AM Explorer: Global Humanities: What's new for 2025

The first module from India Office Records F, now added to East India Company, introduces the Board of Commissioners, who exercised supervision over the East India Company's policies, and continued to exercise responsibility for the government of India until the re-organisation in 1858. These records include proceedings of the Company in all matters of administration and approved the Company's dispatches to India. Contained within are the despatches detailing the decisions of the Board as they oversaw the expansion of the East India Company into the dominant power in India: these include military strategies, financial decisions, attempts to control pandemics and the evolving relationship of the company with native powers and peoples.

Highlights of Module 6 include:

• Letters regarding vaccination in Bengal IOR/F/4/427/10455
• Letters discussing the sample of Bourbon cotton sent to the Directors IOR/F/4/840/22475
• Material about the establishment of Hindu Colleges at Nadia in Bengal IOR/F/4/408/10172
• Communications between the Nepal government and the Court of the Chinese Emperor at Peking IOR/F/4/809/21721
• Discussion of the plants and seeds sent from the Calutta Botanic Garden to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew IOR/F/4/540/12989
• Documents relating to the introduction of new native commissioned rank of Subador Major IOR/F/4/565/13914

Women's Voices and Life Writing 1600-1968 brings together diaries and oral histories for the study of the lives and experiences of women living in Britain and Ireland, told in their own words. The resource draws on material from more than 10 archives across the UK and Ireland, with an emphasis on under-represented women, enabling students to study issues of race, gender, class, disability, sexuality, and more. The primary source material is further supplemented by contextual essays exploring the key themes as well as outlining research methodologies for accessing minority histories.

Highlights include:

• Chevalier d’Eon papers; a celebrated eighteenth-century soldier, diplomat, and spy, Chevalier d’Eon lived openly as a man and woman in France and England at different stages of their life. The collection includes correspondence, diaries and accounts documenting the daily life and social circle of d’Eon, and an annotated guard book of press clippings revealing their fame and notoriety at the time
• Diaries of Isabella Twysden, one of which includes an eye-witness account of the execution of Charles I.
• Eighteenth century commonplace books of Elizabeth Morgan, who lived in Anglesey and meticulously recorded her household and gardening activities
• Letters and telegrams written between 1934 and 1937 by Marguerite Radclyffe Hall to her lover Evguenia Souline, a Russian émigré nurse
• Letters from Elizabeth Garrett Anderson dated 1860 to 1867, describing her efforts to pursue a career as a doctor
• ‘Meditations’ of Lady Anne Halkett, detailing political events and theological disputes of the 1670s to 1690s
• More than 80 interviews with women who were associated with the London Brick Company, including a number from India and Europe, sharing their experiences of migrating and working in the UK in the mid-twentieth century
• Papers of Sophia Duleep Singh, an Indian princess and prominent suffragette whose family were exiled to England after their kingdom was annexed by the British in the 1840s

Featuring material drawn from archives in the US, UK, Europe, Canada and Australia as well as specific company archives, trade journals and union records, The Transformation of Shopping: Department Stores, Social Change and Consumerism 1830 - 1994 explores the social and cultural history of the retail industry, illustrating how department stores adapted to changing consumer needs over time. The material explores the retail industry, and daily and working life through the lens of the department store, covering 160 years of history.

Highlights include:

• Advertisement scrapbooks from the Fashion Institute of Technology and History of Advertising Trust illustrating changes to ready-to-wear fashion over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
• Photographs of fashion shows, product promotions, sales, and community events hosted at the stores
• Posters produced for Estonian store Tallinna Kaubamaja, dating from the Soviet era 
• Press packs for the opening of new store branches, including discount shops, and shopping malls
• Staff newsletters with news and gossip from regional branches of the Hudson’s Bay Company, House of Fraser, Wanamaker’s, and more
• Trade journals documenting the introduction of new technologies to the retail industry, such as computers, credit cards, escalators and air conditioning 
• Union correspondence and newsletters covering shop worker campaigns for improved wages, accommodation, and working hours in the US, UK, and Australia
• Visual ephemera of Parisian stores from the height of La Belle Époque