British Online Archives (BOA) would like to wish all of our customers a happy holiday season!
Despite another challenging year for Higher Education institutions, BOA continues to produce outstanding primary source collections at affordable prices.
2024 has certainly been a busy year for us—we have published six collections containing over 240,000 images!
At the beginning of 2024, we released an exciting collection showcasing the American Women's Club Magazine, 1925–1936. This was followed by two intriguing collections on the Second World War—Building a New Germany: Denazification and Political Re-education, 1944–1948, and Censorship: Policy and Practice During the Second World War. In March, we published our much-anticipated collection, Pandemics, Society, and Public Health, 1517–1925. Sourced from The National Archives (UK), British Library, University College London, and The London Archives, it illustrates how plague, cholera, smallpox, and influenza have left a significant mark upon British history.
During the summer, we released British Mercantile Trade Statistics, 1662–1809, a comprehensive collection that supplies detailed statistical information on British trade throughout the “long eighteenth century”. We have just published British Colonial Rule in the Cape of Good Hope and Basutoland, 1854–1910. This charts the administration of the Cape in remarkable detail.
Throughout 2024 we have continued to improve the user-experience of our website. To make them easier to discover and explore, we have grouped our collections under eleven key “Themes”. We have also worked hard to ensure that even more of our collections can be explored using the Universal Viewer and that they have likewise benefitted from Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR).
2025 promises to be just as busy for us, particularly as we look forward to the publication of our new primary source collection: Britain Under Threat: Civil Defence in the Era of Total War, 1914–1989. This will be released in the spring and we will be in touch with more information on it during the coming months. We hope that you will enjoy exploring it as much as we have enjoyed creating it!
Happy holidays!