Select a Database
Library Databases by Subject: American Studies
| Database/Description | Guide |
|---|---|
| ACLS Humanities E-Book (formerly History E-Book) A project led by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the HEB project now includes the full text of over 1500 titles and is expanding to include most humanities disciplines and area studies. It includes books that remain vital to both scholars and advanced students and are frequently cited in the literature. Approximately 300 books are added annually to the collection. |  |
| America's Historical Newspapers Series I offers more than 700 historical American newspapers from 23 states and the District of Columbia printed between 1690 and 1876 and is based on Clarence S. Brigham's "History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690-1820" and other authoritative bibliographies. | |
| America: History and Life Indexes and abstracts scholarly literature from journals, dissertations and book and media reviews on the history and culture of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. Indexing covers 1,700 journals from 1964 to the present. 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. | |
| The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries Includes detailed firsthand descriptions of historical characters, glimpses of daily life in the army and at home, anecdotes about key events and personages. | |
| American Decades (Gale) Cross-disciplinary source for those who need a single, consistent reference to document and analyze periods of contemporary American social history. | |
| American Men and Women of Science (25th ed., 2008) Includes biographical entries on approximately 120,000 living scientists, providing birthdate; birthplace; field of specialty; education; honorary degrees; current position; professional and career information; awards; memberships; research information; and addresses for each entrant where available | |
| American National Biography Offers portraits of more than 17,400 men and women -- from all eras and walks of life -- whose lives have shaped the nation. Updated quarterly with hundreds of new and revised entries, the ANB Online features thousands of illustrations, more than 80,000 hyperlinked cross-references, links to select web sites, and powerful search capabilities. Includes over 900 articles from The Oxford Companion to United States History, providing historical and social context to the biographies. | |
| Annals of American History U.S. history from 1493 to modern times in over 2,000 primary documents plus images, video and audio clips. Document types include historical accounts, speeches, memoirs, poems, editorials and cultural criticism discussing government, foreign relations, business, war, the arts, family life and religion. | |
| Archive of Folk Culture The Library of Congress American Folklife Center's Archive of Folk Culture includes over two million photographs, manuscripts, audio recordings, and moving images. It consists of documentation of traditional culture from all around the world including the earliest field recordings made in the 1890s on wax cylinder through recordings made using digital technology. It is America's first national archive of traditional life, and one of the oldest and largest of such repositories in the world. | |
| Black Thought and Culture Black Thought and Culture provides approximately 100,000 pages of monographs, essays, articles, speeches, and interviews written by leaders within the black community from the earliest times to the present. In addition to well-known works, when completed, the collection will feature unique, fugitive and never-before-published materials, including the first-ever complete full run of the Black Panther newspaper. The collection is intended for research in black studies, political science, American history, music, literature, and art. This ninth release of Black Thought and Culture includes approximately 1297 sources and 1100 authors (March 2007). | |
| Digital National Security Archive The DNSA provides a collection of primary documents central to US foreign and military policy since 1945. Nearly 43,000 declassified documents are included in a group of 22 collections, each focused on a single topic. Each collection contains a range of policy documents including presidential directives, memos, diplomatic dispatches, meeting notes, independent reports, briefing papers, White House communications, email and confidential letters. Most of the documents in the DNSA collection were obtained through the use of the US Freedom of Information Act. | |
| Dissertations & Theses With more than 2 million entries, Proquest Dissertations & Theses (PQD&T) is the single, central, authoritative resource for information about doctoral dissertations and master's theses. Dissertations published from 1980 forward include 350-word abstracts written by the author. Master's theses published from 1988 forward include 150-word abstracts. | |
| Early American Newspapers, Series I Series I offers more than 700 historical American newspapers from 23 states and the District of Columbia printed between 1690 and 1876 and is based on Clarence S. Brigham's "History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690-1820" and other authoritative bibliographies. | |
| Early Encounters in North America: Peoples, Cultures, and the Environment Documents the relationships among peoples in North America from 1534-1850. The collection focuses on personal accounts and provides unique perspectives from all of the protagonists, including traders, slaves, missionaries, explorers, soldiers, native peoples, and officials, both men and women. The project brings coherence to a wide range of published and unpublished accounts, including narratives, diaries, journals, and letters. | |
| Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy (2d ed. 2002) Essays by subject experts treat concepts and doctrines, policymaking, commerce and science, human rights and arms control, with specific articles on topics ranging from anti-imperialism to environmental diplomacy, from refugee policies to terrorism and countermeasures. Also includes a chronology. | |
| Encyclopedia of American Religions (7th ed. 2003) Contains general essays that historically trace the major religious families and traditions, as well as directory listings that include contact and descriptive information on individual churches, religious bodies, and spiritual groups. | |
| The Encyclopedia of American Studies The Encyclopedia of American Studies brings together a wide range of disciplines related to the history and cultures of the United States, from pre-colonial days to the present. It features broad, synthetic articles covering areas such as history, literature, art, photography, film, architecture, urban studies, ethnicity, race, gender, economics, politics, wars, consumer culture, and global America; includes over 660 online, searchable articles and bibliographies. | |
