The History of Parliament Online è il sito collegato al monumentale progetto The History of Parliament, un’opera a stampa ancora in corso di lavorazione (28 i volumi finora pubblicati) che raccoglie tutta la documentazione relativa alla storia del Parlamento inglese, dal XIII secolo ai nostri giorni.
La versione online contiene più di 21.000 biografie e circa 3.000 documenti già pubblicati nella versione a stampa, oltre a materiali inediti (una raccolta di immagini + articoli introduttivi e di approfondimento che aiutano il lettore a focalizzare i concetti chiave e i principali eventi della storia parlamentare dell’Inghilterra).
The History of Parliament Online contains the 21,420 biographies and the 2,831 constituency surveys so far published by the History of Parliament. New material added for the online version includes a growing collection of images, some new introductory articles on individual parliaments, and interpretative articles on events and concepts of significance for parliamentary history.
The History of Parliament is a research project creating a comprehensive account of the parliamentary politics in England, then Britain, from their origins in the thirteenth century. Unparalleled in the comprehensiveness of its treatment, the History is generally regarded as one of the most ambitious, authoritative and well-researched projects in British history.
It consists of detailed studies of elections and electoral politics in each constituency, and of closely researched accounts of the lives of everyone who was elected to Parliament in the period, together with surveys drawing out the themes and discoveries of the research and adding information on the operation of Parliament as an institution.
Twenty-eight volumes covering eight periods have already been published. They deal with 1386-1421, 1509-1558, 1558-1603, 1660-1690, 1690-1715, 1715-1754, 1754-1790 and 1790-1820: in all about 20million words, 20,000 pages, 17,000 biographies, covering 281 years of parliamentary history.
With the exception of the 1690-1715 volumes published in 2002, the other twenty-three volumes with revisions and additional material were reissued in 1998 as a CD-ROM in collaboration with Cambridge University Press.