Databases

The largest single collection of 17th and 18th century English news media available from the British Library, this primary sources database includes more than 1,000 pamphlets, proclamations, newsbooks and newspapers from the period. The collection charts the development of the newspaper as we now know it, beginning with irregularly published transcriptions of Parliamentary debates and proclamations to coffee house newsbooks, finally arriving at newspaper in its current form.

Features the newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets and broadsheets that form the Nichols newspaper collection held at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford, United Kingdom. All 296 volumes of bound material, covering the period 1672-1737 have been digitized. This collection charts the history of the development of the press in England and provides invaluable insight into 17th and 18th century England.

This primary sources collection also includes approximately 300 pamphlets and broadsheets, most prevalent in the 1672-1682 period, which illustrate the transition from early newsbook publications to newspaper format. Distributed as stand-alone publications or in combination with a newspaper, these pamphlets cover a broad range of topics such as battles, religious plots, political intrigue, royal speeches and petitions to government.

From zines, newspapers and ephemera, to oral histories, films and photographs, 1980s Culture and Society is an eclectic and multi-faceted resource compiled from archival collections housed across the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada. Capturing diverse perspectives, materials produced by grassroots organizations and under-represented groups are presented alongside government records and mainstream media to showcase the key social, cultural, and political concerns of the decade such as the rise of conservatism, nuclear threat, and the AIDS crisis.

Searchable full text of full runs of newspapers specially selected by the British Library to best represent nineteenth-century Britain. This primary sources collection includes national and regional newspapers, as well as newspapers from: established country or university towns; the new industrial powerhouses of the manufacturing Midlands; and Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Special attention was paid to include newspapers that helped lead particular political or social movements such as Reform, Chartism, and Home Rule. Penny papers aimed at the working and clerical classes are also included.

This database includes periodicals published in Great Britain between 1800 and 1900, giving insight into many aspects of the 19th century life--literature and culture, empire, feminism, the history of the book, the creative and performing arts, sport and leisure, science and medicine, the professions.

Series 1: New Readerships: Women's Children's, Humor and Leisure/Sport
Series 1 charts the rapid rise of publishing in a reading culture expanding with the rise in literary and leisure. The political spectrum of women's writing from Hearth and Home to the Women's Penny Paper offers insight into women’s changing status in the 1800s. Satirical and comic titles such as Punch and Figaro in London illustrate the humor of the period. This release also charts the growth of children's entertainment and education, with Boy's Own and Good Words for the Young, periodicals that helped shape the values of those future empire builders. Titles like Baily's Monthly Magazine of Sporting, Theatrical, Literary and Fashionable World track the explosion in sports and hobbies, from gardening to horse racing, cricket, cycling and golf.

Contains issues from nearly 400 nineteenth century American newspapers, drawn from a range of urban and rural regions. This primary sources collection encompasses the entire 19th century, with an emphasis on such topics as the American Civil War, African-American culture and history, Western migration and Antebellum-era life among other subjects.

A multi-disciplinary database that covers millions of articles from over 17,000 scholarly journals and other authoritative sources including podcasts, transcripts and videos.

Academic Video Online provides nearly 80,000 titles spanning subjects from anthropology to zoology. Curated for curricular relevance, this streaming video database includes feature films, documentaries, interviews, performances, news programs, newsreels, and demonstrations.

Browse by Channels to see what's available by subject or source, or search by title.

Primary source material from the 18th century to the early 20th century devoted to American history, particularly strong in African American newspapers, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Women's Suffrage, and World War I. Information archived is from leading historical periodicals and books, and includes eyewitness accounts of historical events, vivid descriptions of daily life, editorial observations, commerce as seen through advertisements, and genealogical records. Databases are encyclopedic in scope and allow full Boolean, group, name, string, and truncated searches. Transcribed individual entries are complete with full bibliographic citations and are organized chronologically. Click on the "i" icon to view a full list of collections.

Africa Commons is a platform for discovering African historical and cultural materials held by organizations around the world. It searches across over 450,000 documents from over 4,500 collections and over 600 organizations, including libraries, museums, and archives, and then it links outward to the web repositories where the documents are located. Material types include books, magazines, newspapers, historical periodicals, government documents, manuscripts, letters, diaries, posters, photographs, ephemera, art, music, videos, oral histories, and more.

