Welcome to EBBA

Broadside Ballad from
17th c. "Heyday"

What is a broadside ballad? In its heyday of the the first half of the seventeenth century, a broadside ballad was a single large sheet of paper printed on one side (hence “broad-side”) with multiple eye-catching illustrations, a popular tune title, and an alluring poem—the latter mostly in black-letter, or what we today call “gothic,” type. About 8,000-10,000 English broadside ballads of the entire seventeenth-century survive. To capture the genre’s arch of development, EBBA seeks to archive all these printed ballads—with priority given to the black-letter ornamental broadside of the genre’s heyday—as well as all surviving sixteenth-century broadside ballads (about 250) and a representative sampling of broadside ballads of the early eighteenth century.

EBBA's goal is to make such broadside ballads fully accessible as texts, art, music, and cultural records of the period. We provide high-quality facsimiles of the ballads as well as facsimile transcriptions (which preserve the ballad’s original ornament while transcribing its unfamiliar typeface into easily readable modern print). In addition, we supply recordings of the ballads whenever a tune is extant, extensive cataloguing of the ballads, including cataloguing of their illustrations or woodcut impressions, TEI/XML and MARC records, and both basic and advanced search functions that allow readers easily to find collections or individual ballads as well as their constituent parts or makers by a variety of means. We also offer background essays on the various ballad collections included in EBBA and on ballad culture generally as well as other helpful ballad resources. For more about the EBBA project, see About Us.

	Congratulations EBBA!
	The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded EBBA its third Collections and Resources Grant (for 2010-2012). The British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies has also awarded EBBA the BSECS Digital Eighteenth Century Prize (2009).

In addition to the NEH, EBBA has been generously funded by the University of California-Santa Barbara, the UC Humanities Research Institute, the Making Publics project, and the University of Texas at Dallas.

EBBA is hosted by the English Department’s Early Modern Center at UCSB. With the NEH3 grant, UT-Dallas joins the EBBA team. Welcome on board UT-Dallas!