Research Guides: American Studies: Resources

Welcome

Welcome to the American Studies LibGuide page. Here you can find valuable information for conducting research, crafting an argument or narrative, or just learning the basics about American Studies. Across the top of this page are several tabs that help organize the information.

Recommended Primary Source Databases

American Prison Newspapers This link opens in a new window
A growing digital collection of prison newspapers created by and for inmates, 1800-2020, This collection provides valuable insight into the experiences and perspectives of those who are incarcerated.
Archive Finder
Directory of archives and manuscript collections in the United States with descriptions of a repository's holdings. Repository records include phone and fax numbers, hours of service, materials solicited, email and home page URLs when available. Each collection record links to its corresponding repository record. Integrates records from NUCMC (National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections), 1959-1995; NIDS (National Inventory of Documentary Sources in the United States); and Directory of Archives and Manuscript Repositories in the United States.
ArchiveGrid
Descriptions of archival holdings and special collections of manuscripts and other primary source materials nationwide. Includes full text finding aids describing the contents of archival collections at various libraries, museums, and archival repositories throughout the U.S. with links to the repositories.
Archives Unbound
Archives Unbound presents topically-focused digital collections of historical documents that support the research and study needs of scholars and students at the university level.

Collections included:
American Indian Movement and Native American Radicalism
Black Economic Empowerment: The National Negro Business League
Chinese Civil War and U.S.-China Relations: Records of the U.S. State Department’s Office of Chinese Affairs, 1945-1955
Civil Rights and Social Activism in the South - James A. Dombrowski and the Southern Conference Educational Fund
Conditions and Politics in Occupied Western Europe, 1940-1945
Country Intelligence Reports on China
Country Intelligence Reports on Japan
Country Intelligence Reports on Korea
County and Regional Histories and Atlases: Indiana
Economy and War in the Third Reich, 1933-1944
Electing the President: Proceedings of the Democratic National Conventions, 1832-1988
Electing the President: Proceedings of the Republican National Conventions, 1856-1988
International Women's Periodicals, 1786-1933: Social and Political Issues
Middle East Online: Iraq, 1914-1974
Overland Journeys: Travels in the West, 1800-1880
Post-War Europe: Refugees, Exile and Resettlement, 1945-1950
Ralph J. Bunche Oral Histories Collection on the Civil Rights Movement
SUR, 1931-1992
U.S. Military Activities and Civil Rights: The Military Response to the March on Washington, 1963
We Were Prepared for the Possibility of Death: Freedom Riders in the South, 1961
Women’s Issues and Their Advocacy Within the White House, 1974-1977
Women, War and Society, 1914-1918
Gale Primary Sources - All
Gale Primary Sources is an integrated research environment that allows scholars to search across more than 30 Gale primary source collections, including Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Nineteenth Century Collections Online, Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers, Archives of Human Sexuality and Identity, The Making of the Modern World, and other collections.

African American Poetry
Contains nearly 3,000 poems by African-American poets of the 18th and 19th centuries.
British Literary Manuscripts Online This link opens in a new window
Contains facsimile images of literary manuscripts, including letters and diaries, drafts of poems, plays, novels, and other literary works, and similar materials dating from roughly 1120-1900. Searching is based on tags and descriptive text associated with each manuscript (note: the text of the manuscripts is not full-text searchable).
Early English Books Online - Proquest Platform This link opens in a new window
Early English Books Online (EEBO) contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700 - from the first book printed in English by William Caxton, through the age of Spenser and Shakespeare and the tumult of the English Civil War.
News, Policy & Politics Magazine Archive (feat. Newsweek) This link opens in a new window
An archival collection comprising the backfiles of 15 major magazines (including the Newsweek archive), spanning areas including current events, international relations, and public policy. These titles offer multiple perspectives on the contemporary contexts of the major events, trends, and interests in these fields throughout the twentieth century. The collection will provide valuable primary source content for researchers in fields ranging from history and political science, through to law and economics.
Note: Due to the rarity of some of the original print volumes, there are small gaps (issues or pages) in the runs of some publications.
Periodicals Archive Online
Periodicals Archive Online is a major archive that makes the backfiles of scholarly periodicals in the arts, humanities and social sciences available electronically, providing access to the searchable full text of hundreds of titles. The database spans more than two centuries of content, 37 key subject areas, and multiple languages.

