Attn: 18C scholars / interested writers

Those of you who want to search 18th century texts for free can now do so at ECCO-TCP

The University of Michigan, the University of Oxford, and Gale have cooperated in a Text Creation Partnership to create 2,231 accurately keyed and fully searchable SGML/XML text editions from among the 150,000 titles available in the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) corpus. These texts are now fully available to the public in two formats: plain text editions can be requested from 18thConnect, an online resource initiative in 18th century studies, and sgml/xml editions can be requested directly from our office. ECCO is an important research database that includes every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom during the 18th century, along with thousands of important works from the Americas.

In the news

A "Shakespeare's Sister" for contemporary politics: Poor Jane’s Almanac.

 

...Franklin, who’s on the $100 bill, was the youngest of 10 sons. Nowhere on any legal tender is his sister Jane, the youngest of seven daughters; she never traveled the way to wealth. He was born in 1706, she in 1712. Their father was a Boston candle-maker, scraping by. Massachusetts’ Poor Law required teaching boys to write; the mandate for girls ended at reading. Benny went to school for just two years; Jenny never went at all.

Their lives tell an 18th-century tale of two Americas. Against poverty and ignorance, Franklin prevailed; his sister did not.