USC students, faculty, and staff can explore digital collections of 19th century pamphlets and tracts from three libraries in Great Britain. The collections offer insight into print culture and public debates at the height of Great Britain's global influence.
JSTOR recently added the first pamphlet collections from the 19th Century British Pamphlets Project on a trial basis. These include approximately 8,200 pamphlets--representing portions of the Knowsley Pamphlet Collection (University of Liverpool), Cowen Tracts (Newcastle University), and the Hume Tracts (University College London).
The 19th Century British Pamphlets collection is accessible to the USC community through June 30, 2009 as part of JSTOR's trial program. This is what JSTOR had to say about the contents of their digital pamphlet collections, which they hope to expand after the conclusion of the trial program:
Pamphlets were an important means of public debate in the 19th century, covering the key political, social, technological, and environmental issues of their day. They are a valuable primary resource relevant to a wide range of disciplines. They have been underutilized within research and teaching because they are generally quite difficult to access – often bound together in large numbers or otherwise hard to find in the few research libraries that hold them. The digitization of more than 20,000 pamphlets will provide researchers, students, and teachers with an immensely rich and coherent corpus of primary sources with which to study the socio-political and economic landscape of 19th century Britain.
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Pamphlets by and about: Charles Babbage, W.E. Gladstone, Florence Nightingale, Charles Bradlaugh, Joseph Hume, Thomas Paine, John Bright, John Stuart Mill, Robert Peel
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Valuable content inside and appended to pamphlets: Advertisements, diagrams and maps, petitions, annotations, engravings, portraits, cartoons, letters
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7 Collections represented, including Selections from the London School of Economics and Political Science, the Earl Grey Pamphlets Collection, and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Collection