DAR 29.3)

Charles Darwin, ‘Shells & post Beagle zoological materials (DAR 29.3)’.

Classmark: DAR 29.3: 58br
Alternative Identifier(s): 75611
Title: Drawings for "Plate 13":
Date of Creation: [nd]

Darwin Manuscripts : Shells & post Beagle zoological materials:

Box of Broadcasts (BoB)

New styles for autumn [Shelfmark: Women's Clothes and Millinery 9 (29)] - John Johnson Collection: An Archive of Printed Ephemera - ProQuest

New styles for autumn [shelfmark: Women's clothes and millinery 9 (29)] Retrieved from https://ezp.lib.cam.ac.uk/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/pamphlets-ephemeral-works/new-styles-autumn-shelfmark-womens-clothes/docview/2823516296/se-2

UK Parliament - All Bills

BBC News - Wales

History Scotland Journal

RTÉ News

Related University of Cambridge and College sites

The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure (Campop) The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure was founded in 1964. In the fifty years since then, members of the Group have made a spectacular series of discipline-transforming contributions to social science history. These include work on historical demography and household structure, on the interdependence of these elements with welfare systems, and on occupational structure.
Centre for Gender Studies The University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies is a multi-disciplinary centre for research and teaching which intersects with the work of historians at many points. Their symposia, public lectures and research seminars are an important place for showcasing research and engaging with theoretical developments in this field.
Churchill Archives Centre The Churchill Archives Centre is the most important archive in Britain for materials in 20th-century political history (and much else). In addition to the headline collections of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, it holds over 600 active collections with particular strengths in political life, government policy, military strategy, foreign policy, science and technology, journalism, media, social observation and commentary.
Girton College Archive The Girton College Archive is a major centre for the study of the British women’s movement, and the history of women’s education. Among other items, it holds the papers of Emily Davies and Barbara Bodichon, as well as the Helen Blackburn collection of nineteenth-century feminist pamphlets.

Journals

Contemporary Wales : an annual of economic & social research. Contemporary Wales is an annual English-language journal containing academic articles and reviews relating to politics, history and current affairs. It was started in 1987 and continues, although 2001 is the last issue digitised here.
Gay Scotland : the monthly newsletter of the Scottish Homosexual Rights Group. Gay Scotland was an independent, bi-monthly or monthly newsletter turned magazine; published by the Scottish Homosexual Rights Group, later known as Outright Scotland. The publication - which called Ian Dunn, John Hein, Dominic d'Angelo, and Andrew Wilson as editors - ran initially from 1981–1997, and again from 2002–2003. The publication was one of the main sources of HIV/AIDS news hubs for Scotland during the height of the crisis.
History Scotland History Scotland is an ambitious undertaking: an accessible magazine, aimed at a popular audience, that contains scholarly articles about historical topics. The issues examined include articles on a project to investigate the earliest settlement of west coast Scotland, an alternative history of Mary Stuart, and two varying visualizations of Scottish history through art. Articles are written on a slightly more academic level than the average newsstand fare but certainly not beyond the scope of an interested reader. The latest news and a lengthy calendar of Scottish historical and cultural events in Scotland are included in each issue, as are book reviews.
Northern Scotland Northern Scotland is an established scholarly journal that has been in existence since 1972. It is a fully peer-reviewed publication whose editorial board, contributors, reviewers and referees are drawn from a wide range of experts across the world. While it carries material of a mainly historical nature, from the earliest times to the modern era, it is a cross-disciplinary publication, which also addresses cultural, economic, political and geographical themes relating to the Highlands and Islands and the north-east of Scotland. It contains substantial articles and book reviews, as well as interviews and reports of research projects in progress.
International journal of Welsh writing in English. The International Journal of Welsh Writing in English is the premier journal for current research on Welsh literature in the English language, Welsh drama and performance in English, translation, cultural studies and related areas. The journal was first published in 1995 as Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays. For a history of the journal, and listings of all previous articles and reviews published in it, please see the information provided on the website of the Association for Welsh Writing in English.
Scottish archaeological journal. Scottish Archaeological Journal is the journal of the Glasgow Archaeological Society. The journal provides a thoughtful, scholarly perspective on Scottish archaeology, as well as neighbouring regions, from the earliest prehistory to the present. Articles in the journal report on fieldwork, discuss museum collections, consider the social and intellectual context of Scottish archaeology and document new discoveries.
Wales (Journal) Wales was an English-language literary journal containing fiction, poetry, reviews and articles. It also contained advertisements and editorials. The journal started as a quarterly publication (No. 1 (Summer 1937)-No. 11 (Winter 1939-1940), became a Wartime Broadsheeet (No. 1 (1941), then moved to six-monthly publication (1943-1949). In 1958 it was re-started as a monthly publication with No. 32, ending with No. 47 in January 1960. It was published between 1937 and 1960
The Welsh history review : Cylchgrawn hanes Cymru / University of Wales Press. Published by the University of Wales Press since its inception in 1960, The Welsh History Review / Cylchgrawn Hanes Cymru is the most authoritative journal in its field. This twice-yearly journal is committed to publishing research on Welsh history, from medieval to modern. The internationally-renowned editorial board includes scholars from universities in Wales, the UK, Europe and the United States, whose collective breadth of knowledge contributes to a diverse range of cultural, social, political and economic history. Cyhoeddwyd The Welsh History Review / Cylchgrawn Hanes Cymru gan Wasg Prifysgol Cymru ers sefydlu'r cyfnodolyn yn 1960. Hwn yw'r cyfnodolyn mwyaf awdurdodol yn ei faes, a'i brif hanfod yw arddangos amrywiaeth eang o feysydd ymchwil ym maes hanes Cymru, o'r canoloesol hyd at y modern. Ar y bwrdd golygyddol, ceir ysgolheigion o brifysgolion Cymru, y Deyrnas Unedig, Ewrop a'r Unol Daleithiau. Adlewyrchir arbenigeddau'r bwrdd yng nghynnwys y cyfnodolyn, sydd yn ymdrin â hanes diwylliannol, cymdeithasol, gwleidyddol ac economaidd.
Llafur : the journal of the Society for the Study of Welsh Labour History. Llafur : the journal of the Society for the Study of Welsh Labour History is a journal published in annual parts (four parts to a volume), containing scholarly articles and book reviews relating to labour history and people’s history. It also contains society notes.
Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall

Audio-Visual Material

Cecilia (IAML)
Cecilia is an on-line guide to music collections in archives, libraries and museums in the UK and Ireland
Box of Broadcasts (BoB)
A film archive of over 2.2 million broadcasts. Access available in the UK only.
John Johnson Collection
This collection provides access to thousands of items selected from the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera, offering unique insights into the changing nature of everyday life in Britain in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Categories include Nineteenth-Century Entertainment, the Booktrade, Popular Prints, Crimes, Murders and Executions, and Advertising

The Darwin Manuscripts
Split into Parts 1 (Creation of the Origin of Species) and 2 (Darwin’s Evidence) The Charles Darwin Papers in the Manuscripts Department of Cambridge University Library hold nearly the entire extant collection of Darwin’s working scientific papers. Paramount among these documents are Charles Darwin’s Evolution Manuscripts , which are being published online at the Cambridge Digital Library and simultaneously at the Darwin Manuscripts Project in collaboration with the Darwin Correspondence Project . This is a conceptually coherent set of over 30,000 digitised and edited manuscript pages, spanning 1835-1882. None of these documents have hitherto been digitised to the present high standard of full-colour and high-resolution. While several documents are classics of the Darwin manuscripts corpus, many have never been transcribed and edited before and many that have been published previously are presented here in new and radically improved editions.
Additionally, see the 'Darwin-Hooker Letters' collection which comprises of around 10% of Darwin's surviving correspondence. These 1,200 letters provide a structure within which all the other letters can be explored. They are a connecting thread that spans forty years of Darwin's mature working life from 1843 until his death in 1882.
Kettle's Yard
Kettle’s Yard is a beautiful house with a remarkable collection of modern art and a gallery that hosts modern and contemporary art exhibitions. Between 1957 and 1973 Kettle’s Yard was the home of Jim and Helen Ede. In the 1920s and 30s Jim had been a curator at the Tate Gallery in London. Thanks to his friendships with artists and other like-minded people, over the years he gathered a remarkable collection, including paintings by Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Alfred Wallis, Christopher Wood, David Jones and Joan Miró, as well as sculptures by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Constantin Brancusi, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.
Royal Greenwich Observatory (RGO) Archives
The RGO Archives, held in Cambridge University Library, consist of all the surviving historical paper records of the Royal Observatory from 1675 until circa 1980, though many later records are held and the collection accrues as material is deposited. They include the papers of the various Astronomers Royal and successive directors, records created by different departments, official sets of Royal Observatory and HMNAO publications, papers of the Board of Longitude, and visual and audio-visual collections.
Sassoon Journals
Diaries and journals can be among the most intimate and revealing of texts, offering accounts of their authors' lives with minimal literary artifice or mediation. Considered as physical objects, too, they accrue the fascination of having travelled with the writer through the events described in their pages. The notebooks kept by the soldier-poet Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) during his service in the British Army in the First World War are among the most remarkable documents of their kind, and provide an extraordinary insight into his participation in one of the defining conflicts of European history.
Walking with Constable
John Constable is one of the most celebrated and widely studied artists of the 19th century. Constable’s connection with the countryside, his intimate familiarity with rural life, is evident in his paintings, drawings, and prints, in his choice of subjects and his attentive observation of the smallest detail of the natural world. This project uses digital technologies to take prints locked in a museum back into the landscape which made them, which represents them, and of which they are part. Using an app enabling us to pinpoint and ‘see’ various Constable compositions we will curate a series of public walks in landscapes Constable sketched, documenting them to produce, as a form of public writing and as a walking diary.