History Reference Source This link opens in a new window
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This database features full text for thousands of primary source documents and informational texts.
NexisUni This link opens in a new window
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Features more than 15,000 news, business and legal sources from LexisNexis -- including US Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1790.
ProQuest Congressional Publications
Provides access to historic and recent U.S. Government publications from 1789-1969 on including U.S. Congressional Serial Set documents, federal agency reports, congressional committee publications including reports on legislation, statistics, maps, and congressional debates.
Coverage includes Congressional Record and predecessor publication debates from 1789-1997 and Executive branch agency publications not included in the U.S. Congressional Serial Set from 1789-1932.
Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Hate Map This link opens in a new window
The Hate Map publishes an annual census of hate groups operating within the United States. A hate group is an organization that, based on its official statements or principles, the statements of its leaders, or its activities, has beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people.
Wiley Digital Archives This link opens in a new window
Wiley Digital Archives is a continuous program of new databases comprised of unique or rare historical primary sources, digitized from leading societies, libraries, and archives around the world, and made accessible in ways that tie directly to research outcomes and educational goals. All Archives are cross-searchable, and contain tools for searching, browsing, analyzing and visualizing primary source content.

Current archives available: New York Academy of Sciences and the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland

Archives of Sexuality and Gender This link opens in a new window
More than 5,000 rare and unique books covering sex, sexuality, and gender issues across the sciences and humanities and throughout history. Topics include patterns of fertility and sexual practice; prostitution; religion and sexuality; the medical and legal construction of sexualities; and the rise of sexology.

Includes five archives:

L'Enfer de la Bibliothèque nationale de France
International Perspectives on LGBTQ Activism and Culture
LGBTQ History and Culture Since 1940, Part I
LGBTQ History and Culture Since 1940, Part II
Sex and Sexuality, Sixteenth to Twentieth Century
Defining Gender, 1450-1910 This link opens in a new window
Provides access to a vast body of original British source material that will enrich the teaching and research experience of those studying history, literature, sociology and education from a gendered perspective. A wide range of original primary sources representing five key topics: Conduct and Politeness, Domesticity & the Family, Consumption & Leisure, Education & Sensibility, and The Body.
Gender Identity and Social Change This link opens in a new window
Essential primary sources documenting the changing representations and lived experiences of gender roles and relations from the nineteenth century to the present. This expansive collection offers sources for the study of women's suffrage, the feminist movement, the men’s movement, employment, education, the body, the family, and government and politics.
Women's Magazine Archive This link opens in a new window
Full back-files of leading women’s interest consumer magazines. Titles are scanned from cover to cover in high-resolution color and feature detailed article-level indexing.

Coverage: late-19th century through to 2005
Women in The National Archives This link opens in a new window
Original documents on the Suffrage Question in Britain, the Empire and Colonial Territories combined with a Finding Aid to Women's Studies Resources in The National Archives, Kew, Britain.

Economist Historical Archive, 1843–2020 This link opens in a new window
The Economist Historical Archive ('EHA') is the fully searchable facsimile edition of The Economist, the weekly paper which is essential reading for anyone engaged in politics, current affairs and all aspects of business and trade worldwide. Containing every issue since its launch in 1843, EHA offers full-color images, multiple search indexes, topic and area supplements and surveys. It is an unrivaled multidisciplinary primary source for researching and teaching the 19th and 20th centuries.
Film and Television Literature Index with Full Text This link opens in a new window
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Subject coverage includes film & television theory, preservation & restoration, screenwriting, production, cinematography, technical aspects, and reviews. The database provides cover-to-cover indexing and abstracts for more than 380 publications (and selected coverage of 300), as well as full text for more than 120 journals, and 100 books. In addition, Film & Television Literature Index with Full Text includes Variety movie reviews from 1914 to the present and over 36,300 images from the MPTV Image Archive.
Homeland Security Digital Archive This link opens in a new window
Electronic documents made available by the Dudley Knox Library at the Naval Postgraduate School, searchable by keyword or by topic, including general U.S. policy documents, national strategy documents, theses and research papers from the Center for Homeland Defense and Security and the Naval Postgraduate School, and homeland security executive orders. Also includes notices of events and conferences pertaining to homeland security, and news items drawn from various news sources.
Library Music Source
Classical music scores, parts, and accompaniments ready to download, save, view, and print. Over 35,000 works from over 350 Western composers.
Naxos Music Library (NML) This link opens in a new window
Online classical music library offers streaming access to well over 120,000 CDs of standard and rare repertoire. Over 800 new CDs are added to the library every month. NML offers the complete Naxos and Marco Polo catalogs, as well as selected recordings from over 650 labels such as Chandos, Deutsche Grammophon, and EMI Classics. Text resources include liner notes, composer/artist biographies, work analyses, opera libretti and synopses. Listeners can create personalized playlists or use predefined NML playlists.