McMaster has access to three modules: "Black South African Magazines", "East African Magazines, Newspapers, and Films: The Hilary Ng’weno Archive", "History & Culture", and "Southern African Films and Documentaries".

Covers migrations, communities, and ideologies of the African Diaspora through the voices of people of African descent. With a focus on communities in the Caribbean, Brazil, India, United Kingdom, and France, the database includes never-before digitized primary source documents, including personal papers, organizational papers, journals, newsletters, court documents, letters, and ephemera.

This database features nearly 60 newspapers from across the African continent, all published before 1900.

NOTE: The Library has subscribed to Struggles for Freedom, but not the African Cultural Heritage Sites and Landscapes collection.
This primary sources database provides over 180,000 pages of documents and images focusing on the liberation struggles in southern Africa, with an initial concentration on Angola, Botswana, Mozambique, South Africa, Namibia, and Zimbabwe.  Contents include periodicals, nationalist publications, records of colonial government commissions, local newspaper reports, personal papers, correspondence, UN documents, out-of-print and other particularly relevant books, oral testimonies, life histories, and speeches.  

Covers the history and culture of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. Include 450,000+ citations and abstracts from over 2,000 journals; also includes book and media reviews and dissertations.

The AAS collection provides some 7600 distinct North-American-focused historical periodicals, published between 1684 and 1912.  Titles cover a range of subject areas, including, but not limited to: science, technology, medicine, Native American and African American populations, law, politics, government, music, the arts, literature, language, publishing, agriculture, business and industry, advertising and marketing, religion, philosophy, social movements, military matters, and leisure activities.  A small number of Canadian publications, primarily from the mid 19th Century, are also included.

American Film Scripts Online (AFSO) contains 1,009 scripts by 1,062 writers together with detailed, fielded information on the scenes, characters and people related to the scripts. In addition, the database includes facsimilie images for more than 500 of these screenplays. Most of the scripts have never been published before, and are not otherwise available online.

The rationale behind the database is not only to provide access to many previously unpublished screenplays, but to allow scripts to become part of the established corpus of literary works. Legal, authoritative versions of these screenplays will, the producers hope, be consulted by a wide range of scholars, including historians, sociologists, and those who study literature.

Explore the rise of the global human rights movement during the second half of the twentieth century through the International Secretariat records of Amnesty International. The material within this collection is vital for studying the history of key political events, global social change, human rights violations and campaigns with themes including international relations, state violence, political prisoners, minority rights, and more.

Enfer ("Hell") from the Bibliothèque nationale de France is one of the most storied and sought-after private case collections of forbidden books. The collection was created in the 1830s to protect and isolate works that were considered contrary to the morals of the time. The entire collection was kept in a locked section of the library, accessible only by application to the Director-General of the Bibliothèque and approval by an advisory committee of curators before it was made availabe online. Enfer is made up of more than 2,400 literary works, manuscripts, engravings, lithographs, and photographs. The books in Enfer span from the 1530s to the 2010s, providing a wide perspective throughout time and in different societies on what were considered to be erotic and/or pornographic works. The documents are mainly in French, with some titles also in English, German, Spanish, and a smattering of other languages. Many of the books are beautifully bound and wonderfully illustrated.

A newly added section, International Perspectives on LGBTQ Activism and Culture, presents material from regions and populations that are not generally encountered in gender and sexuality studies, specifically southern Africa and Australia. The database as a whole brings together approximately 1.5 million pages of primary sources on social, political, health, and legal issues impacting LGBTQ communities around the world. Rare and unique content from newsletters, papers, government documents, manuscripts, pamphlets, and other types of primary sources sheds light on the gay rights movement, activism, the HIV/AIDS crisis, and more. Documents are sourced from over 35 countries, and include extensive material from the Canadian Gay and Lesbian Archives.

The Archives of Sexuality and Gender: Sex and Sexuality, Sixteenth to Twentieth Century is made up of more than five thousand rare and unique books covering sex, sexuality, and gender issues across the sciences and humanities and throughout history. It is the variety of titles and subjects in this archive that make the research opportunities intriguing. Through its many monographs, the collection offers researchers a fascinating collection of historical material providing multiple perspectives on the study of sex, sexuality, and gender. The archive presents content in fourteen different languages, with a predominance in French, English, and German and including Old French, Old English, and Old High German.

