By Jutta Seibert

Villanova University faculty, students, and staff now have electronic access to all volumes in the acclaimed Studies in Imperialism series published by Manchester University Press. For close to forty years the series has retained its relevance in academic circles by steadily expanding its cross-disciplinary scope. John M. MacKenzie, the founding editor of the series and an occasional contributor, explored the cross-fertilization or, as some would argue, the cross-contamination between the usurper and the usurped in Propaganda and Empire (1984), the first volume in the series. The series’ continued success reflects the pervasive and persistent bonds between metropolis and periphery in the post-colonial period.

As general editor, MacKenzie has promoted cross-disciplinary research in imperial studies through his research and editorial work for more than thirty years. In Propaganda and Empire MacKenzie explored the impact of imperialism on British popular culture. As the editor of the following volume, Imperialism and Popular Culture (1986), he invited other scholars to further explore the same topic. During his tenure as general editor, MacKenzie continued to push Studies in Imperialism into new directions. Examples include his foray into environmental history with The Empire of Nature, which appeared in 1988, followed by Imperialism and the Natural World (1990), a collection of essays edited by MacKenzie. His Museums and Empire (2009) introduced museum studies to the series. Later volumes on imperial museums and exhibitions include Exhibiting the Empire (2015), a collection of essays edited by MacKenzie that explored the domestically promoted imperial narrative, and Curating Empire (2012), a collection of essays edited by Sarah Longair and John McAleer.

The Library’s catalog includes records for all available print and electronic editions of individual volumes in the series. Access to the complete series is also available via the Library’s Databases A-Z list under S.

Learn more about Studies in Imperialism

• Thompson, Andrew (ed.) Writing Imperial Histories. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013.
  Volume 100 reflects and celebrates Studies in Imperialism.
• Thompson, A. S. (ed.). (2013). Complete List of the Manchester University Press Studies in Imperialism Series, 1985–2013. In Writing Imperial Histories (pp. vii–xii). Manchester University Press.
• Ward, Stuart. “The MacKenziean Moment in Retrospect (or How One Hundred Volumes Bloomed).” In Writing Imperial Histories, edited by Andrew Thompson, 29-48. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013.
• MacKenzie, John M. “Afterword.” In Writing Imperial Histories, edited by Andrew Thompson, 268-274. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013.

Related resources

• British Library Newspapers (Gale)
  Includes over 160 newspaper titles spanning the years 1732 to 1950. The archive reflects diverse and distinct regional attitudes, cultures, and vernaculars, providing an alternative viewpoint to the London-centric national press.
• Times (London) Digital Archive, 1785-2012 (Gale)
• Times of India, 1838-2010 (ProQuest)
• British Periodicals (ProQuest)
  Provides access to British periodicals published from the 17th through the early 20th century with the majority of content from the 19th century. Covers a broad range of topics.
• 19th Century UK Periodicals (UK)
  Features digital access to a selection of 19th century British magazines on women, children, leisure and sport, humor, anthropology, travel, missionaries, and colonies.
• Age of Exploration (Adam Matthew Digital)
• China: Trade, Politics and Culture, 1793-1980 (Adam Matthew Digital)
• Empire Online (Adam Matthew Digital)
• Frontier Life: Borderlands, Settlement and Colonial Encounters (Adam Matthew Digital)
• India, Raj and Empire (Adam Matthew Digital)

Jutta Seibert is Director of Research Services & Scholarly Engagement at Falvey Memorial Library.

By Jutta Seibert

Villanova faculty, staff, and students have temporary access to the complete digital archive of Izvestiia until Nov. 1. Izvestiia (Известия) is one of the longest running Russian newspapers. It was the official organ of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and was often called the Kremlin’s newspaper of record. It was first published in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) by the Petrograd Soviet in 1917. The Bolsheviks took over Izvestiia after the October Revolution and relocated it to Moscow when the Soviet government moved there. Izvestiia remained the main news outlet of the Soviet state until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, after which it became independent. The archive covers the Soviet era in its entirety as well as the collapse of the Union and the following decades until 2011.

The Izvestiia archive is available from East View, a publisher that specializes in international news sources. The search interface accepts Romanized (transliterated) Russian and Cyrillic search terms. Cyrillic search terms can be entered with an integrated Cyrillic keyboard.

Russian news sources available through Falvey Library include:

• Izvestiia Digital Archive, 1917-2011 (East View)
  Presents the complete archive of Izvestiia (Известия), one of the longest running Russian newspapers and the official organ of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. The archive covers the Soviet era in its entirety as well as the collapse of the Union and the first decades of the Russian Federation.
  Trial access until Nov. 1, 2021.
• Moscow News Digital Archive (East View)
  Features the longest running English-language newspaper published in Russia from 1930 to 2014.
• Current Digest of the Russian Press, 1949- (East View)
  Offers a selection of Russian-language news in translation.
• Imperial Russian Newspapers (East View)
  Presents open access to selected Russian newspapers published between 1782 and 1917.

