Back in the salad days of the British Empire, there was a Queen named Victoria. She defined an age in a way that few could do today, and certainly not for sixty years. While her writings are not represented in this fine online collection, it contains writings of many who flourished during her long reign. Bartleby.com recently placed the complete "A Victorian Anthology, 1837-1895" here, and...

Where did the term "cry uncle" come from? Does the phrase "the whole shebang" come from the Irish word "shabeen" ("a disreputable drinking establishment")? What is the odd word out in this group: "bigot," "saloon," "quiche," and "tornado"? If these questions pique your interest, you'll want to check out A Way with Words, an hour long weekly podcast about all things language. Hosted by Martha...

Historical student newspapers can be read with an eye towards examining the social mores of college students through the decades, and a close reading can reveal a great deal about the campus environment and overall milieu. The first student newspaper at the State University of New York at Albany (SUNY-Albany) was the State College News, and it carried news of student life and events, along with...

The American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts celebrated their bicentennial in 2012. They chose to celebrate with a variety of events, and one of their projects involved creating this website. Visitors to the site can make their way through a wide range of images and illustrations taken from the Society's printed bicentennial history volume, which was meticulously prepared by Philip...

Rice University has a well-developed digital scholarship archive and this particular area of the site "strives to represent the full range and complexity of the Americas history by bringing together key documents." The Americas Digital Archive project is under the direction of two scholars at the university, and they have worked with colleagues to digitize over 1,000 documents. Visitors to the...

This website from the Asia Society is actually two exhibitions in one: Traces of the Calligrapher and Writing the Word of God: Calligraphy and the Qur'an. The former focuses on the men and women who have practiced calligraphy, or beautiful writing, the most esteemed of the Islamic visual arts, while the latter provides a few samples of their craft. In the opening section, "Tools and Materials",...

Based at Princeton University, the Blue Mountain Project encompasses the work of scholars, librarians, curators, and digital humanities researchers whose "mission is to create a freely available digital repository of important, rare, and fragile texts that both chronicle and embody the emergence of cultural modernity in the West." The materials here are contained within 5 sections, including The...

With this website visitors can read selected poetry from the current issue of the Beloit Poetry Journal, which has been published since 1950, but only on the Web much more recently. In addition, in 2006 the full-text archive of all 227 issues of the Journal published since the fall of 1950 was made available online. The editors of the Journal point out "rare texts such as Anne Sexton's first...

Those persons who love the work of 19th century poets will find much to capture their attention on this simple, yet thorough, website. Curated by Charlotte Payne at the University of California, Davis, this digital collection presents hundreds of works by British women writing from 1789 to 1832. The original goal of the project was to present an online scholarly archive of British and Irish women...

Written by Mikhail, "The Master and Margarita" is a Russian novel that blends magical realism with social satire in a spot-on effort that effectively skewers the bizarre bureaucracy and social order of the Soviet Union. The book features characters that include a talking black cat, a young poet, and a cast of others that poke in and out of the narrative. Upon reading this novel, some might wish...