Google Print news
You may recall that some writers and publishers have taken issue with Google's plans to digitize copyrighted books. Time will tell whether Google can win the legal battles that are brewing over those plans. In the meantime, fortunately, Google is continuing with its plans to digitize older library books--mainly from the nineteenth century--that are in the public domain or were never subject to copyright laws. That means that while Google Print continues to be only sporadically useful to most users, it is becoming even more of a bonanza to historians, since previously rare nineteenth-century volumes are now online, accessible without any fussiness or passwords.
And, as always, you can search the full text of these books, and view full page images of the actual hard copies.
Let me give some examples of the kinds of things I've found related to my own project, just by doing a few minutes' worth of aimless searching:
* William Adam's The Law and Custom of Slavery in British India, an 1840 work by an Anglo-American abolitionist whose career took him from work as a missionary in India to membership in the Northampton Association, one of antebellum America's many utopian communities.
* A nineteenth-century biography of Gerrit Smith, New York abolitionist and member of the Secret Six who funded John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. Or a nineteenth-century biography of Richard Cobden, prominent British free trader and peace activist.
* Harriet Beecher Stowe's Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, detailing the true stories on which the novel was based.
* Particularly relevant to some work I'm doing right now, the records of the state trials of Daniel O'Connell, the Catholic Irish nationalist and prominent British abolitionist. He was arrested on trumped up charges of sedition late in 1843 and then tried before a rigged court, whose guilty verdict was eventually reversed because the jury had been stacked with Protestants.
* An 1863 edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson's English Traits.
And so on and so on. If you want to give this a spin with your own research interests, go to Google Print's advanced search page and limit your search to the nineteenth century. Enjoy! And remember, Ralph Waldo Emerson isn't around to sue anyone, so at least we know they can't take these away from us! Viva la Revolution!