Databases

Life at Sea: Seafaring in the Anglo-American Maritime World 1600-1900 This resource brings together unique primary sources drawn from world-class maritime archives and heritage collections.
Public petitions to Parliament 1833-1918 The collection includes Records of the Select Committee on Public Petitions, allowing researchers to gain insight on the formative role of petitions to Parliament during the 19th century (1833-1918), an unparalleled period of political modernization and democratization in Britain.
Brepols Online Access to selected individual titles only
British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII) British and Irish case law & legislation, European Union case law, Law Commission reports, and other law-related British and Irish material

Newspapers

Guardian (1821-2003) & Observer (1791-2003)
This historical newspaper provides genealogists, researchers and scholars with online, easily-searchable first-hand accounts and unparalleled coverage of the politics, society and events of the time.
Illustrated London News Historical Archive (1842-2003)
The full facsimile run of the world’s most iconic illustrated newspaper
Irish Times Newspaper Archive
Access to the archive is currently unavailable. The publisher is aware of the problem and is working to fix the issue.
Over 150 years of Irish times journalism, as it originally appeared in print. Searchable by keyword and date, reproductions of every page of the Irish Times from 1859 up to the last 7 days. Please note the newspaper archive is separate from irishtimes.com; our access is to the archive only.
Nineteenth Century British Newspapers
The 19th Century British Newspapers collection contains full runs of 48 newspapers specially selected by the British Library to best represent nineteenth century Britain. This new collection includes national and regional newspapers, as well as those from both established country or university towns and the new industrial powerhouses of the manufacturing Midlands, as well as Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Special attention was paid to include newspapers that helped lead particular political or social movements such as Reform, Chartism, and Home Rule. The penny papers aimed at the working and clerical classes are also present in the collection.
Radical Newspapers Archive (Irish Newspapers)
The Radical Newspaper Archive is an extraordinary collection of over 115 Irish radical and political newspapers, journals, pamphlets and bulletins. Fully searchable and consisting of more than 11,000 editions with a total page count of 102,755 these newspapers, according to Dr Ciarán Reilly of Maynooth University, ‘hold the key to understanding Ireland in the turbulent decades of the early twentieth century’. Spanning one of the most important periods in Irish history, from the Home Rule debates of the 1880s to Ireland on the eve of the Second World War, these somewhat obscure titles provide an insight into a myriad of opinions on Irish life. Covering events such as Home Rule, the redistribution of land, the 1913 Lock Out, the 1916 Rising and its aftermath, the War of Independence, the fractious Civil War, the rise of Fascism in Ireland and the Economic War of the 1930s to name but a few, The Radical Newspaper Archive sheds important new light on all of these critical moments.
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Nichols Newspaper Collection
The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Nichols Newspapers Collection features the newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets, and broadsheets that form the Nichols newspaper collection held at the Bodleian library in Oxford, UK. All 296 volumes of bound material, covering the period 1672-1737, are presented in digitized format here. The collection charts the history of the development of the press in England and provides invaluable insight into seventeenth and eighteenth century England.
The collection includes approximately 300 primary titles of newspapers and periodicals and 300 pamphlets and broadsheets.
Times Digital Archive, 1785-2019
An online, full-text facsimile of more than 200 years of The Times, detailing every complete page of every issue from 1785-2012. Allows researchers an opportunity to search and view the newspaper in its original published context. Includes weekend supplements. The archive supports research across multiple disciplines and areas of interest: in business, humanities, political science, philosophy and numerous other subjects with coverage of all major international historical events.This database contains all Monday-Saturday issues of the Times in full text and full image, including news, features, editorials and commentary, advertising, pictures and illustrations. The Sunday Times is NOT included.
UKPressOnline
Online archive of the full runs of the Daily Express and Sunday Express
Waterloo directory of Scottish newspapers and periodicals 1800-1900
The Waterloo Directory of Scottish Newspapers and Periodicals:1800-1900, is a subject-inclusive, language-inclusive bibliography of 73,000 publications, 68,000 personal names, 6,300 issuing bodies, 2,400 publishing towns, 23,000 title pages, 2,000 subjects. Also look for the The Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals:1800-1900, and the The Waterloo Directory of Irish Newspapers and Periodicals:1800-1900 through iDiscover.