Recommended Secondary Source Databases

JSTOR
Full-text digital archive of over 2600 scholarly journals, especially strong in Social Sciences, Humanities, Economics, and Mathematics.
Social Sciences Citation Index
Provides bibliographic data, citations and abstracts of English-language authors to significant articles from over 3,000 journals across 55 social science disciplines. Also covers individually selected, relevant items from over 3,500 of the world's leading scientific and technical journals.
Oxford English Dictionary (OED) This link opens in a new window
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is widely regarded as the accepted authority on the English language. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of 600,000 words— past and present—from across the English-speaking world.
Oxford Music Online
With over 60,000 articles written by over 6,000 music scholars, Grove Music Online (GMO) is the authoritative resource for music research with an ongoing mission to chart the diverse history and cultures of music and musicians from around the globe.
Oxford Art Online
Oxford Art Online is an innovative gateway that offers users the ability to access and search the vast content of Grove Art Online and Oxford art reference in one location. With the 2008 complete redesign of Grove Art Online, as well as the addition of substantial new Oxford reference content, Oxford Art Online offers the most extensive and easily searchable online art resource available today, a virtual art reference library of unparalleled scope and depth.

Please note: a login is NOT required to access this database. You may create a personal account if you wish to have access to the ability to save searches, etc.

Ecology Abstracts
Ecology Abstracts covers journal literature pertaining to the relationships of organisms to each other and to their environments. About 285 journals are indexed, some completely, others, selectively. Included are relevant papers on evolutionary biology, economics, and systems analysis as they relate to ecosystems or the environment. There is detailed information on resource and ecosystems management and modeling as well as material on the impact of climate, water resources, soil, and man on environmental problems such as depletion, erosion, and pollution.
Environment Abstracts
This database encompasses all aspects of the impact of people and technology on the environment and the effectiveness of remedial policies and technologies, featuring more than 950 journals published in the U.S. and abroad. The database also covers conference papers and proceedings, special reports from international agencies, non-governmental organizations, universities, associations and private corporations. Other materials selectively indexed include significant monographs, government studies and newsletters.
Environmental Studies
Offers authoritative content on the development of emerging green technologies and discusses issues on the environment, sustainability and more. Topic, organization, and country portals form research centers around issues covering energy systems, health care, agriculture, climate change, population, and economic development.
Gale OneFile: Environmental Studies and Policy This link opens in a new window
Contains more than 5.4 million articles from more than 300 journals and book reference content from Delmar, including Soil, Science, and Management; Introduction to Agronomy; Food, Crops, & Environment; Fundamental Soil Science; and more.
Pollution Abstracts
This database provides fast access to the environmental information necessary to resolve day-to-day problems, ensure ongoing compliance, and handle emergency situations more effectively. Pollution Abstracts combines information on scientific research and government policies in a single resource. Topics of growing concern are extensively covered from the standpoints of atmosphere, emissions, mathematical models, effects on people and animals, and environmental action in response to global pollution issues. To ensure comprehensive coverage, material from conference proceedings and hard-to-find documents has been summarized along with information from primary journals in the field.

America: History and Life
Index of literature covering the history and culture of the United States and Canada, from prehistory to the present. Covers over 2,000 journals published worldwide. Strong English-language journal coverage is balanced by an international perspective on topics and events, including abstracts in English of articles published in more than 40 languages.
Bibliography of Asian Studies (BAS)
The most comprehensive Western-language bibliographical database for research on East, Southeast and South Asia. It covers Western-language journal articles, review articles, conference proceedings and chapters in edited volumes with special focus on the humanities and social sciences.

Coverage: 1971 – current.
Historical Statistics of the United States This link opens in a new window
Electronic version of Historical Statistics of the United States: Earliest Times to Present; Millennial Edition presents thousands of annual time series of quantitative historical information covering virtually every quantifiable dimension of American history: population, work and welfare, economic structure and performance, governance, and international relations. Chapters are preceded by essays that introduce the quantitative history of their subject, and provide a guide to the sources. Enables searching, combining, and downloading of data using Excel or CSV spreadsheets.
Humanities and Social Sciences Index Retrospective
Humanities & Social Sciences Index Retrospective™: 1907-1984 offers a broad range of subject coverage in the humanities and social sciences with high-quality indexing of more than 1,300,000 articles in nearly 1,100 periodicals, dating as far back as 1907, as well as citations of over 240,000 book reviews.
Search this resource with Humanities Full Text for coverage up to the present
Archives of Latin American and Caribbean History This link opens in a new window
Provides full text searchable access to a digital collection of primary and secondary source documents about Latin America and the Caribbean. The scope ranges from the colonial period to the present and includes monographs, manuscripts, pamphlets, letters, expedition records, journals, periodicals, reports, maps, diaries, descriptions of voyages, newspaper accounts, news feeds, audio and video, and more.

