This book provides a number of effective tools to aid in the recovery of LGBTQIA historic material by providing extensive glossary and non-glossary written descriptions, and how to use those terms and phrases in searching effectively online and offline. Researching hidden and forbidden people from the past can be extremely difficult. Terminology used to write about LGBT+ people shifts over time, legal terminology enforces certain set terms which some writers use but others reject to avoid informing or disgusting a reading public. Often written descriptions contain no set terminology at all. How then can LGBT+ people be found in historic records? This book provides practical tools for a researcher wanting to uncover material from online or hard copy sources, including: keyword/s covering various sexual orientations and gender diversity, along with how and when to use them; tips for effective searching in online newspaper archives; how to use genealogy, auction and social media sites to uncover information; searching in online and physical libraries; advice on researching in physical archives and the types of collections which can yield results; and researching in museums collecting and displaying LGBT+ content. Making use of a straightforward and jargon free style, this is a short and accessible guide to doing historical research on Gay, Lesbian, Trans, Queer and non-normative research subjects. This is a useful resource for students and scholars alike in Archive Studies History, Gender and Sexuality Studies.

This book provides a number of effective tools to aid in the recovery of LGBTQIA historic material by providing extensive glossary and non-glossary written descriptions, and how to use those terms and phrases in searching effectively online and offline. Researching hidden and forbidden people from the past can be extremely difficult. Terminology used to write about LGBT+ people shifts over time, legal terminology enforces certain set terms which some writers use but others reject to avoid informing or disgusting a reading public. Often written descriptions contain no set terminology at all. How then can LGBT+ people be found in historic records? This book provides practical tools for a researcher wanting to uncover material from online or hard copy sources, including: keyword/s covering various sexual orientations and gender diversity, along with how and when to use them; tips for effective searching in online newspaper archives; how to use genealogy, auction and social media sites to uncover information; searching in online and physical libraries; advice on researching in physical archives and the types of collections which can yield results; and researching in museums collecting and displaying LGBT+ content. Making use of a straightforward and jargon free style, this is a short and accessible guide to doing historical research on Gay, Lesbian, Trans, Queer and non-normative research subjects. This is a useful resource for students and scholars alike in Archive Studies History, Gender and Sexuality Studies.

Traditionally, historic women have been seen as bound by social conventions, unable to travel unless accompanied and limited in their ability to do what they want when they want. But thousands of women broke those rules, put on banned clothing and traveled, worked and even lived whole lives as men. As access to novels and newspapers increased in the nineteenth century so did the number of women defying Biblical and social restrictions. They copied each other’s motives and excuses and moved into the world of men. Most were working-class women who either needed to or wanted to, break away from constricted lives; women who wanted to watch a hanging or visit a museum, to see family or escape domestic abuse, some wanted to earn a decent living when women’s wages could not keep a family. The reasons were myriad. Some were quickly arrested and put on display in court, hoping to deter other women from such shameful behavior, but many more got away with it. For the first time, A History of Women in Men’s Clothes looks at those thousands of individuals who broke conventions in the only way they could, by disguising themselves either for a brief moment or a whole life. Daring and bold, this is the story of the women who defied social convention to live their lives as they chose, from simply wanting more independence to move and live freely, to transgender and homosexual women cross-dressing to express themselves, this is women’s fight to wear trousers.

Expanding Austenland: The Pride and Prejudice Fanfiction Archive explores Jane Austen’s reception in popular culture through an exploration of the ever-expanding terrain of online fanfiction, professionally published (profic) texts, and other intertextual reworkings inspired by the author’s most popular novel, Pride and Prejudice. The book argues that given its pervasiveness, Pride and Prejudice could be usefully considered not as a single novel, but as an entire ‘archive’ of interrelated texts, or as a portal that opens a ‘virtual world’ for readers to expand and explore. By examining the Pride and Prejudice archive of interrelated texts, this book analyses the process through which an individual novel can develop a virtual life, or afterlife. The evolving world that is opened by Pride and Prejudice, and extended and enriched through fanfiction, is conceptualised in the monograph as ‘Austenland’.

This short collection of essays engages with queer lives and activism in 1970s Poland, illustrating discourses about queerness and a trajectory of the struggle for rights which clearly sets itself apart, and differs from a Western-based narrative of liberation. Contributors to this volume paint an uneven landscape of queer life in state-socialist Poland in the 1970s and early 1980s. They turn to oral history interviews and archival sources which include police files, personal letters, literature and criticism, writings by sexuality experts, and documentation of artistic practice. Unlike most of Europe, Poland did not penalize same-sex acts, although queer people were commonly treated with suspicion and vilified. But while many homosexual men and most lesbian women felt invisible and alone, some had the sense of belonging to a fledgling community. As they looked to the West, hoping for a sexual revolution that never quite arrived, they also preserved informal queer institutions dating back to the prewar years and used them to their advantage. Medical experts conversed with peers across the Iron Curtain but developed their own "socialist" methods and successfully prompted the state to recognize transgender rights, even as that state remained determined to watch and intimidate homosexual men. Literary critics, translators, and art historians began debating—and they debate still—how to read gestures defying gender and sexual norms: as an aspect of some global "gay" formation or as stemming from locally grounded queer traditions. Emphasizing the differences of Poland’s LGBT history from that of the "global" West while underscoring the existing lines of communication between queer subjects on either side of the Iron Curtain, this book will be of key interest to scholars and students in gender and sexuality studies, social history, and politics.

Records of the Historic Records Search Committee.