Old Bailey Online
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oldbaileyonline.bsky.social
Old Bailey Online
@oldbaileyonline.bsky.social
Historical crime online.
https://www.oldbaileyonline.org
Pinned
It's here!
Really pleased to announce the launch of the all-new, all-dancing, London Lives website - www.londonlives.org It has been thoroughly re-engineered to facilitate more types of search, and redesigned for phones and tablets. The team very much hopes peope like it. 1/
London Lives
www.londonlives.org
It's here!
Really pleased to announce the launch of the all-new, all-dancing, London Lives website - www.londonlives.org It has been thoroughly re-engineered to facilitate more types of search, and redesigned for phones and tablets. The team very much hopes peope like it. 1/
London Lives
www.londonlives.org
November 5, 2025 at 12:09 PM
If you're seeing these right now... sorry. Developer is looking into it.
Nobody likes it when the server flakes out, but at least we give you cute bugs to look at till it comes back.
October 16, 2025 at 11:37 AM
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Remarkable photo taken inside the Old Bailey in 1907 - Mr Justice Ridley wearing the black cap as he sentences to death J.E. Wyatt for murder of Florence Wakeling. (Penny Illustrated Newspaper, 9 March 1907, via British Newspaper Archive)
July 7, 2025 at 9:12 AM
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I've also been busy exploring the @oldbaileyonline.bsky.social API, which changed a LOT when the site was relaunched 18 months ago and I've been meaning to write up some guidance for that. So here is a new little website.

sharonhoward.github.io/obo/
Old Bailey Online for Data Analysis – OldBaileyOnline ~ Data
sharonhoward.github.io
May 19, 2025 at 8:04 AM
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Good news for @oldbaileyonline.bsky.social fans who are Zotero users... the OBO Zotero translator is working again. Except the multi functionality for search results (a bit much for my JS skills; maybe later), but I added bookmarking a session, and tidied it all up a bit.
May 18, 2025 at 7:50 AM
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Didn't realize that the John Johnson Crime ephemera collection is free to access in the UK:

johnjohnson.chadwyck.co.uk/geoLocSubscr...

hat tip to @oldbaileyonline.bsky.social where I discovered this.

#History #DigitalHistory 🗃️
Log In - ProQuest
Explore millions of resources from scholarly journals, books, newspapers, videos and more, on the ProQuest Platform.
johnjohnson.chadwyck.co.uk
May 15, 2025 at 10:47 AM
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OTD in 1848, some 150,000 Chartists met on Kennington Common to present their third petition to Parliament.

Mark Crail on how tracing Chartists, a working-class movement for political and economic reform, became a point of connection between family and academic historians:
http://www.historywo...
Family History in the Digital Age
In the second article of our feature on the radical potential of family history, family historian Mark Crail reflects on the power of collaboration in the history of working-class movements.
www.historyworkshop.org.uk
April 10, 2025 at 1:20 PM
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Last is the online adaptation of my beloved "Crime and Punishment in England, 1500-1900," which draws on the glories of the Old Bailey Online for the second half of study and projects. www.oldbaileyonline.org
The Proceedings of the Old Bailey
A searchable online edition of the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913.
www.oldbaileyonline.org
January 2, 2025 at 12:50 AM
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Please excuse the self-promotion, but www.Oldbaileyonline.org was recently awarded the Mary L.Dudziak Digital History Prize by ASLH, and Bob Shoemaker and I just received the certificate. We were really honoured, but having no wall space to speak of, I thought it could usefully go here.
December 10, 2024 at 10:59 AM
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On Saturday 7 December, I will be running a short afternoon session on the history of the Old Bailey for the WEA Petts Wood and Orpington Branch. If anyone down that way wishes to come along, you are very welcome.
Details are below www.wea.org.uk/courses/huma...
History: History of the Old Bailey | WEA
History: History of the Old Bailey
www.wea.org.uk
November 29, 2024 at 12:28 PM
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Delighted that the workshop Law and History: Sources and Approaches is now available as an online resource.
If you are a lawyer interested in history or a historian interested in law, this is for you. Enjoy watching!

