This is the kind of thing the web is perfect for.
What was it like to live in the first million person city in modern Western Europe? Crime, poverty, and illness; apprenticeship, work, politics and money; how people voted, lived and died; all this and more can be found in these documents.
London Lives makes available, in a fully digitised and searchable form, a wide range of primary sources about eighteenth-century London, with a particular focus on plebeian Londoners. This resource includes over 240,000 manuscript and printed pages from eight London archives and is supplemented by fifteen datasets created by other projects. It provides access to historical records containing over 3.35 million name instances. Facilities are provided to allow users to link together records relating to the same individual, and to compile biographies of the best documented individuals.
Found by Brother Uncle Don
Great Granddaddy was supposed to be the Mayor of London, or maybe the Tax Collector. I can see spending a few hours on this new resource.
Thanks.
Yes … See how your possible ancestors lived in the filth and disease that was London in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries.
Its will make for some cautionary distopian tales as we head down the toilet that is becoming our lot in the twenty-first century United States.
As our education budgets get slashed only the shrinking percentage of the population who can remember how to read will scan the tissue of lies scribbled in between the Justin Beiber concert ads and try to retrieve some semblance of dignity.
Since the scanned documents are all written in cursive script I don’t expect that there’ll be much reading going on because its too hard or its too boring or it takes too long to read about what some hookers died of.
I mean, what’s with all these funny words they used?
This is using the Internet for education, much as television was promised to be.
There is, however, much more legitimate educational material on the net than most people realize.
The people who utilize it are the same folks who go to libraries, or used to.
The ones who don’t are the ones watching American Starsearch or New Jersey or Two and a Half Men. Or worst of all, local news with the guy with nice hair and the babe with fake boobs.
I do watch some television. The “Hopping Mad Hillbilly” on Dish on Fridays. The guy is a hoot. He “won’t sell any Chi-nee junk and put money in the pockets of our enemy”.
I use “Stumble Upon” to set up my random search criteria and have found many great sites. Not unlike the one mentioned here, to return to the point of this post.
I have a college degree and I can’t read that.
#3 Colt45 MaltLiquor – I call BS on you. I’ve read a lot of your posts and it is clear that you are a FOX news droid. Your holier than thou anti tv elitism is almost progressive sounding. If I didn’t know any better, I would have taken you for one of them thar bleedin-heart pinkos.
Not sure I understand what you guys are talking about, not being able to read things. For example, if you go to this page there’s the text of what’s on the page, plus there’s the movable magnifying glass that pops up over the page so you can see it. Yeah, they use that old English f looking letter for s, but it seems pretty readable.
I believe that London is the ugly city from the world!! It is crowded,depressive because of the whether. For me it was the biggest disappointment, we expected a lot more from London…