Trial access is available to all Villanova University faculty, staff, and students. Links to the two archives will be available on the Databases A-Z list under “I” for the duration of the trial. Contact us if you would like to recommend this resource for the permanent collection.

Jutta Seibert is Director of Research Services & Scholarly Engagement at Falvey Memorial Library.

By Jutta Seibert

Falvey Library recently expanded its Irish newspaper holdings with assistance from the Irish Studies program and the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. The newly acquired Radical Newspapers collection from Irish Newspaper Archives includes more than 100 Irish newspapers, bulletins, and pamphlets, mostly from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The collection consists of digital copies of a broad range of nationalist, republican, and socialist publications. It offers rich contemporary commentary on Ireland’s War of Independence (1919-1921) and many other topics.

The United Irishman, Sinn Fein Daily, The Irish Worker, and The Workers’ Republic are some of the better-known newspapers in the collection. The United Irishman was an Irish nationalist weekly published from 1899 to 1906. Irish leaders such as Pádraig Pearse, Maud Gonne, and Roger Casement regularly contributed to the paper. The paper ceased publication after only seven years following a libel suit. The same year it was re-started under the new name Sinn Féin, under which it was published until 1914 when it was suppressed by the British government. The Irish Worker was founded in 1911 by James Larkin, an Irish trade union leader. It was also suppressed by the British government in 1914. The Workers’ Republic was the official organ of the Socialist Party of Ireland. Its first issue was printed in 1898 under the aegis of James Connolly, another Irish trade union leader and the founder of the Irish Socialist Republican Party. Connolly emigrated to the U.S. in 1903, where he worked for a few years as the editor of the Free Press, a newspaper out of New Castle, Pa. He returned to Ireland in 1910 as organizer of the Socialist Party of Ireland. Many of his contributions to The Workers’ Republic and other papers have been transcribed for the Marxist Internet Archive.

Many of the publications in the collection were ephemeral in nature and, in some cases, only a handful of issues have been preserved. For example, the Radical Newspaper archive only includes a single issue of The Woman Worker (An Bhean Oibre), a short-lived newspaper published by the Irish Women Workers’ Union from 1926 to 1928. Helpful publication histories for individual titles in the collection are available elsewhere on the publisher’s website.

Irish Newspapers Archive has created a short tutorial that introduces available search features. Search facets include date range, publication title, and document type. The search bar features Boolean operators to combine search terms. Search results can be refined in various ways but beware the byline facet as many articles do not carry a byline and results are unreliable. The digital archive is easy to navigate from search results to article and/or page display. Individual articles can be clipped and downloaded or saved to a personal collection. Access the Radical Newspapers archive via the Library’s Databases A-Z list under “R”.

Austin Molloy.
The Nation’s Armour.
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Related resources in the Falvey collections:

• Irish studies research guide
• The Irish Times (ProQuest Historical Newspapers)
  Presents a complete archive of the Irish Times back to 1859 (except for the most recent two years) and the Weekly Irish Times (1876-1958).
• Irish newspapers in Falvey’s Digital Library
  Available titles include The Free State, The Irish Felon, The Irish People, The Irish Tribune, The Irish Worker and People’s Advocate, The Irishman, The United Irishman, and The Waterford Chronicle.
• Irish newspapers on microfilm in the Falvey collection
  Titles available include: An-Phoblacht/The Republic, Belfast News-letter, Dublin News, Evening Freeman, Evening Telegraph, Freeman’s Journal, Irish Freedom, Irish Times, Irish Tribune, Irishman, Pilot, The Peasant, United Irishman, and The Weekly Nation.
• The Irish Press
  A weekly newspaper dedicated to Irish nationalism for an Irish American audience. It was founded by Joseph McGarrity and published in Philadelphia from 1918 to 1922.

Jutta Seibert is Director of Research Services & Scholarly Engagement at Falvey Memorial Library.

By Jutta Seibert

Bloomsbury History: Theory & Method is a brand new digital resource dedicated to historiography and the examination of historical theory and methods using a global approach. It features cutting-edge scholarship in the form of exclusive articles contributed by historians from 25 different countries. At the core of the collection are the recently published four-volume survey Historiography: Critical Readings edited by Q. Edward Wang and 100 essays that explore key concepts, thinkers, debates, and methods as well as a small selection of classical texts that shaped the discipline. Examples of topics include medievalism, social movements, agency, causality, microhistory, environmental history, and public history to name just a few. The collection also features digital access to more than 60 previously published monographs and essay collections that focus on historiography, theory and methods. Included are the following titles:

• The Concept of History (2017) by Dmitri Nikulin
• Historiography: An Introductory Guide (2012) by Eileen K. Cheng
• Theories of History: History Read across the Humanities (2018) by Michael J. Kelly and Arthur Rose (eds.)
• Global History, Globally: Research and Practice around the World (2018) by Sven Beckert and Dominic Sachsenmaier (eds.)
• Contesting History: Narratives of Public History (2014) by Jeremy Black

New content will be added continuously in the coming years. Trial access will be available until October 22, 2021. A link to the collection is available on the Library’s Databases A-Z list under B. Get in touch if you would like to recommend this resources for the Library’s permanent collection.