| Film Literature Index The Film Literature Index (FLI) annually indexes 150 film and television periodicals from 30 countries cover-to-cover and 200 other periodicals selectively for articles on film and television. The periodicals range from the scholarly to the popular. More than 2,000 subject headings provide detailed analysis of the articles. | |
| Gale Encyclopedia of Multicultural America (2d ed. 2000) Contains 8,000 to 12,000 word essays on specific culture groups in the United States, emphasizing religions, holidays, customs, and languages in addition to providing information on historical background and settlement patterns. Also covers ethnoreligious groups such as Jews, Chaldeans, and Amish. Each essay lists organizations and research centers; name, address, and contact information for periodicals, radio, and television stations; and a further readings section. | |
| Google Scholar Search for relevant scholarly literature across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. | |
| HAPI Online The Hispanic American Periodical Index (HAPI) provides access to over 265,000 journal article citations about Central America, South America, the Caribbean, Mexico, Brazil, and Hispanics/Latinos in the United States from 1970 to the present. | |
| LexisNexis Congressional Access to legislative and regulatory information from the United States government, including hearing transcripts, committee reports, bills, the Congressional Record, the Federal Register, the Code of Federal Regulations, the U.S. Code, and public law. | |
| Los Angeles Times A ProQuest database that indexes and provides full-text access to the Los Angeles Times including extensive coverage of national, international and local news. Covers 1985 to current date. | |
| Los Angeles Times (Historic) Every issue from 1881-1985 includes the complete paper -cover-to-cover- with full-page and article images in downloadable PDF. | |
| Naxos Music Library Jazz Comprehensive collection of jazz on the Naxos and Fantasy Jazz labels, features close to 20,000 tracks of jazz from over 1900 albums with over 500 jazz artists represented. | |
| New York Times (Historic) Includes not only news, editorials, letters to the editor, obituaries, and birth and marriage announcements, but also historical photos, stock photos, and advertisements. Every issue from 1851-2003 includes the complete paper -cover-to-cover- with full-page and article images in downloadable PDF. | |
| North American Immigrant Letters/Diaries North American Immigrant Letters/Diaries consists of personal narratives such as letters, diaries, pamphlets, autobiographies, and oral histories, including several thousand indexed and searchable pages of Ellis Island Oral History interviews. The materials begin around 1840 and extend to the present, focusing heavily on the period from 1920 to 1980. People from many countries are represented, including more recent waves of immigrants from Latin America and Asia. IMLD provides perspectives both on North America and on the immigrants? countries of origin. | |
| North American Women's Letters and Diaries Spanning more than 300 years, the database presents the personal experiences of some 1325 women. The collection includes approximately 150,000 pages of letters and diaries from Colonial times to 1950, including 6,000 pages of previously unpublished manuscripts and 1,500 bibliographies. The material is drawn from more than 600 sources, including journal articles, pamphlets, newsletters, monographs, and conference proceedings and represents all age groups and life stages, a wide range of ethnicities, many geographic regions, the famous, and the not so famous. | |
| Oxford African American Studies Center Contains over 7,500 articles by top scholars and hundreds of primary source documents, images, maps, and charts and tables. | |
| Primary Sources in African American History (LexisNexis) LexisNexis African American History is a collection of documents pertaining to African American history and women's studies, including guides to microforms. Using either the keyword search, subject search or browse option, users are able to access primary sources such as pictures and images, government documents, manuscripts, speeches, autobiographies and more. | |
| Primary Sources in American Women's History (LexisNexis) Available through LexisNexis, Primary Sources in American Women's History provides first-hand accounts by influential women, the full texts of laws and court decisions that define or have defined women's opportunities and rights, and scholarly articles on events and issues that pertain to women's studies. | |
| RAND California RAND California provides information on California public policy and social science issues affecting the state, its counties and cities. It provides access to current economic, demographic, educational, and financial data for the State of California. | |
| Richmond Daily Dispatch Full-text searching of all issues of the American Civil War-era newspaper, the Richmond Daily Dispatch from November 1860 through December 1865. | |
| Statistical Abstract of the United States The Statistical Abstract of the United States, published since 1878, is the authoritative and comprehensive summary of statistics on the social, political, and economic organization of the United States. Sources of data include the Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bureau of Economic Analysis, and many other Federal agencies and private organizations | |
| Vanderbilt Television News Archive The Archive focuses on creating, preserving and providing access to the news broadcasts from the U.S. national television networks since August 5, 1968. The core of the collection consists of regularly scheduled newscasts from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and Fox News. The database currently includes 835,000 records, including abstracts at the story level of regular evening news programs and catalog records for each special news program. Streaming video is available to a limited part of the collection (CNN News). | |
| Women and Social Movements Scholar's Edition Women and Social Movements currently includes 76 document projects with more than 2,200 documents, 30,000 pages of additional full-text documents, and 1,640 primary authors. It includes as well book, film and website reviews, notes from the archives, and teaching tools. The Scholar?s Edition will include The Women's Commission Reports, an archive of the publications and documents of local, state, and federal Commissions on the Status of Women from 1963 to the present. At this time, the database includes the full text of 590 reports and publications issued by commissions in more than thirty states. When complete this collection will contain 75,000 pages of publications from commissions in all fifty states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Virgin Islands. The publications include reports, pamphlets, posters, and ephemeral materials. |
