As we mark the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare, Cambridge University Press is offering free chapters from their prestigious books and articles from Shakespeare Survey every month to celebrate the reach of Shakespeare’s global reputation. The selected publications all focus on Shakespeare’s fellow playwrights and writers. All of this content can be accessed freely on the publisher’s Shakespeare’s 400th Anniversary homepage, or click the link straight to either the free book chapters or Shakespeare Survey articles.
If you wish to read the whole books, our University’s Main Library has the printed version of most of these books. Please search in Discovered. We also have a full run of the journal Shakespeare Survey from 1948 onwards, though we haven’t subscribed to the online version yet.
The University of Manchester Library has just launched today, 1 Feb 2016, their digital project Nashriyah: digital Iranian history. It provides free access to 12,000 pages of digital versions of Iranian newspapers and periodicals capturing key historical events as they happened.
American National Biography offers portraits of more than 19,000 men and women — from all eras and walks of life — whose lives have shaped American history and culture. From astronauts to missionaries, chemists to musicians, and cowboys to Vikings, the portraits combine to reflect the rich diversity of American life, from pre-colonial times onward. More than a decade in preparation, the American National Biography is the first biographical resource of this scope to be published in more than sixty years.
Foreign Office Files for China provides access to the digitised archive of British Foreign Office files dealing with China, Hong Kong and Taiwan between 1919 and 1980. The complete files consist of six parts. We have purchased full content for the three parts covering 1949-1956. Files between 1919 and 1948 are now under trial which cover the following parts: 1919-1929: Kuomintang, CCP and the Third International; 1930-1937: The Long March, civil war in China and the Manchurian Crisis; and 1938-1948: Open Door, Japanese war and the seeds of communist victory. The formerly restricted British government documents include diplomatic dispatches, letters, newspaper cuttings, maps, reports of court cases, biographies of leading personalities, summaries of events and other diverse materials.
Spanning three centuries (c. 1750-1929), this resource makes available for the first time extremely rare pamphlets from Cornell University Library’s Charles W. Wason Collection on East Asia, one of the oldest and most distinctive collections of its kind and a very rich source for research on China for teachers and students from undergraduate-level to research-level and beyond. Digitised in its entirety and in full colour, the Wason collection of c. 1,200 pamphlets encompasses speeches, guides, reports, essays, catalogues, magazine articles and other material addressing Chinese history, culture, and everyday life. The resource is full-text searchable, allowing for the collection to be comprehensively explored and studied. The wide variety of research interests and themes covered by the pamphlets include education, emigration, the foreign presence, missionaries, wars, rebellion, reform, opium, healthcare and language. *Please note that PDF download options are not available during trials.