Includes over 40 archival collections with a focus on Anti-War Protest Movements, Colonialism, Holocaust Studies, and International Relations, scanned from national and local archives.  Part of Gale Primary Sources.

The ARTFL Project is a full-text database consisting of over 2700 French language texts from the 13th to the 20th centuries including texts in literature, philosophy, arts, and sciences. The database includes texts by French women writers, Provençal poetry, Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie, French dictionaries from the 17th - 20th centuries, and Bayle's monumental Dictionnaire historique et critique (5th edition, 1740).

A multidisciplinary index covering the journal literature of the arts and humanities; it fully covers 1,144 of the world's leading arts and humanities journals, and indexes individually selected, relevant items from over 6,800 major science and social science journals. It contains a current total of over 2.5 million records. Subjects covered include archaeology, art, architecture, Asian studies, classics, dance, folklore, history, language, linguistics, literary reviews, literature, music, philosophy, poetry, radio, television, & film, religion and theatre. As of January 2000, the Arts & Humanities Index contains searchable, full-length, English-language author abstracts.

Online access to approximately 400,000 digital images of visual material from different cultures and disciplines which document artistic and historical traditions across many time periods and cultures, and which focus on, but are not limited to, the arts. As a campus-wide resource, ARTstor is designed to be used by researchers in fields that do not traditionally use images, as well as by art historians, and to support a wide range of non-commercial educational and scholarly activities.

BBC Monitoring was founded in 1939 at the start of WWII. Its purpose was to listen to radio broadcasts and gather open-source intelligence to help Britain and its allies understand global dynamics and assess emerging global threats and capabilities. Over the next 60 years, the scope of its monitoring grew quickly. Trained specialists transcribed broadcasts of speeches, current aff airs, political discussions, and social and cultural events worldwide. Transcripts, in turn, were translated into English, then read by experts who carefully selected critical content for publication. Finally, selections were summarized and curated into daily reports that comprise the Summary of World Broadcasts. These original daily reports often included commentary and evaluation by subject-matter experts, as well as synopses and specialist briefings. 

The online Bibliography of Asian Studies (BAS) indexes literature on all subjects (especially in the humanities and the social sciences) pertaining to East, Southeast, and South Asia published worldwide from 1971 to the present.  In addition, special projects have contributed substantian numbers of additional citations to the database, among them references to journals on Southeast Asia dating as far back as 1779.

Through 1991, the BAS included citations to Western-language periodical articles, monographs, chapters in edited volumes, conference proceedings, anthologies, and Festschriften.  However, monographs published since 1992 have not been added, and sources such as WorldCat should be consulted instead.

Provides bibliographic data on historical writing dealing with the British Isles, and with the British Empire and Commonwealth, during all periods for which written documentation is available - from 55 BC to the present.  Books, articles in books and articles in journals are listed, with some 700 journals and series currently searched for relevant material.

The Bibliography aims to be as comprehensive as is practical for publications since 1900 and has been enriched by co-operation with other projects. Data from the London Past Online project were added to the database in January 2003 and the first batch of data from Irish History Online was added in August 2004, with further batches from both projects being added later. From the end of 2006 the Bibliography has co-operated with teams working under the auspices of the Scottish Historical Review Trust which will henceforth edit the primarily Scottish titles in the database. The complete database now contains over 475,000 records.

A bibliographic database covering all aspects of Indigenous culture, history, and life in North America. This resource covers a wide range of topics including archaeology, education, the gaming industry, religion, folklore, economic development, acculturation, mythology, missions, tribal governments, and ethnohistory. BIPNA contains more than 350,000 citations for newspapers, magazines, academic journals, books, reviews, and trade publications from the United States and Canada with expanded content from Great Britain and Australia. Dates of coverage for content range from the sixteenth century to the present. The database is an essential research tool for anthropologists, educators, historians, political scientists, sociologists, psychologists, linguists, theologians, and policy makers. BIPNA will appeal to anyone interested in exploring the contributions and lived experiences of North America's Indigenous peoples