This week at The Archive we are delighted to have reached another landmark, having passed 59 million pages in total over the past seven days alone. We have added 312,002 brand new pages, with a trio of exciting specialist titles joining us, one of which covers in illustrated detail the First World War, as well as adding a range of new titles from across England and Scotland, from Carluke to Chester, from Bolton to Nottingham. We’ve also updated 82 of our existing titles…

This week has been a bumper week at The Archive as we have added 422,110 brand new pages, covering everything from spiritualism to yachting, from education to farming, spanning the world from Antigua to Australia, and back to Britain. We’re delighted to have added 10 exciting brand new titles, which cover an eclectic array of subjects, whilst we’ve also updated 54 of our existing titles from across Canada, the Caribbean, England, Wales and Scotland.So read on to discover more about each one…

This July at The Archive we are exploring all things space and the stars, and what better way to begin this exploration than with a look at six trailblazing women astronomers from history.From the first woman to discover a comet (Caroline Herschel), to the first woman to be appointed Director of the Royal Greenwich Observatory (Margaret Burbidge), we will explore the stories of six women astronomers from history, from the 1700s through to the 2000s, using newspapers taken from…

Reading like a tabloid’s dream, or the script of a film noir, the shooting death of racing car driver David Blakely at the hands of his model girlfriend Ruth Ellis revealed the seedy underbelly of 1950s society.From the smoky, dim-lit cocktail bars of West London, to extramarital affairs and illicit weapons, this is the story of a young woman and what drove her to shoot her lover in broad daylight on Easter Sunday, 1955, as told by our newspapers. The…

Women last week made history in the youngest Service, for the first delivery flights of aeroplanes from factory to storage depot, ‘somewhere in Great Britain,’ were carried out by the Women’s Transport Section of the Air Transport Auxiliary. There are nine members of this body.So reported The Sketch on 17 January 1940. Four months into the Second World War, and women were making history, and in particular, the nine women who belonged to the Air Transport Auxiliary. These women, along with…

The 1930s were a decade of aviation records. Airmen and airwomen from across the globe pushed their aircrafts to the limit, travelling thousands of miles in pursuit of world firsts and fastest travelling times. And these men and women became the superstars of their day, bona fide celebrities alongside the stars of stage and screen.Chief amongst the royalty of the air was Amy Johnson, Britain’s answer to Amelia Earhart. In this special blog, as part of aviation April on…

To celebrate International Women’s Day this year, and as part of our look at the history of football this March, in this very special blog we will be taking a look at pioneering early women footballers.Register now and explore the ArchiveFrom those who took to the pitch in the eighteenth century Bath, to those who played in the first international match in 1881, we will look at the women who disrupted the status quo in order to play a…

In November 1846, the ‘Friends of a respectable young Woman’ placed this advertisement in the ‘Wants‘ column of Saunders’s News-Letter:The Friends of a respectable young Woman wish to procure for her a Situation either as Attendant on a Lady or in a Nursery, or as a Shop Girl; she is adequate to any of the above capacities, and is willing to make herself generally useful, being of an humble, quiet and obliging disposition; she is a good needleworker, and can…

This week at The Archive has been another incredibly busy one, as we have added 116,740 brand new pages, with eight brand new titles in all joining us. And all of our eight new titles of the week hail from Wales, and include two Welsh language newspapers, a specialist political title, and a shipping gazette. Meanwhile, we have updated 26 of our existing titles.So read on to discover more about our eight brand new titles of the week, as well as…

When the miniskirt first burst onto the fashion scene in the early 1960s, its presence was divisive. Immediately, many women took to it, but others were not so sure, wondering whether it was just a passing fad.But the miniskirt was to become a symbol of the 1960s, from embodying ‘Swinging London’ to representing the greater emancipation it afforded to women – sexual, social and moral. And so, in this special blog, using newspapers taken from The Archive, we will explore…