The Exchange

"Moving Beyond 'Rags to Riches' " is a website that aims to "use digital history to uncover the lost stories of New York's Irish Famine immigrants." The project was initiated by Tyler Anbinder, who enlisted Simone Wegge and Cormac Ó Gráda for their expertise. According to the site creators, We created this site to give students, scholars, and anyone interested in history access to more than 1,000 original documents chronicling the lives of New York’s pre-Civil War immigrant community. Our work focuses in particular on the “Famine Irish” who came to New York by the tens of thousands annually in the late 1840s and early 1850s. . . . We’ve chosen about 400 of these immigrants—representing a cross-section of the Irish immigrant experience—and gathered documents (including census records, ship manifests, news accounts, and even their bank records) to allow you to understand how they survived and, in many cases, ultimately thrived in America. In addition...

The Wirtschaftsarchiv-portal  (WAP) is an online directory of business archives in German-speaking countries, thus presenting German, Austrian, and Swiss business archives together. The portal provides contact details for company and business archives and an overview of their historical sources. Although the site is in German, searches are easy with a basic vocabulary. And if one knows the name of the archives, the directory provides a quick way to find a basic description of the institution's holdings and contact information.      The WAP is supported by the Society for Business History (Gesellschaft für Unternehmensgeschichte), the Association of German Business Archivists (Vereinigung deutscher Wirtschaftsarchivare), and the Institute for Bank-Historical Research (Institut für bankhistorische Forschung).

The "Runaway Slaves in Eighteenth-Century Britain" project has created a searchable database of well over eight hundred newspaper advertisements placed by masters and owners seeking the capture and return of enslaved and bound people who had escaped. Many were of African descent, though a small number were from the Indian sub-continent and a few were Indigenous Americans. The principal sources for this project are English and Scottish newspapers published between 1700 and 1780. Although some have been digitized, the poor quality of surviving newsprint makes digital text searching unreliable, so project researchers have surveyed thousands of newspaper issues in archives all over Britain, some in their original print form as well as many more on microfilm or digital form. The database contains full transcriptions of the advertisements, and when possible photographic reproductions.      The project is a product of the Department of History at the University of Glasgow, h...

The Federico-Tena World Trade Historical Database : "The available series of world trade covered mostly the advanced world and were hopelessly outdated as they did not take into account all the research on foreign trade of the last thirty years. In contrast, our data-set uses all the most recent research we are aware of and covers almost all polities (independent countries and colonies) in the world after 1850, with few . . . exceptions. . . . For each polity we estimate series of imports and exports at current and constant prices (in 1913 dollars), both at current and 1913 borders." The data are free to use with attribution; the compilers will continue to update the series. Measuring Worth [from Samuel H. Williamson]: "There are two missions of this site. The first is to make available to the public the highest quality and most reliable historical data on important economic aggregates, with particular emphasis on nominal (current-price) measures, as well as real (...

The Urban Transition Historical GIS Project  uses historical census data to document the state of U.S. cities from the end of the nineteenth century into the early twentieth century. The site explains that "These were the decades of America’s urban transition, fed by rapid growth of industry and large-scale immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe that was directed primarily into cities. In 1880 nearly half of total employment was in agriculture, but this share dropped to about 25% by 1920, and by this time about half of the population lived in urban areas." Using the North American Population Project's  100% digital transcription of records from the 1880 Census, the "Urban Transitions" project has developed several additional resources to make possible analysis of social patterns at the level of individuals and households while also taking into account information about their communities.     Although the site is technical, both in the descriptions of d...

Montréal, l’avenir du passé (MAP) is Canada’s oldest and largest historical GIS. The project team has been working on a new phase, which will be available for use in the coming month. In anticipation of that release, one of the project's leaders, Robert C. H. Sweeney, has written an essay for NICHE (Network in Canadian History & Environment), explaining the enhancements to the site: This exceptionally rich resource consists of four distinct elements: a new cartography of all properties in the city in 1903, detailing who owned what; an index of all household heads in the 1901 census linked to this map at the lot level; a 30% sample of the complete manuscript census returns of the city’s households; and a geo-referenced vector map of all 101,353 buildings in the city in 1912. These research tools for understanding Edwardian Montréal build on MAP’s earlier layers for 1880, 1846 and 1825, which are available online .  In detailing the work of the MAP group, Sweeney also dis...

The project "Base de Datos de Empresas Extranjeras en Argentina / Foreign Companies in Argentina"has recently launched a website where the database can be freely examined.      The "Foreign Companies in Argentina Database" (FCAD–PICT 2010/0501) contains information on all foreign companies (registered as foreign or registered in Argentina) operating in the country, and takes into account country of origin, date of creation, organizational form, principal activity, type of investment (greenfield, brownfield and joint-venture), social capital, reserves and results, as well as other data such as composition of boards, for the selected years: 1913, 1923, 1930, 1937-8, 1944, 1959-60, and 1970-1.      The head researchers on this project are Andrea Lluch (CONICET/UNLPam y Facultad de Administración, UNIANDES, Colombia, and a BHC trustee) and Norma Lanciotti (CONICET-Universidad Nacional de Rosario). As they explain on the website, Foreign compani...

Those researching the economic history of early Canada may find useful the Voyageur Database , which includes data from approximately 35,900 fur trade contracts signed in front of Montreal notaries between 1714 and 1830. It is currently the single largest collection of data regarding the contracts signed by participants in the Montreal fur trade. The information collected from the contracts includes: family names, parishes of origin, hiring company, length of contract, destination(s), advances and wages, supplies, conditions of hire, the name of the notary, date of signing, and miscellaneous notes. As the website explains, "The database provides information on a group that was mostly illiterate and thus previously difficult to document and write about. The Voyageur Database documents the expansion of a continental system of trade that had a profound effect on peoples and communities, throughout the continent."      The project director is Nicole St-Onge of the Un...

In coordination with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and the Scholarly Commons site of the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, historians Andrew M. Schocket and Billy G. Smith have established the Magazine of Early American Datasets (MEAD) . MEAD is an online repository of datasets compiled by historians of early North America. The project preserves and makes available these datasets in their original format and as comma-separated-value files (.csv). Each body of data is also accompanied by a codebook. Seven datasets are currently available, including "U.S. Corporate Development, 1790-1850," from Robert Wright, and "Stockholders in the Bank of Pennsylvania, 1790," from Andrew Schocket.      Andrew M. Schocket , is professor of history and American culture studies and director of American Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University; Billy G. Smith is the Michael P. Malone Professor of History and Distinguished Professor of Letters and S...