LibGuides: E 371C: Early Celebrity, Janine Barchas: Primary Sources

Primary Sources
- About Primary & Reference Sources

Research in this Class

This guide provides links to databases, digitized collections, and other information sources useful for this course. Your librarian is Gina Bastone, and you can contact her for help using these resources, as well as one-on-one research consultations covering your specific essay topics.

Many of these databases are tricky to search effectively, so please do not hesitate to ask for help!

Primary & Reference Sources

Below are the important primary resources and reference works. The first set in the list are subscription-based and behind a paywall. You have access through the UT Libraries and will need to login with your EID and password. The others are open and freely available, and we have provided the links.

If you need more clarity on what defines primary sources and reference sources, refer to the "About Primary & Reference Sources" page.

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
Professional reference site for famous British people in history, including all our authors. If you need a biographical reference, this is far more authoritative than Wikipedia.

Updated three times per year. Biographical dictionary of people of distinction in the British Isles and its colonies who died before December 31, 2000. Provides signed articles, each with a bibliography of resource materials, written by specialists. Content includes the complete text of the new sixty-volume Oxford DNB with 50,000 biographies and 10,000 portrait illustrations as well as the complete text of the original thirty-three volume of the DNB.
We have a limited number of users for this database. Please select the logout option before you leave your session. When the limit is reached, a message to this effect will be displayed. If this happens, simply wait 15 minutes and then try the link again.
American National Biography
Similar resource as Dictionary of National Biography, but for Americans—should an interest lead you there.

Updated quarterly. Provides biographical information for over 19,000 people from all eras who have influenced and shaped American history and culture. Ranges in time from the earliest recorded European explorations to the very recent past. Includes the content from all 24 volumes of The American National Biography set as well as over 900 fully integrated articles from The Oxford Companion to United States History. The learning experience is enhanced with entries on historic events, social movements, ideologies, and iconic sites in the United States. Wide range of search options.
We have a limited number of users for this database. Please select the logout option before you leave your session. When the limit is reached, a username and password prompt will probably be displayed. If this happens, simply wait 15 minutes and then try the link again.
Oxford English Dictionary (OED)
Over time, words accumulate new meanings and alter in their use. Modern dictionaries (like Webster’s etc.) cannot give you the meaning of a word as you will find it used by Shakespeare or Austen. The dates alongside OED definitions will allow you to pinpoint the meanings for a particular date. This will help avoid anachronistic readings (where a modern application of a word or expression misses the mark aimed at in, for example, a contemporary newspaper article that mentions your early celebrity). Historically accurate interpretation therefore starts with the OED.

Updated quarterly. Covers words from across the English-speaking world and offers etymological analysis, listings of variant spellings, and phonetic pronunciation. Corresponds to the print Oxford English Dictionary published in 1989 and the three Additions volumes published 1993-1997.
17th and 18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers
This allows you to search old newspapers from the period should you need context for a topic or want to locate contemporary gossip about your celebrity person. The search engine is unforgiving, so you will have to set date parameters and try a great variety of archaic spellings and combinations.

If users encounter an error when connecting please clear your browser cache and cookies and try again OR use a private (incognito) browsing window. The newspapers and pamphlets gathered by the Reverend Charles Burney (1757-1817) represent the largest single collection of 17th and 18th century English news media available anywhere. The 1,270-title collection includes a wide range of pamphlets, proclamations, newsbooks and newspapers from the period, covering more than 200 years of accounts from newspapers from England, Ireland, Scotland and a handful of papers from British colonies in the Americas and Asia.
Literature Online (LION)
Use the "Primary Texts" tab for text-mining and searching inside a work. This database allows you to data-mine and search authoritative editions of our novels (in first editions!). In other words, these are not random copies that happen to be out-of-copyright (like Google Books). LION not only gives you a number count (for the word or phrase you’ve searched) but snippet views of the hits in context.

Try searching by author first, then enter word/phrase + title. You’ll want to limit your search to original editions, so you’ll need the year of publication. LION’s texts are typed in (using ORC software) and not photographed/scanned to make for an accurate typescript of the words inside a book but not a view of the actual first-edition pages. (For scans of the original books, see ECCO below.)