Jutta Seibert is Director of Research Services & Scholarly Engagement at Falvey Memorial Library.

By Jutta Seibert

Bloomsbury’s Cultural Histories are multi-volume sets that survey the social and cultural construction of specific subjects through the ages. All volumes in a set explore the same themes. For example, the Cultural History of Western Empires consists of six volumes covering antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Age of Enlightenment, the Age of Empire, and the modern age. Each volume in the set includes a chapter on race written by an expert in the field. Compare the chapter on race by Cord Whitaker from the volume covering the Middle Ages in the Cultural History of Western Empires to the chapter on race by Vanita Seth from the volume covering the Age of Enlightenment to gain a better understanding of what the series has to offer.

The digital platform currently comprises 24 subjects ranging from animals to work. Recently added subjects include comedy, education, home, memory, and peace. Color, democracy, fairy tales, genocide, medicine, and sport are among the subjects currently in production.

The collection also includes a small selection of complementary cultural and social history books from Bloomsbury Academic, Berg, and Continuum. Among them are David Sutton’s exploration of the relationship between food and memory in Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory (Berg, 2001) and Mark M. Smith’s Sensory History (Berg, 2017), to give just two examples.

Visual resources from the Wellcome Collection, the Rijksmuseum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art round out the collection, which also includes an interactive timeline and lesson plans for the undergraduate classroom. Remote access is provided through the Library’s Databases A-Z list under B.

Jutta Seibert is Director of Research Services & Scholarly Engagement at Falvey Memorial Library.

By Jutta Seibert

Scholars interested in modernism will be delighted to learn that they now have electronic access to The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism (REM) through Falvey Memorial Library. Modernism is an umbrella term for a hodgepodge of movements in literature and the arts, among them expressionism, dadaism, cubism, social realism, surrealism, futurism, and Bauhaus. Modernist thinking and ideas influenced architecture, dance, theater, film, literature, music, philosophy, and the visual arts from the late 19th century until the middle of the 20th century.

All the articles in the Encyclopedia are written by subject specialists and include recommended reading lists as well as cross-references to related content. For example, the article about Russian Modernism includes links to articles about representative Russian artists together with links to overview articles about Social Realism and Symbolism. A scholar looking up Entartete Kunst will find two overview articles on Modernism in Europe and Expressionism, five topical articles including one on Entartete Kunst, and three biographical articles on artists associated with the movement.

REM’s global interdisciplinary coverage is particularly noteworthy. Contents are indisputably skewed towards Europe, but there is a fair amount of global coverage. Articles about literature and the visual arts clearly dominate content about the other arts. REM’s landing page links out to popular and new content. Modernism in the Middle East and Arab World is currently featured as the most read article. If you would like to learn more about REM, take the online tour.

Related resources:

• Butler, Christopher. Modernism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2010.
• Levenson, Michael H., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Modernism. 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
• Marshik, Celia, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
• Wollaeger, Mark A., and Matt Eatough, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Jutta Seibert is Director of Research Services & Scholarly Engagement at Falvey Memorial Library.

By Jutta Seibert

Against considerable odds the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization has flourished since its launch in 1965. In an article published in 1982 in Jewish Historical Studies, Louis Littman, the series’ founder, recounted his goals for the series and the obstacles he faced in realizing them.

Littman, who grew up in Brighton in the thirties, blamed the relative ignorance of the Jewish intellectual tradition among British Jews on a lack of English translations of classical Hebrew scholarship. He hoped to change the status quo by commissioning translations and publishing Hebrew scholarship in English in a series dedicated to the memory of his father.

However, publishers showed little interest in his project as the series was not expected to be a commercial success and qualified translators were few and far between. It took considerable effort to get the project off the ground.

The first book in the series was a small volume of Hebrew poems from medieval Spain. On its jacket, Littman described the scope of his project:

“The aim of the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization is to present to the English-speaking public a selection of some of the finest products of the Jewish religious and literary genius. It is hoped that this Library will help to encourage a revival of interest in a religious and literary Heritage, much of which has been virtually closed to those unfamiliar with the language in which it is enshrined.”

In 2017, the Littman Library entered a publishing partnership with Liverpool University Press and launched its first e-books. The Villanova community acquired electronic access to the series through JSTOR. A subset of books from the series is also available in print.

