Enfilade

As noted by Anna Battigelli at Early Modern Online Bibliography, Gale’s Burney Collection is available free of charge until October 30 for EMOB readers. To access the collection, visit the blog here. For a description of this extraordinary resource (drawn from the Gale website), see below:

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.

The original Burney volumes are now in fragile condition and have been restricted from ordinary reading room use. Until now, the only access to this unprecedented collection has been through microfilm. This digital collection, made possible by a partnership with the British Library, puts these early newspapers into the hands of scholars and researchers and is an invaluable research tool for all disciplines.

Specifically, historians interested in this period of U.K. history will find the cultural trends, political currents and social problems reflected in these newspapers — and their advertisements — especially useful as they give freshness and immediacy to historical events.