This week on the Secret Library Leeds we bring you a snapshot of a unique treasure held as part of our Special Collections: Lucas Janszoon Waghenaer’s A description of the sea coastes of England between Burnham & Scarborough….This wonderful sea chart was shown to the public during our Local and Family History open day in…
Tag: Yorkshire
The Chimney Corner: Secret Books from the Secret Library #10
The latest in an occasionally-regular series exploring books and other items selected from our vast collections. In this entry Librarian Antony Ramm looks at a collection of materials illuminating a late 18th century election in Yorkshire… Our previous entry in this series looked at a slim 18th century volume of Yorkshire topography. In this current article we remain in the…
The Chimney Corner: Secret Books from the Secret Library #9
The latest in an occasionally-regular series exploring books and other items selected from our vast collections. In this entry Librarian Antony Ramm looks at a slim 18th-century volume of antiquarian musings… Titled ‘A Survey of Yorkshire,’ it is debatable, really, whether this is even a book at all: although bound like a book, it is quite clearly a chapter, one…
It Could Happen to You: The Mystery of the “Metcalfe Millions”
This week the staff in our Local and Family History department bring us a wonderful story sourced from a recent customer enquiry and some dogged detective work in our resources… One of the joys of working in the Local and Family History department are the occasionally offbeat enquiries we get, and the many wide and…
I Was Here: Diversity In Medieval Yorkshire
This week we welcome back Danny Friar, one of our most popular guest authors, who offers a sequel to his important previous work looking at hidden, underwritten and marginalised histories in Georgian Yorkshire… It has been around a year since I last contributed as a guest author on the Secret Library Leeds blog so I…
I Was Here: Diversity in Georgian Yorkshire
This week we hear from independent researcher Danny Friar, who offers a brilliant and sensitively-researched excavation of the Georgian era, revealing fragments of a hidden, but universal, history… Ten years ago a discussion of the Georgian period may have brought up names such as Lord Horatio Nelson, Captain James Cook, William Wilberforce and Jane Austen….
Slavery in Yorkshire
This week on the blog we hear from Library Officer Ruairí Lewis about a heated debate between two leading local men in the early 19th-century… In 1830, the ‘Tory Radical’ Richard Oastler sent an open letter to the Leeds Mercury, owned and edited by prominent Leeds liberal Edward Baines (1774-1848), entitled ‘Slavery in Yorkshire’. Oastler…
Do You Believe in Fairies?: The Story of The Cottingley Fairies Retold in a New Installation
‘And then I said, “Those fairies we see – let’s take a picture!”‘ In the summer of 1917, cousins Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright claimed to have seen fairies by Cottingley Beck. The photographs they took would later be described by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as having the potential to ‘mark an epoch in human…
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