A-Z Databases

Life at Sea explores the lives of seafarers in the Anglo-American maritime world during the period 1600-1900. The emphasis of the resource is largely on narrative content, giving accounts of life onboard a variety of ocean-going vessels, including merchant and naval vessels, whalers, and pirate ships. A large amount of this content is sourced from journals written by sailors at sea but also from memoirs written by sailors reflecting on their lives. Another major source of narrative content are court records, especially from depositions and witness statements, including the examinations of pirates and court martials within the Royal Navy. Material has been sourced from institutions in both England and the United States, providing collections that reflect the maritime experience on both sides of the Atlantic. The bulk of the material ranges from 1650-1850, reflecting the availability of material and roughly coinciding with the Golden Age of Sail. The end of the 1850s is also the high-water mark of American whaling prior to the discovery of oil in 1859 at Titusville, Pennsylvania.

The Oxford Research Encyclopedia (ORE) project is one of the most ambitious reference projects that Oxford University Press has embarked upon. OREs are highly discoverable, peer-reviewed, online encyclopedias with essays planned, written, and reviewed by the world’s leading scholars and scientists, providing hundreds of in-depth articles on core topics in all of the major disciplines. Every month, new topics are added and current essays are updated, ensuring that users have the most up-to-date content at their fingertips. The ORE project combines the ease of access and speed of digital publishing with the standards of academic publishing. OREs:

• Synthesize primary research in high-level interpretive overview articles;
• Provide anchoring information to be used at the start of a research project;
• Are developed collaboratively with the global community of experts in a discipline;
• Are written and vetted by scholars for scholars and students;
• Direct users to other relevant, trusted content.

Working with international communities of scholars across all fields of study, Oxford has developed new comprehensive collections of in-depth, peer-reviewed summaries on an ever-growing range of topics. While most content is restricted to subscribers, full-text articles of pre-subscription and preview OREs are freely available, as are the summaries in restricted subscriber content.

ReRight is a public charitable trust that aims to redefine women's lived experiences. ReRight Foundation’s campaign, ‘Papaya Parade,’ aims to unpack abortion stigma through art and storytelling. They have collaborated with a young artists’ collective, Artists Anonymous. This campaign highlights abortion experiences of Indian women from diverse backgrounds. Every year, 15.6 million women undergo abortions in India. Using storytelling and visual art to highlight anonymous personal stories of abortion, Papaya Parade is the unveiling of the stories behind this data.