Databases

Search or browse issues (full page and article images in PDF) of the National Post from January 1, 2011 to 2 weeks ago.

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

Provides full page and article images (PDF) with searchable full-text back to the first issue. Includes digital reproductions providing access to every page from every available issue.

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

Provides full page and article images (PDF) with searchable full-text of New York Tribune / Herald Tribune.  Useful for researching key events of the 19th and 20th centuries, from pre-Civil War tensions and U.S. internationalism to the fight for women’s rights and the completion of the Panama Canal. In addition to politics and reform, this newspaper also reports on the arts, New York society, sports, business, finance, and more.

An archival collection comprising the backfiles of 15 major magazines (including Newsweek), spanning areas such as current events, international relations, and public policy. The titles offer multiple perspectives on the contemporary contexts of the major events, trends, and interests in these fields throughout the twentieth century.

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 

The Norman Bethune Papers document the life and legacy of Norman Bethune (白求恩; 1890–1939), a Canadian thoracic surgeon and internationally recognized figure, revered as a national hero in China. A committed Communist, Bethune provided medical aid during the Spanish Civil War and later served with the Chinese Eighth Route Army, where he died in 1939. His selfless dedication was later praised by Mao Zedong. The collection includes correspondence, photographs, newspaper and magazine clippings, pamphlets, and research materials selected from several sub-collections, including the Norman Bethune Collection, Bethune Foundation Fonds, Roderick Stewart Fonds, Louis and Irene Kon Fonds, and Maurice McGregor Fonds.

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.

Includes biographies, auto-biographies, personal narratives, speeches, diaries, letters, and oral histories, with over 119,000 pages of text and images. Full-length reference works also are included to give background and context to the narratives.

The largest collection of women's diaries and correspondence ever assembled, spanning more than 300 years, and bringing the personal experiences of some 1,325 women to researchers, students, and general readers.

Subjects include what women wore, the conditions under which they worked, what they ate, what they read, and how they amused themselves; how frequently they attended church, how they viewed their connection to God, and how they prayed; their relationships with lovers, family and friends.

Contains 150,000 pages of published letters and diaries from individuals writing from Colonial times to 1950, more than 6,000 pages of previously unpublished materials, drawn from more than 600 sources, including journal articles, pamphlets, newsletters, monographs, and conference proceedings, and 300 biographies. All age groups, life stages, and ethnicities, many geographical regions, the famous and the not so famous are represented.

Oral History Online is a landmark database of English language oral histories. It contains at present more than 30,000 pages of full-text content that is available nowhere else in electronic format, much of which is available nowhere else in any format. This full-text material includes Ellis Island oral history narratives, exclusive Black Panther Party interviews, and other oral histories. With each quarterly update of Oral History Online, the publisher will add more of such proprietary (in-copyright) full-text interviews.

Search or browse issues (full page and article images in PDF) of the Ottawa Citizen from 1845 to 2010.

The most current issues of Ottawa Citizen are available online (plain-text) via Factiva

The documents in this collection on Palestine and Israel are sourced from the Central Files of the General Records of the Department of State. The records are under the jurisdiction of the Legislative and Diplomatic Branch of the Civil Archives, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C. This archive traces the vitally important period that saw the end of the British mandate in Palestine. Documents address the role of the Security Council and General Assembly of the United Nations and that of the United States in the creation of the state of Israel. Included here are the Palestine Reference files of Dean Rusk and Robert McClintock, as well as documents from the Mission of the United States in Tel-Aviv. The years 1955-1959 contain instructions and correspondences of the U.S. Department of State. Most of the State Department's internal documentation as well as correspondence between the State Department and other federal departments and agencies, in addition to documents from private individuals and organizations, are included in the central files.

The Palestine Statehood Committee Records, 1939-1949, "Concerning the campaigns for a Jewish Army; to save the Jewish people of Europe and the establishment of a Hebrew Republic in Palestine" consist of correspondence, memoranda, reports, publications, advertisements, and clippings related to five committees active in the United States from 1939 to 1949: the American Friends of a Jewish Palestine, the Committee for an Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews, the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, the American League for a Free Palestine, and the Hebrew Committee of National Liberation. Among these papers are selected materials spanning the years 1939-1942 on the activities of similar groups in Great Britain and France: the British League for a Free Palestine, and the Ligue francaise pour une Palestine libre. The Committee's goals included the creation of an independent Jewish army to fight the Axis powers, the rescue and repatriation of European Jews in Palestine, and the re-establishment of a Jewish nation in an independent Palestine.

The collection is comprised of over 100 pamphlets and periodicals from the French Revolution of 1848 held by the Center for Research Libraries (CRL).

Provides full-text scholarly editions of selected philosophers and English literary writers. Works include published and unpublished texts, articles, essays, and correspondence, in both the original language, and, where required, in English translation. Contents include classical works in philosophy, history of political thought and theory, education, religious studies, economics, classics, history, and German studies.

Digitized from originals held by McMaster University Library's Research Collections. This primary source collection consists of newspapers and periodicals; broadsides; leaflets; and books and pamphlets and other documents produced by or relating to the underground resistance in France, Belgium, Holland, and Italy.

Interactive database linking texts and translations of major works covers the history, literature and culture of the Greco-Roman world. 

Produced by Coherent Digital, Policy Commons is the world’s largest database for public policy, with more than 3.2 million reports, working papers, policy briefs, data sources, and media drawn from a directory of more than 24,000 IGOs, NGOs, think tanks, and research centers. It includes over a million pages of premium content from leading publishers and restored from organizations that have disappeared.

The Policy Commons interface offers fulltext searching in addition to 3,400 topics tags and filters for document type, organization name and type, publication language, country of publication, and publication date. It also provides a searchable database of more than 16,000 policy organizations worldwide.