Related resources:

• Littman Library of Jewish Civilization (JSTOR)
• Littman Library of Jewish Civilization (selected print volumes)
• Littman, L.T.S. “The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization.” Jewish Historical Studies 29 (1988): 311-325. http://www.jstor.org/stable/29779823.
• “Mr. Louis Littman.” Obituary. Times (London), December 21, 1987. The Times Digital Archive.
• Goldstein, David, ed. Hebrew Poems of Spain. Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2007.

Jutta Seibert is Director of Research Services & Scholarly Engagement at Falvey Memorial Library.

Trials of the following databases are now available at Databases A-Z

CQ Congress Collection (SAGE) – Features include:

• Floor votes and member profile tabs covering members of congress from 1969-present, including records on CQ designated key votes, interest group voting, and CQ generated voting scores.
• Data analysis section including Congressional member alignment with other members, interest group ratings with other members and groups and advanced key vote analysis to compare how members voted or to analyze voting behavior, based on member demographic information on the same vote.
• A How Congress Votes tab features a Policy Analysis section on broad topics including floor votes on legislation, legislative chronologies and links to Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports, where applicable.

CQ Supreme Court Collection (SAGE) – Features include:

• Search for case summaries by court name from Jay to Roberts, select a term from 1789-present or browse all cases by constitutional area, court, justice, term, topic, voter totals, case type and date. Alternately, browse justices by name, court, term or type of opinion.
• Use the “Analyze Data” section, 1941-present, to search for a justice’s role in an opinion, opinion alignment or voting block incidence (to search the number of times the bloc of justices selected were together in the majority and the number of times they were together in the minority, or the number of times the selected bloc of justices voted against each other).
• Other sections include justices’ biographies, CQ key cases pertaining to constitutional amendments, court rules and traditions, analysis of term overviews (such as the Coronavirus Term), a Supreme Court Encyclopedia, key documents and laws in American history and a glossary of common legal terms.

See these and other related resources in SAGE’s CQ Press Library (CQ Press).

Merrill Stein is Political Science Librarian at Falvey Memorial Library.

By Susan Turkel

Falvey Memorial Library is hosting a trial to Access World News, a full-text gateway to articles from local, regional, and international newspapers and magazines, as well as television and radio transcripts. It combines full-text articles, web-only content, and PDF image editions into a single interface, and includes both archival and current content.

Access World News offers more than 12,000 different news sources, including the Philadelphia Inquirer (full images of every page since 2018, and full text since 1981), NPR’s Morning Edition and Fresh Air, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Miami Herald, the Jerusalem Post, and the Irish Times. It excels in providing local news, and offers more than 300 Pennsylvania news sources, including the Main Line Times, State College’s Centre Daily Times, the Reading Eagle, Philadelphia Magazine, and a variety of college and university newspapers. Explore the full title list.

Browse Access World News by location

Search the full database, or browse by location, by date, or by topic. The front page allows you to view a world map and navigate to a country or state, seeing the list of news sources from that region as you focus your inquiry. If you need help thinking of a topic, use the subject browser that allows you to drill down through a series of layers to get to a useful list of articles on a timely subject.

Explore Access World News and let us know what you think! We simultaneously have trials to two competing news databases, Factiva and ProQuest’s Global Newsstream. Please take a moment to share your feedback on these resources with the library. The trials run through Sept. 30, 2021, and all of these resources will be available from the Databases A-Z list during the trial period.

Susan Turkel is a Social Sciences Librarian at Falvey Memorial Library.

By Linda Hauck

Photo by Matthew Guay on Unsplash

The Library is hosting a trial to Factiva, an international news database, by Dow Jones. A wide range of news reporting formats, including newspapers, magazines, wires, podcasts, TV news transcripts, and blogs in multiple languages, are offered. Factiva is a one-stop shop for influential national news sources, such as the Washington Post, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, and Los Angeles Times. All editions of key international publications, such as Der Spiegel, Le Monde and China Daily, are also available.  Many local papers, trade, and professional publications are included. Most of the content is archival, current and full text. A detailed title list is available. In addition, Factiva includes company and industry snapshots.

Factiva News Search Interface

Customization options abound in the form of Alerts and Newsletters. The News Pages tab conveniently groups top publications by industry and region to facilitate browsing and searching. The Search Builder tab employs boolean operators and filtering for efficiency and ease.

As the name suggests, Global Newsstream also provides coverage of local, national and foreign news publications. The search interface will be familiar to anyone who has used a Proquest database.

We simultaneously have trials to three competing news databases: Factiva, Proquest’s Global Newsstream and Newsbank’s Access World News. Put Factiva and Global Newsstream to test here. Please take a moment to share your feedback on these resources with the library. The trials run through Sept. 30, 2021.

Linda Hauck, MLS,  MBA, is Business Librarian at Falvey Memorial Library.