Databases U

Database includes 3 million pages of 19th to 21st century British popular newspapers, from 1835 to current (updated daily). Titles include: Daily Express, Sunday Express, Daily Star, Church Times, The Watchman, Daily Worker, Morning Star and collections covering World Wars I & II by means of Fascist and Communist Political Press and a number of Regional Newspapers.

Please note the Daily Mirror is no longer included in UK Press Online but you can access it via The Mirror Historical Archive instead.

The Gateway to Research portal holds information on projects funded by the different UK research councils and Innovate UK, including grants awarded, project descriptions, and partners working on the project. It includes details of active projects and the outcomes for projects that have finished. To find funded theses, use the filters to select “studentships” and the relevant funding council. The short record only shows the title and institution to which the funding was awarded, but the full record includes further details. 

Access on and off campus. The Library's subscription to this resource expires 31 July 2024.

Comics have become an increasingly popular area of academic study, and yet the typical library has only a small selection of graphic novels in the catalog. Underground and Independent Comics solves this problem, collecting thousands of comics—many extremely rare and hard to find—in one, easy-to-use online collection. Volume I covers major works from North America and Europe, beginning with the first underground comix from the 1950s and continuing through to modern sequential artists.  It incorporates 75,000 pages of material from artists such as Basil Wolverton and Harvey Kurtzman, R. Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, Harvey Pekar, Spain Rodriguez, and Vaughn Bode, and modern masters including Peter Bagge, Kim Deitch, Dave Sim, Dan Clowes, and Los Bros.  The collection contextualizes these original works with 25,000 pages of interviews, commentary, theory, and criticism from journals, books, and magazines, including The Comics Journal. Also included in this collection is The Seduction of the Innocent by Dr. Frederick Wertham—the book that led to one of the largest censorship programs in US history—and the complete transcripts of the senate subcommittee hearings that birthed the Comics Code Authority and, inadvertently, the underground comix movement.

Access on and off campus. The Library's subscription to this resource expires 31 July 2024.

The second volume expands on the debut database by offering an additional 100,000 pages of important, rare, and hard-to-find works, scholarly writings, and more. It adds extensive coverage of the pre-Comics Code era of horror, crime, romance, and war comics that fueled the backlash leading to the advent of the Comics Code. Selections include works by visionaries such as Alex Toth, Boody Rogers, Fletcher Hanks, Steve Ditko, Joe Kubert, Bill Everett, Joe Simon, and Jack Kirby, along with essential series such as Crime Does Not Pay and Mister Mystery, and many others both famous and infamous. Volume II also contains tens of thousands of pages of non-mainstream, post-code comics and secondary materials from around the world, including the US, Canada, France, Italy, Spain, England, Sweden, Norway, Australia, Korea, Japan, and more. Notable titles include Essex County by Jeff Lemire, From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, 120 Days of Simon by Simon Gardenfors, Gen Manhwa by various artists, Werewolves of Montpellier by Jason, and God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post-World War II Manga. Ancillary materials within Volume II render the collection ideal for students and researchers seeking a holistic perspective on the historical role of underground comics. Dozens of associated scholarly writings and commentaries add perspective and enrich understanding of the works and their cultural significance.

Images which can be freely used for commercial and non-commercial purposes. 

It is good practice to seek permission and credit the creator.

Access on and off campus. For off campus access please use the University VPN - Access to the University network via the VPN.

To register for the mobile app, click Login/Register link and register as a new user using your @ed.ac.uk email address.  Once registered, you can install the UpToDate Mobile App on up to two devices.

This collection focuses on two series of international negotiations that dominated U.S. climate policy during this period: the 1987 Montreal Protocol and the 2015 Paris Agreement. It is unrivalled in its scope and primary-source content, with newly declassified documents showing how each administration framed its goals for the negotiations and how they navigated the complex interplay of diplomacy and domestic policy. Included materials address negotiations in detail, assessments of other governments' positions, briefing materials, and more.

Access on and off campus.

Diplomatic post records — those kept at the embassies or legations rather than in Washington — contain the messages from Washington, retained copies of outgoing dispatches, locally gathered information and background material on decision making. Represented in this module are Japan, Cuba, El Salvador, Honduras and nine more nations.

Complementing earlier National Security Archive collections about the structure and operations of U.S. spy agencies, this set consists of 1,180 documents, totaling 36,023 pages. The great bulk of the collection consists of documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Specific types of documents include organization and functions manuals; unit, agency, and departmental regulations; command histories; interagency directives; evaluations of intelligence community performance; and assorted memoranda.

