Databases

This primary sources database provides images of original documents related to the British Empire. The content is structured around five thematic sections: Cultural Contacts; Literature; The Visual Empire; Religion; and Race, Class, Colonialism and Imperialism.

Contains video and text material focusing on engineering failures and successes such as Apollo 13, Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Ford Pinto, Space Shuttle Challenger and the Titantic.

Contains primary sources for studying the history of the film and entertainment industries, from the era of vaudeville and silent movies through to the 21st century. The core US and UK trade magazines covering film, music, broadcasting and theatre are included, together with film fan magazines and music press titles. Issues have been scanned in high-resolution color, with granular indexing of articles, covers, ads and reviews. Subject coverage includes the film industry, music business, rock and pop, jazz and blues, theatre, television, radio, and video games. 

McMaster has access to the following collections: Cinema, Film and Television (Parts 1 & 2), Music, Radio and Stage, and Video Gaming.

Brings together multimedia materials (text, archival primary sources, video and audio) around key environmental challenges, including climate change, water/air pollution, biodiversity, conservation, agriculture, deforestation and more. The database is curated around specific environmental issues and events from the 20th and 21st centuries. Provides an understanding of the relationship between people and the environment through social, cultural, economic, political, historical and ecological perspectives. 

This collection from Wiley Digital Archives focuses on critical aspects of anthropogenic change, with unique and rare archival collections from the Environmental Society of America (ESA), Royal Botanic Gardens (Kew Gardens), the National Archives (UK), the Commonwealth Forestry Institute, CABI (Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International) and more. The collection will build to approximately one million pages or images of primary sources featuring data-heavy collections on Deforestation, Agriculture, Livestock, and Fisheries (Food Production); Ecology, Botany, Biodiversity, and Extinction; Water Sources, Irrigation, Wetlands, and Hydrology, with an expected competion date of December 2023.

Search or browse issues (full page and article images in PDF) of the Financial Times. The archive covers the complete run of the London edition of this internationally known daily business newspaper, from its first issue in 1888 through 2021. Every article, advertisement, and market listing is included—shown both individually and in the context of the full page and issue of the day.

The most current issues of the Financial Times are available in print and online via several databases (with most current month embargoed).

Showcases a wealth of primary source material for the study of the First World War, from personal narratives and printed books to military files, propaganda pamphlets and strong visual documents. Also provides secondary contextual material, including scholarly essays, case studies and interactive maps.

Material is sourced from archives around the world, including McMaster's Archives and Research Collections which contributed hundreds of personal collections, albums, photographs, trench journals, sheet music, visual sources and trench maps, as well as material from the Vera Brittain Archive and Michael Brisebois collections.

Provides researchers rich archival content, visual ephemera, monographs, and videos that explore how food shapes the world around us.

This collection of primary source documents captures the lives, experiences and colonial encounters of settlers and indigenous people living in colonial frontiers of North America, Southern Africa, Australia and New Zealand from 1650-1920. More than 20% of the content is Canadian, with over 1,000 documents drawn from the Hudson's Bay Archive and the Glenbow Museum.

Search across Gale's primary source databases, including Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), with links to additional content from ProQuest's Early English Books (EEBO).  Individual databases can also be explored separately or in combination.

Explore primary sources documenting the changing representations and lived experiences of gender roles and relations, and the struggle for women’s rights, from the nineteenth century to the present.

Sourced from the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia, the database provides materials for the study of gender history, women’s suffrage, the feminist movement and the men’s movement. Other key areas represented in the material include: employment and labour, education, government and legislation, the body, domesticity and the family. Explore records from men’s and women’s organisations and pressure groups, detailing twentieth-century lobbying and activism on a wide array of issues to reveal developing gender relations and prevalent challenges.

An initiative of the German Historical Institute, Washington, DC, German History in Documents and Images (GHDI) is a comprehensive collection of primary source materials documenting Germany's political, social, and cultural history from 1500 to the present. It comprises original German texts, all of which are accompanied by new English translations, and a wide range of visual imagery. The project comprises ten sections, each of which addresses a discrete period in Germany's history.

A cross-cultural database for information on women's history. It spans more than four centuries and 15 languages and includes over two million full-page images. Trace the evolution of feminism within a single country, as well as the impact of that country's feminist movement on other countries and their movements.

This primary source database brings together material from The National Archives, UK and the British Film Institute to document the changes in reactions, responses, medicines, and treatments of infectious diseases within the British empire and across the globe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Thematic areas include animals and livestock, disease prevention and interventions, institutional care, maternal and child health, and more, with a range of document types allowing researchers to explore this area of STEM history and colonial administration.

Includes coverage of 180 issues, topics, and events from the late 1890s to the present that are key to understanding today’s world including border and migration, atrocities and human rights violations, peacekeeping, climate change, terrorism, revolutions, and human trafficking. Specific events explored include the U.S. and Mexico Border, the Rwandan Genocide, the Arab Spring, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and climate migrants in Asia Pacific.

Online full-page newspaper archive of The Globe & Mail from May 1844, current 4 years embargoed. Coverage includes all the stories, plus thousands of images, advertisements, classifieds, political cartoons, births and deaths from Canada's national newspaper, dating back to the pre-confederation era.

The most current issues of The Globe & Mail are available in print and online (plain-text) via Factiva and other databases.

