Databases

Nineteenth Century Collections Online provides full-text, fully searchable content from a wide range of primary sources. Archives published in the program include works in Western as well as non-Western languages and are sourced from rare collections at libraries and other venerable institutions from around the globe. McMaster currently has access to these collections: Asia and the West: Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange; British Politics and Society; British Theatre, Music, and Literature: High and Popular Culture European Literature, 1790-1840: The Corvey Collection and Europe and Africa, Colonialism and Culture 

Contemporaneous letters and diaries, oral histories, interviews, and other personal narratives provide a unique and personal view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada between 1800 and 1950. Includes 2,162 authors and approximately 100,000 pages of information, and in selected cases, the actual audio voices of the immigrants.

Contains 244 plays by 48 playwrights representing the stories and creative energies of American Indian and First Nation playwrights of the twentieth century. More than half of the works are previously unpublished, and hard to find, representing groups such as Cherokee, Métis, Creek, Choctaw, Pembina Chippewa, Ojibway, Lenape, Comanche, Cree, Navajo, Rappahannock, Hawaiian/Samoan, and others. Together, the plays demonstrate Native theater’s diversity of tribal traditions and approaches to drama—melding conventional dramatic form with ancient storytelling and ritual performance elements, experimenting with traditional ideas of time and narrative, or challenging Western dramatic structure.

Covers many aspects of the Canadian and American Theatre. Its goal is to provide detailed reference information for every theatrical figure, every play, every theatre, every major production, and every production company, from Colonial times to the present, in both Canada and the United States. To date it includes some 40,000 pages of major reference materials, together with records to approximately 30,000 plays, over 57,000 people, 5,400 theatres, nearly 22,000 productions and 2,500 production companies. The collection also includes approximately 10,500 images, playbills, postcards, scrapbooks and other resources.