From music and youth culture to politics and fashion, the period from 1950 to 1975 witnessed dramatic changes in society. This primary source database traces the development from 1950s austerity to the excess of the 1970s through a range of printed and manuscript sources, visual material, ephemera and video footage including:

• Pamphlets, letters, government files, and eye witness accounts covering key events of the period.
• The renowned Social Protest Collection from University of California, Berkeley.
• Underground magazines including OZ and IT; as well as American fanzines and alternative press titles from Bowling Green State University.
• Thousands of indexed photographs depicting the people and events of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.
• Ephemera and memorabilia – posters, pins and artefacts.
• A collection of carefully selected video footage that brings the sights and sounds of the period to life.
   

Collection of primary sources for the study and understanding of the challenges facing the European peoples in the aftermath of World War II.  Topics covered include the administration of refugee camps across Europe including England, Germany, Italy, Hungary and Yugoslavia; displaced Persons Assembly Centre reports; Jewish Relief Unit field reports; British Military Government in Germany; Belsen DP Camp; Maclean Mission in Italy; Politics of the Refugee Crisis; and, strengthening of the Zionist cause.

Sources include surveys, leaflets, photographs, reports of relief workers, US zone reports, War office memos, Exodus Camp records, Displaced Persons Assembly Centre weekly reports and correspondence of relief organizations.

This collection showcases a range of ideas, initiatives, and social movements devoted to people-powered politics and organizing from the 19th through 21st centuries. Ranging beyond a few specific movements, the archive paints a broad picture of the counterculture and many disparate organizations that represent this moment in modern Western history. Although the archive concentrates mainly on the United States and the United Kingdom, it also covers events and topics from around the globe.

Search or browse issues (full page and article images in PDF) of several Canadian, British, French, Indian and U.S. newspapers including The Globe and Mail, The Hamilton Spectator, Le Monde, The New York Times, The Guardian and The Observer, The Times of India, Toronto Star and The Wall Street Journal.

A critically important Johannesburg daily, The Rand Daily Mail pioneered popular journalism in South Africa and was the first newspaper to openly oppose apartheid. Fully searchable coverage (1905–1985) includes articles, advertisements, editorials, cartoons, and photographs, offering unique perspectives on 20th-century South African history and the country’s struggle for freedom and democracy.

The provocative literary materials in this collection provides an historical time stamp and current affairs commentary on the transitional period in the Rastafari Movement's development—a period extending from the early 1970s through to the present. It is a forty-three year period during which the Rastafari Movement has been spreading across the Afro-Atlantic world in one form or another and becoming progressively globalized. Each title can be viewed separately by clicking on the title found below the Detailed Description section.for nursing and youth activities.

With nearly 70 million individuals dislocated by war, famine, and environmental disaster, refugee crises have been, and will continue to be, a highly visible part of our global reality. But understanding and addressing what the future holds requires reckoning with the past. Refugees, Relief, and Resettlement opens a window onto the history of refugees and forced migration so that the thousands of scholars and students who will study—and possibly work with—refugee populations may look profitably to the primary source record of the past to help them navigate the present and the future. Available in two parts:

• Forced Migration and World War II
• The Early Cold War and Decolonization

The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry (AACI), formed in 1945, was created to study the situation of Jewish survivors in Europe and the problems connected with their resettlement in Palestine. The committee was charged with gathering information and making recommendations on 1) the effect of Jewish immigration and resettlement on the political, economic, and social conditions in Palestine; and (2) the position of surviving Jews in Europe and the possibility of relieving the problem by repatriation or resettlement of the survivors in Palestine and other non-European countries. The committee called for a unitary state rather than partition based on ethnicity or religious profession. The records include AACI reference files, evidence submitted to the committee, transcripts of hearings, AACI reports, and papers of the Anglo-American Cabinet Committee.

The brief but dramatic political reign of Senator Joseph Raymond McCarthy (1908–1957) is examined in this collection, from the Wheeling speech in 1950 to McCarthy's condemnation by the Senate in late 1954. McCarthy rode the crest of U.S. anti-communist paranoia in the early 1950s, and his tactics of accusation through insinuation and innuendo have come to be known as "McCarthyism". His popularity was short-lived, however; in 1954 his television appearances severely damaged his image, followed by a backlash by his political opponents resulting in a condemnation vote by the Senate in December that year.

This database offers the digitized archives of the Royal College of Physicians of London from ~1100 to 1980, and contains a range of searchable monographs, rare books, primary sources, manuscripts, correspondence, reports, conference papers, medical reports, medical education textbooks, proceedings, lectures, anatomical drawings, public health surveys, photographs, drawings, data and ephemera produced by the researchers and members of the RCP.

The history of medicine from early origins in folklore through to the modern practice is represented in this collection, with strong connections to the medical humanities, the interactions between medicine and culture, religion, and government, the establishment of public health systems, and the policies which govern medical education and practice. The content is presented as digital images, with searchable text and metadata, on a platform which also allows for visual and textual analyses and is cross-searchable with archives from other societies in the Wiley Digital Archives program.

This database offers the digitized archives of the Royal Geographical Society from 1478 to 1953, and contains a range of primary sources, searchable manuscripts, correspondence, reports, conference papers, proceedings, maps, charts, atlases, photographs, surveys, data and ephemera produced by the researchers and members of RGS. The history of geography throughout the British Empire in all its aspects is represented in this collection, which also focuses on environmental history, exploration, colonization and decolonization, anthropology, law, climate science, gender studies and cartography. The content is presented as digital images, with searchable text and metadata, on a platform which allows for visual and textual analyses and is cross-searchable with archives from other societies in the Wiley Digital Archives program.