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Prof. Murdoch's courses: a research guide

A guide to resources for research assignments in Prof. Murdoch's courses on Victorian Britain, History of Childhood, The First World War & British Imperialism.

Government Sources

Old Bailey Online
Records of the Proceedings of the Old Bailey and the Central Criminal Court 1674-1913. A fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London's central criminal court.
United Kingdom Primary Documents
Hansard's Parliamentary Debates
Hansard is a “substantially verbatim” report of what is said in Parliament. Members’ words are recorded, and then edited to remove repetitions and obvious mistakes, albeit without taking away from the meaning of what is said. Hansard also reports decisions taken during a sitting and records how Members voted to reach those decisions in Divisions.
Parliamentary Debates [print volumes]
Tip: Scroll down in the Library Search record to see the "related titles"; this will help you find print volumes that were published under variant titles (e.g., Hansard's Parliamentary Debates).

U.K. Parliamentary Papers
Complete file of the British House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, also known as Sessional Papers or Blue Books, from the 19th and 20th centuries. Includes the Hansard reports on parliamentary debates. Date range: 1801-2005
Vassar does not subscribe to the 18th Century module of this database.
Earlier and later parliamentary papers are available from the UK Parliamentary Archives.
A guide to the Proquest database is also available.

Peter Cockton's Subject Catalogue to the House of Commons Parliamentary Papers 1801-1900.
The researcher's canon to navigating nineteenth century Parliamentary papers . The subscription database to access the papers uses Cockton's subject headings to describe the 19th century papers.

Enhanced Parliamentary Papers on Ireland, 1801-1922
Complete set of British Parliamentary papers that relate to Ireland and Irish affairs published during the period of the Act of Union (1801-1922). Includes official reports, testimony, and correspondence about Irish political, religious and economic issues, as well as Irish migration to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United States, and elsewhere. Date range: 1801-1922

Part of DIPPAM (Documenting Ireland: Parliament, People and Migration), a partnership of the Mellon Centre for Migration Studies, Queen's University, Belfast and the University of Ulster
Confidential Print: Africa, 1834-1966
British government records generated by the Foreign and Colonial Offices. Earliest documents regard coastal trading in the early nineteenth century and the Conference of Berlin of 1884 and the subsequent Scramble for Africa. Other topics include the Congo Free State, tropical disease, Italy’s defeat by the Abyssinians, World War II, apartheid in South Africa, and colonialism
Original physical collections are held by the British National Archives
Confidential Print: Latin America, 1833-1969
British government records generated by the Foreign and Colonial Offices. Areas covered in the records include Central and South America and the French- and Spanish-speaking Caribbean. Topics include slavery and the slave trade, immigration, relations with indigenous peoples, wars and territorial disputes, the fall of the Brazilian monarchy, British business and financial interests, industrial development, the building of the Panama Canal, and the rise to power of populist rulers such as Perón in Argentina and Vargas in Brazil. Date range: approximately 1820-1970
Original physical collections are held by the British National Archives
Confidential Print: Middle East, 1839-1969
British government records generated by the Foreign and Colonial Offices. Countries discussed in the records include Levant and the Arabian peninsula, Iran, Turkey, Egypt and Sudan. Beginning with the Egyptian reforms of Muhammad Ali Pasha in the 1830s, the documents trace the events of the following 150 years, including the Middle East Conference of 1921, the mandates for Palestine and Mesopotamia, the partition of Palestine, the 1956 Suez Crisis and post-Suez Western foreign policy, and the Arab-Israeli conflict
Continued by Foreign Office Files for the Middle East, 1971-1981
Original physical collections are held by the British National Archives