Useful Links

agCensus online Offers access to a time-series database of grid square based data derived from the regular Agricultural Censuses of England, Scotland and Wales.
Bibliography of British and Irish History Successor to the Royal Historical Society Bibliography. The BBIH provides bibliographic data on historical writing dealing with the British Isles, and with the British empire and commonwealth, during all periods for which written documentation is available - from 55BC to the present. The BBIH includes all references cited from 1901 – 2002 in the Annual Bibliographies of British and Irish History and its predecessor, Writings on British History, as well as pre-1901 citations from Oxford’s Bibliography of British History series. Post- 2002 citations are added on a continuing and timely basis. The BBIH is considered one of the main bibliographical sources on the History of the British Isles and Ireland.
Dictionary of Irish Biography The online equivalent to the 9 v. print edition, this is the most authoritative and comprehensive reference work on Ireland.
Historic England Publications Here you can search the full range of publications for Historic England, including books, periodicals and guidance documents. The database covers all formats, including print and downloadable PDFs.

Faculty of History - Modern British and Irish History

Official Publications

Allied Propaganda in World War II and the British Political Warfare Executive This collection presents the complete files of the PWE kept at the U.K. National Archives as FO 898 from its instigation to closure in 1946, along with the secret minutes of the special 1944 War Cabinet Committee "Breaking the German Will to Resist." Included here is all the correspondence, minutes and agents' mission files along with a complete collection of all the airborne propaganda leaflets dropped over mainland Europe during the war by the British and American air forces. These leaflets, single sheets and miniature books are often highly illustrated, sometimes satirical and sometimes intended to boost morale with speeches or addresses from exiled leaders. They were produced in all nine languages of the recipient countries.
Down Survey of Ireland from Trinity College Dublin There are two main components to this website. The Down Survey Maps section comprises digital images of all the surviving Down Survey maps at parish, barony and county level. The written descriptions (terrier) of each barony and parish that accompanied the original maps have also been included. The second section, Historical GIS, brings together the maps and related contemporaneous sources – Books of Survey and Distribution, the 1641 Depositions, the 1659 Census – in a Geographical Information System (GIS). All these sources have been georeferenced with 19th-century Ordnance Survey maps, Google Maps and satellite imagery.
Dublin Castle Records 1798-1926 Archives Unbound
Macmillan Cabinet Papers, 1957-1963 Users of the Macmillan Cabinet Papers On-Line have access to nearly 30,000 images of original documents from the Macmillan administration (January 1957-October 1963) as well as materials from the first three months of the Douglas-Home administration (October-December 1963). Complete coverage of Cabinet Conclusions (CAB 128) and Memoranda (CAB 129) are supplemented with materials selected from the Prime Minister’s Private Office (PREM 11) and from two Cabinet Committees (CAB 134). From the opening page, a Help section provides information about effective searching, while a Contents section permits browsing of materials by document number and date, and provides links to document indexes, lists of government officials, and five “editorial essays” dealing with aspects of the Macmillan administration. (Those using this material intensively will want to look at information concerning source selection and indexing found in the "Publisher’s Note" in this area). There are also "Subject" and "People" indexes.
Northern Ireland: A Divided Community;1921-1972 Cabinet Papers of the Stormont Administration The history of Ireland in the twentieth century was dominated by the political and sectarian divide between the north and the south, leading to sustaining armed violence over several decades. These Government documents of the British administration in Northern Ireland 1921-72 (CAB/4) offer what have been described as the best continuous record of government activity and decision-making in the world, and shows "how government actually worked". The papers contained in Northern Ireland: A Divided Community, 1921-1972 are a complete digital facsimile of the Cabinet Conclusion files of the Northern Ireland Government, filed as CAB/4 at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI). These CAB/4 files contain a full record of every debate and transaction for the entire duration of the Stormont administration, the devolved government of Northern Ireland. Separate files exist for each Cabinet Meeting and include minutes and memoranda. The discussions and decisions reflect the wide range of problems and activities involved in making the new administration work. Topics debated and reported in just one sample year of the Troubles (1970) include: policing, arms and explosives, social need, prevention of incitement to religious hatred, army occupation of factories, road spiking, routing of Orange Day parades, dock strikes, law and order, riots, and the roles of the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC).
Society Digimap 2011 UK census data. Provides a wealth of census and socio-economic data for Great Britain. 
UK Parliamentary Papers With all collections enabled, HCPP now includes over 200,000 House of Commons sessional papers from 1715 to the present, with supplementary material back to 1688. HCPP delivers page images and searchable full text for each paper, along with detailed indexing.
Westlaw UK ICLR, Legislation service, Index to Legal Periodicals. Service that consolidates all primary and secondary legislation for the UK, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland

Resources for My Subject

History: Modern British and Irish History

Introduction to Modern British and Irish History

Seeley Library Modern British and Irish History Collection

Audio-Visual Material

UK Parliament - All Bills

BBC News - Wales

History Scotland Journal

RTÉ News

Related University of Cambridge and College sites

Journals

Audio-Visual Material

Databases

Newspapers

Useful Links

Official Publications