#LegalHistory
Legal history: sources and approaches - YouTube
A workshop for lawyers interested in history and historians interested in law. It includes sessions on Sources: (1) local archives; (2) national archives and...
www.youtube.com
November 27, 2024 at 11:08 AM
💃 🕺
Really pleased that 2024 update of The Old Bailey Online was awarded the 2024 Mary Dudziak Digital Legal History Prize by the American Society for Legal History, for "a project that continues to break new ground in the field of digital legal history". www.oldbaileyonline.org
The Proceedings of the Old Bailey
A searchable online edition of the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913.
www.oldbaileyonline.org
October 29, 2024 at 5:42 PM
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Really pleased to announce the launch of a thoroughly updated version of Locating London's Past: locatinglondon.org - new functionality, better mapping, cleaner data. @ihr.bsky.social @long18thsem.bsky.social @ihrhistorylab.bsky.social
October 2, 2024 at 8:54 AM
Nobody likes it when the server flakes out, but at least we give you cute bugs to look at till it comes back.
August 31, 2024 at 9:42 AM
And modest. 😉
Old Bailey Online is an amazing resource
August 24, 2024 at 10:48 AM
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Putting together a list of digital archives for my research methods students to consult as they consider what topics to write their research papers on, but it's heavily US focused. Can fellow historians help me add some variety? 🗃️
August 23, 2024 at 5:27 PM
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you know that I LOVE @oldbaileyonline.bsky.social so much that my students make fun of me about it
February 7, 2024 at 9:37 AM
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I have 'reviewed' the recently updated Old Bailey Online after 20 years in the public domain for the London Journal. Link works 50 times for those who would like to read what I had to say. Everybody knows about this iconic resource, but as it moves into its third decade new challenges will emerge.
The Old Bailey Online at 20
Published in The London Journal: A Review of Metropolitan Society Past and Present (Ahead of Print, 2024)
www.tandfonline.com
August 6, 2024 at 11:24 AM
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We also think the Old Bailey statistical search pages are much improved, with more visualisation options, and links below to all the trials that contribute to a particular graph or table. This is a multi-line chart of all subcategories of theft, by year. www.oldbaileyonline.org/search/stati...
December 13, 2023 at 11:39 AM
As part of the latest update, the OBO bibliography, which is maintained as a Zotero library, has been substantially updated. Browse on the site from here www.oldbaileyonline.org/about/biblio... or more searchably on Zotero www.zotero.org/groups/34674... (the latter might have a few newer items too)
December 13, 2023 at 8:33 AM
Miaow. 😹
Also, you can now search for "cat", which has been impossible for several years (SQL indexing ignored words less than 4 characters long). www.oldbaileyonline.org/search/keywo... Progress, baby! 😜
December 12, 2023 at 4:56 PM
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Usually I'm crabby about updates to beloved, oft-used online history resources, but the Old Bailey team seems to have made it genuinely better!

The initial scatterplot visualisation when you search for anything is very snazzy and actually really helpful. www.oldbaileyonline.org/about/whats-...
December 12, 2023 at 11:21 AM
What's proximity searching and why is it great that we've got it back? Thanks to the Internet Archive, you can find out here web.archive.org/web/20061029...
December 12, 2023 at 12:21 PM
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A startling scatter graph via the new version of the Old Bailey Online: there were a lot of coining offences in c19th London, and surprisingly few in the c18th:

www.oldbaileyonline.org/search/keywo...

#History #DigitalHistory #MonetaryCrime
Really pleased to announce the launch of a new version (9.0) of the Old Bailey Online oldbaileyonline.org. There is lots of new functionality, and a thoroughly redesigned front and back end.
December 12, 2023 at 11:49 AM
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We discovered the earliest ever professional tattooer in England in this database. ♥️
Really pleased to announce the launch of a new version (9.0) of the Old Bailey Online oldbaileyonline.org. There is lots of new functionality, and a thoroughly redesigned front and back end.
December 12, 2023 at 11:56 AM