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This collection features every declassified daily or weekly memo to President Carter from National Security Advisor Brzezinski and from Secretaries of State Vance and Muskie; as well as every available meeting record of the National Security Council's two subgroups – the Policy Review Committee and the Special Coordination Committee. Topics include the conflict in the Middle East, Iran hostage crisis, Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, SALT talks, diplomatic relations with China, Nicaraguan revolution, and U.S. concern for global human rights.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, on New York and Washington led to profound changes in U.S. foreign and defense policy, internal security practices, and indeed the entire national security structure, including dramatic changes in the organization and operations of the U.S. Intelligence Community.  The U.S. Intelligence Community after 9/11 reflects the National Security Archive's long-standing success – through research and the Freedom of Information Act – in documenting the organizational and operational changes that have occurred since the attacks.

Recognizing the central role of intelligence in U.S. foreign policy, this collection provides a detailed description of the varied civilian and military organizations that constitute the U.S. intelligence community, their past and present operations, and the mechanisms by which the community's activities are managed . Documents include previously inaccessible documents such as functional manuals, unit histories, and internal directives – that portray the bureaucratic reality underlying some of the most highly secret activities of the U.S. government.

This, the second collection on China, includes more than 2,300 documents providing new insights into various aspects of U.S. intelligence operations against Beijing. The finished intelligence resulting from these activities addressed a diversity of topics, from military capabilities to domestic policies, which was critical in helping to shape U.S. policy toward the emerging world power. This collection provides insights into all these operations, revealing U.S. concerns about its rival, China, and its ally, Taiwan. The set was assembled from materials originating from a variety of intelligence organizations.

This collection includes primary sources used by Jeffrey Richelson, one of the world's leading experts on intelligence, as the basis for the widely acclaimed book, Spying on the Bomb: American Nuclear Intelligence from Nazi Germany to Iran and North Korea (W.W. Norton, 2006). In addition to those once largely inaccessible materials, the set includes many of the U.S. Intelligence Community's products on the world's nuclear, biological, chemical, ballistic missile, and military space programs from World War II to the present. Consisting of over 600 documents and 8,300 pages, the set is the product of an extensive series of Freedom of Information Act requests and in-depth archival research.

Over the years, military attachés reported on internal politics, social and economic conditions, and foreign affairs of the countries in which they were stationed. This module contains Intelligence reports for seven foreign nations, plus Biweekly Intelligence Summaries and Combat Estimates.

A critical yet often overlooked arena of national security concern is outer space.  This collection of previously classified histories, program management directives, requirements studies, and other documents shows the evolution of a variety of U.S. military space programs – historically among the most highly classified documents of the U.S. government. Topics range from a 1951 report on using satellites for reconnaissance to a 1990 briefing paper on air support to Operation Desert Shield.  The U.S. Military Uses of Space collection provides an unusually extensive documentary record of this highly sensitive subject.

This collection documents the deadliest conflict in modern U.S. history prior to the current war against terrorism. The goal was to assemble both classic and relatively well-known documentary sources as well as the most recent declassified materials, making a single comprehensive resource for primary substantive research on the Vietnam conflict. The principal focus of this collection is on the period of the Vietnam War between 1961 and 1968.

This is the most important compilation of documents available on the final phase of the Vietnam War. Incorporating newly released documents, virtually all previously classified, it covers all the major issues from the period, including diplomatic, military, and intelligence aspects of the Vietnam war during the period of the Nixon and Ford administrations.

Since the overthrow of the U.S.-backed Shah in 1979 and the subsequent hostage crisis, Iran has widely been considered a pariah state and a continuous challenge - not to say threat - to the United States. Yet, every American president has at some point sought to establish ties with the Islamic Republic. This collection traces the arc of this unusual relationship from among its darkest points - the 1979 embassy seizure, the 1983 Beirut bombings, the 1980s U.S. tilt toward Iraq, the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing, 9/11 and its aftermath, President Bush's 2002 Axis of Evil Speech, the resurgence of hard-line policies under President Ahmadinejad, and the fears over Iran's nuclear program - to the improbable signing of the controversial nuclear accord in 2015. The continuing relevance of U.S.-Iran relations and the issues documented here will make this collection a vital resource for scholars and students for the foreseeable future.