Early English Books Online (EEBO) is a book repository of early printed works in English, and works printed in England, making digital copies of over 146,000 titles from before 1700. EEBO can be used to search books and periodicals. You can search by content text, title, author, and subject. Be advised that many of the documents are in Middle English OR Early Modern English, so you might have to augment your search to accommodate that.
From the book The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I, a source from 1581 is cited: Allen, William. An apologie and true declaration of the institution and endevours of the two English Colleges. Try to find this document in EEBO.
State Papers Online is a Gale resource that houses thousands of British State Papers. Butler Library has access to the following collections:
Sample Search: Look in the Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the reign of Henry VIII:
HathiTrust Digital Library is a large-scale collaborative repository of digital content from research libraries including content digitized via Google Books and the Internet Archive digitization initiatives, as well as content digitized locally by libraries.
Sample Search: Try finding The Paston Letters in a HathiTrust search. The Paston Letters is a collection of correspondence between members of the Paston family of Norfolk gentry and others connected with them in England between the years 1422 and 1509. The collection also includes state papers and other important documents.
HathiTrust Digital Library is a preservation repository that houses millions of volumes digitized by Google, the Internet Archive, and HathiTrust's partner institutions. It provides long-term preservation and access services for public domain and copyrighted content. The library is maintained by relying on community standards, best practices, and open infrastructure.
Most of these databases are included in ALL-Search queries. However, sometimes searching in individual databases can improve searches. Below is a list of databases that contain resources in British History
The 19th Century British Newspapers collection contains full runs of 48 newspapers selected by the British Library to represent nineteenth-century Britain. It includes national and regional newspapers, as well as those from established country or university towns and industrial Midlands, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. Newspapers related to political and social movements like Reform, Chartism, and Home Rule, as well as penny papers for working and clerical classes, are also included.
This collection includes more than 20,000 pamphlets from 19th Century Britain covering many subject areas.
As the most comprehensive resource available in its field, Humanities Source provides full text—plus abstracts and bibliographic indexing—for the most noted scholarly sources in the humanities.
JSTOR is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources.