Updated regularly. Literature Online is a fully searchable library of over 350,000 full-text works of English and American literature. Includes several literary databases of poetry, plays and fiction as well as general reference works and links to other Internet sites. Coverage of literary criticism includes access to the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature, 1920-present (from the Modern Humanities Research Association) and 383 Full-Text Journals (from Literature Online/ProQuest).
ECCO: Eighteenth Century Collections Online
Searchable full-image database of thousands of eighteenth-century books published in England between 1700 and 1800. Early English Books Online, or EEBO, will give you the century earlier. You can search via keywords in the prelims for fictions, plays, history books, or travel guides. You cannot search by genre, only by keywords by title or author (novel, for example, is not going to get you many early hits, because that word was rarely used on a title page). This is a professional literature database and tricky to use. Be patient and try a variety of likely 18th-century words, variant spellings, and combinations.

Users may need to refresh cache and cookies or use a private browsing window for this resource. Updated regularly. An online collection of English and foreign language books, pamphlets, broadsides and other ephemera published in the U.K. and the Americas between 1701 and 1800. Content is presented as full text page images which can be viewed online or downloaded as PDF documents. When complete, more than 33 million pages of material will support full text searching. The collection is an ongoing project based on The English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), a machine-readable union list of the holdings of the British Library, as well as those from more than 1,500 university, private, and public libraries worldwide.

Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913
Searchable texts of 200K trials at London’s central criminal court. Crime impinges upon a number of our early celebrities.
British Museum Collections Online
Vast collection of prints, drawings, trade cards, satires, portraits, etc. Best source for material on paper (prints & engravings), although they do have other objects too. A search will pull up anything that has your key terms in the catalogue description.
National Portrait Gallery
This is the most likely go-to source for a celebrity pinup of famous British people. (For American figures, turn to the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.). Always use the “Advanced Search” function for a museum catalogue.
Victoria & Albert Museum, London
Not just traditional works of art, but objects from watches to ceramics can be found here in a few clicks, along with accurate historical information about their function or construction. If your celebrity figure inspired figurines or souvenirs, try here.
Royal Museums Greenwich
This is a maritime museum for researching people, ships, or objects associated with the navy.
Locating London's Past
Users can toggle between a central London map of 1746, a Victorian map of about 1880, and modern Google or Satellite views. These maps connect to databases about crime (including the Old Bailey), insurance, and real estate statistics. Pick your desired data and, presto, it visualizes it on the maps. Not as useful as Google Maps until you have a specific set of questions/addresses you want to ask it to map in central London.
Folger Shakespeare Library, “LUNA”
This is the image database for objects and images (including book pages and print) of certain items in the Folger Shakespeare Library’s collections. Great source on theatre history and the merchandising of actors and actresses. Try search term “realia” for non-books.
Jane Austen Fiction Manuscripts
The novels published in Austen’s lifetime do not survive in manuscript. But her juvenilia, two unfinished novels, a completed early epistolary novelette (Lady Susan) and one cancelled chapter of Persuasion do, and they are made searchable on this site. You can leaf through pages by Austen written in her own hand! This is seriously cool, if you consider how these manuscripts have not been physically together since her sister Cassandra had them on the kitchen table after Jane’s death.

Books & More

Don’t forget to supplement with books and ebooks in the UT library, and your standard web wits, including Google Maps and Google Books. Resources on the web are always expanding––if you locate something so tremendously helpful that you think it should be on this go-to resource list, please email Prof. Barchas with your finding.

UT Library Catalog
Search the UT Libraries' collections of print books and ebooks. Have questions about borrowing print books during the pandemic? See the library's borrowing guide. Not in Austin? No problem! Ebooks are linked from the catalog.

Google Book Search
Search the complete text of digitized books. Keep in mind that books under copyright will show a limited preview. Works published before 1925, or those out-of-copyright and in the public domain, will be available in completion.

Updated daily. Searches complete text of books from selected library collections and publishers. Search works just like a regular Google search -- when book content contains a match for selected search terms, Google provides links to it in the search results. Depending on a few factors, Google displays everything from a few short excerpts to the entire book.
Each book includes an "About this book" page with basic bibliographic data like title, author, publication date, length and subject. For some books, additional information like key terms and phrases, references to the book from scholarly publications or other books, chapter titles and a list of related books.

Humanities Librarian

Gina Bastone

Email Me

Contact:

Pronouns: she/her
PCL 2.312X

512-495-4414

Subjects: Comparative Literature, Creative Writing, Disability Studies, English Literature, LGBTQ Studies, Rhetoric, Women's and Gender Studies

Ask a Librarian

Chat With Us

EID login required