The backfile of GQ magazine, from its launch in 1931 (as Apparel Arts) to the present. One of the longest-running, most influential men's magazines, GQ expanded its initial focus on fashion to cover general men’s-interest subjects. The digital archive makes available a wealth of editorial content and photography, providing essential insights into the 20th/21st-century history of fashion, popular culture, masculinity, and society.

Originally published as Istoriia Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny Sovetskogo Soiuza (История Великой Отечественной войны Советского Союза) 1941-1945, published in Moscow in 1960 in six volumes by the USSR Ministry of Defense. This work was translated by the U.S. Army Center of Military History and the Foreign Technology Division, Air Force Systems Command. The complete official Soviet history of World War II, a monumental work of over 9,000 pages, this collection provides Western scholars with an opportunity to study what is considered one of the most significant historical documents produced in the Soviet Union. In addition to its importance in the war's historiography, this work is a valuable exposition of the development of a widely influential military doctrine.

The Guardian (1821-2003) and its sister newspaper, The Observer (1791-2003) provide facts, firsthand accounts, and opinions of the day about the most significant political, business, sports, literary, and entertainment events from the past two centuries.

The most current issues of The Gluardian are available online (plain-text) via  Factiva, Nexis Uni and other databases 

The most current issues of The Observer are available online (plain-text) via  Factiva, Nexis Uni and other databases

Search or browse issues (full page and article images in PDF) of The Hamilton Spectator from 1852 to 2010. Most issues from 2011 to one week ago are also available.

The most current issues of the The Hamilton Spectator are available in print and online (plain-text) via Factiva and Nexis Uni. 

Includes the complete runs of the US and UK editions of Harper’s Bazaar, from 1867 to the present (US edition) and 1929-2015 (UK edition). The issues are reproduced as high-resolution color page images and supported by fully searchable text and article-level indexing. The magazine covers over 150 years of American, British, and international fashion, society, and popular culture, facilitating academic research in wide-ranging fields such as women’s studies, fashion, marketing, advertising, material culture, design, and more. It chronicles of some of the most influential work from world-renowned designers, models, photographers,stylists, and illustrators of the period.

Includes the backfiles of the following nine major US and UK consumer magazines devoted to health, fitness, exercise, nutrition, and medicine, charting trends in these areas from the mid-20th century to the 21st.

• Flex [US] (1983 to 2015)
• Men’s Fitness [US] (1985 to 2015)
• Men’s Fitness [UK] (1999 to 2015)
• Men’s Health [US] (1986 to 2015)
• Prevention [US] (1950 to 2015)
• Women’s Health [US](2005 to 2015)
• Women’s Health Activist [US] (1975 to 2015)
• Women’s Health Weekly [US] (1994 to 2015)
• Zest [UK] (1994 to 2014)

Coverage is from issue 1 through to 2015 (or publication ceased date), with issues scanned from cover to cover, although there will be some small coverage gaps (issues / pages).

Heritage is a growing collection of digitized Canadian primary source documents, chronicling the country and its people from the 1600s to the mid-1900s.  Featured collections include:

Includes primary source, cross-searchable, full-text/full-image documents on some of the most widely studied topics in American history.

HCPP provides a vital historical record of Britain, its former Colonies and the wider world, providing detailed primary sources for the history of the past two centuries.  The database includes House of Commons parliamentary papers from 1803 onwards, Hansard (Commons and Lords), Diplomatic and Consular Reports (1887-1916), and more.

Provides comparative documentation, analysis, and interpretation of major human rights violations and atrocity crimes worldwide from 1900 to 2010. The collection includes primary and secondary materials across multiple media formats and content types for each selected event, including Armenia, the Holocaust, Cambodia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, Darfur, and more than thirty additional subjects.

This primary source database chronicles human migration in the latter half of the 20th-century. News and analysis comes from reports gathered daily between the early 1940s and 1996 by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, a U.S. government organization that became part of the CIA.  These include translated and English-language radio and television broadcasts (transcripts), newspapers, periodicals and government documents.

From historic pressings to contemporary periodicals, this collection covers nearly 200 years of Indigenous print journalism from the US and Canada. The newspapers represent a wide variety in style, production, audience, and era, and can be used to discover how events were reported by and for Indigenous communities.

Provides original materials on the political, social, and cultural history of Native Peoples from the 16th century well into the 20th century, including rare books and monographs, periodicals, newspapers, manuscripts, census records, legal documents, maps, drawings and sketches, oral histories, photos, and videos from the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. Major contributors include the University of Alberta, U.S. National Archives, Library of Congress, Princeton University, Moravian Archives, and Gonzaga University.  Titles in this database are also listed in the library catalogue.

This collection was created to consolidate information available on United States and Indigenous Law, and also to share the influence that Indigenous American cultures have had on modern society.  It contains U.S. federal statutes and regulations, federal case law, tribal codes, constitutions, and jurisprudence, and includes:

• 418 treaties between the United States and Indigenous peoples
• 25 serial titles, including the American Indian Law Review, Indigenous Peoples’ Journal of Law, Culture and Resistance, and NARF Legal Review
• Over 770 works related to the constitutions and laws of Indigenous peoples in the United States
• Landmark Indigenous cases, congressional hearings, government reports, the Model Tribal Probate Code and more