Children's Literature Comprehensive Database
Reliable one search access to information, awards, honors and published reviews about Pre K-12 books and media, including reading measurement programs (Lexile, AR, Scholastic Reading Counts), curriculum tools such as lesson plans, teaching guides, discussion guides, and links to web pages featuring children's authors and illustrators reviews.

Note: Works best with Firefox or Google Chrome
MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new window
This database is a classified listing and subject index of scholarly books and articles on modern languages, literatures, folklore and linguistics which has been compiled by the Modern Language Association of America since 1926. The electronic version includes the Bibliography's entire print run and currently contains more than 2 million records.
Gale Literature Resource Center
Provides access to biographies, bibliographies and critical analysis of authors from every age and literary discipline. Covers more than 90,000 novelists, poets, essayists, journalists and other writers, with in-depth coverage of 2,000 of the most-studied authors.
Black Studies Periodicals
Black Studies Periodicals (formerly The International Index to Black Periodicals) covers scholarly and popular Black Studies journals, including full text for many titles. The Marshall Index is a guide to black periodicals, 1940-1946. Cultural, economic, historical, religious, social, and political issues of vital importance to the Black Studies discipline are covered.
Philosopher's Index
The Philosopher's Index provides indexing and abstracts from books and journals of philosophy and related fields. It covers the areas of ethics, aesthetics, social philosophy, political philosophy, epistemology, and metaphysic logic as well as material on the philosophy of law, religion, science, history, education, and language.

Coverage: 1940-Present

Anthropology Plus
Brings together two resources: Anthropological Literature from Harvard University, and the Anthropological Index from the Royal Anthropological Institute in the UK. Provides worldwide indexing of journal articles, reports, commentaries, edited works, and obituaries in the fields of social, cultural, physical, biological, and linguistic anthropology, ethnology, archaeology, folklore, material culture, and interdisciplinary studies. Offers coverage of all core periodicals in the field in addition to local and lesser-known journals.
AnthroSource
Current and back issues of journals published by the American Anthropological Association, including American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Anthropology of Work Review, Archeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association, Culture & Agriculture, Journal of Latin American Anthropology, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists Newsletter, Visual Anthropology Review, Voices, and more.
Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology
The BEOS Online, the digital version of the 11 volume Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, offers 1800 specially commissioned entries ranging from definitions of key terms to extended explorations of major topics in sociology.
Sociological Abstracts
This database abstracts and indexes the international literature of sociology and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences. The database provides abstracts of journal articles and citations to book reviews drawn from thousands of serials publications and also provides abstracts of books, book chapters, dissertations, conference papers and working papers. Cited references are included for many journal articles.
Worldwide Political Science Abstracts
Provides citations, abstracts, and indexing of the international serials literature in political science and its complementary fields, including international relations, law, and public administration / policy. The database is building on the merged backfiles of Political Science Abstracts, 1975-2000, and ABC POL SCI, 1984-2000. Thesaurus of over 3,000 terms used to index records also available.

Everyday Life & Women in America This link opens in a new window
A resource for the study of American social, cultural and popular history, providing access to thousands of fully searchable images of monographs, pamphlets, periodicals and broadsides addressing 19th and early 20th century political, social and gender issues, religion, race, education, employment, marriage, sexuality, home and family life, health, and pastimes. The collection is especially rich in conduct of life and domestic management literature, offering vivid insights into the daily lives of women and men, as well as emphasizing contrasts in regional, urban and rural cultures.

Coverage: 1800-1920
Gale OneFile: Contemporary Women's Issues This link opens in a new window
Gale OneFile: Contemporary Women's Issues offers comprehensive coverage of issues that influence women's lives across the globe. Users will find timely and historically relevant content on topics including civil rights, health, education, professional development, and entrepreneurship.
Gale OneFile: Gender Studies This link opens in a new window
This database offers access to scholarly journals and magazines covering topics including gender studies, family and marital issues, and more.
Women's Studies International
Index to over 871,000 records drawn from a variety of essential women's studies databases, including Women Studies Abstracts, Women's Studies Database, Women Studies Librarian, Popline Subset on Women, Women of Color and Southern Women, and Women's Health and Development.
Women and Social Movements in Modern Empires since 1820 This link opens in a new window
Explores prominent themes in world history since 1820 as told through women’s voices: conquest, colonization, settlement, resistance, and post-coloniality.

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