Databases

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 

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published letters and diaries from individuals writing from Colonial times to 1950, more than 6,000 pages of previously unpublished materials, drawn from more than 600 sources, including journal articles, pamphlets, newsletters, monographs, and conference proceedings, and 300 biographies.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.

OpenBook Publishers is a not-for-profit Social Enterprise run by academics who are committed to making high-quality research available to readers around the world. Monographs and textbooks in all subject areas are published and all books are available to read free online.

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.

Combining features of an annotated bibliography and a high-level encyclopedia, the Bibliographies identify the best available scholarship across a wide variety of subjects.  McMaster subscribes to the following subjects:  African American Studies (New), Anthropology, Atlantic History (New), Biblical Studies, Geography, International Relations, Jewish Studies, Literary & Cultural Theory, Philosophy, Political Science, Social Work, and Sociology.

A collection of 55,000 specially written biographies, which describe the lives of people who shaped the history of the British Isles and beyond. The Oxford DNB replaces and extends the original Victorian DNB, and includes: re-written biographies of all subjects included in the Victorian DNB, reflecting new research, and providing an up-to-date assessment of their lives 16,500 biographies of new subjects from all periods. For checking facts, learning about people involved in a historical event or associated with a place, or undertaking new research into any aspect of the British past. Entries offer detailed and extensive biographical information drawn from primary and secondary sources and range from a few dozen to 35,000 words in length. With more than 10,000 illustrations, researched in partnership with the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Oxford DNB is also the largest selection of national portraiture ever published.

Provides scholarly review articles summarizing current thinking and research in a range of subjects across the humanaities, social sciences, and sciences.  Each handbook offers in-depth introductions to topics and a critical survey of the current state of scholarship.  McMaster's access has expanded to include all 1200 Handbooks.

Covers issues in the public debate through selective coverage of a wide variety of international sources including journal articles, books, government documents, statistical directories, grey literature, research reports, conference papers, web content, and more. 

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).

Includes digitized New Zealand  and Pacific newspapers from the 19th and 20th centuries.  

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.

Major online periodical archive that makes the backfiles of periodicals in the humanities and social sciences available electronically. PAO contains over 700 journals spanning more than two centuries of content, 37 key subject areas, and multiple languages. McMaster's subscription includes PAO collections 1-10.

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.

Covers U.S. public policy issues with indexing and linking to the output of over 350 public policy think tanks, nongovernmental organizations, research institutes, university centers, advocacy groups, and other similar organizations.

This archive provides insight into how communist, socialist, and Far-Left groups and figures saw themselves and the world around them during the major political and social events that occurred in the twentieth century. The primary sources in this collection come from multiple regions, offering the opportunity for a comparative study of left-wing thinking and government ideology, and connect researchers to firsthand narratives to explore left-wing political radicalism and extremism across Europe, America, Latin America, and more. Collections include documents and correspondence that shed light on the political ideologies of Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, Trotskyism, and anarchism. Researchers can analyze the world’s response to major extremist events, like the Russian Revolution, the rise of the Soviet Union, and the Red Scare.

Provides simultaneous access to the databases PAIS (Public Affairs Information Service) Index, Policy File Index, Political Science Database and Worldwide Political Science Abstracts, covering the international literature in political science and public administration/policy, along with related fields. Together, they provide abstracts, indexing and full text coverage of journal articles, country reports, dissertations, think-tank reports, working papers, government documents and more, including full-text from many leading political science and international relations journals.

Collection showcases the development of 'popular' medicine in America during the nineteenth century, through an extensive range of material that was aimed at the general public rather than medical professionals. Includes an array of sources, including rare books, pamphlets, trade cards, and advertising ephemera.

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.

A collection of over 670 full-text scholarly journals in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Individual journal titles are accessible through the library catalogue (Omni).

Cross-search over 50 indexing, abstracting, and full-text databases in a range of subjects.

Contains thousands of full-text e-books across a variety of disciplines. To display titles accessible to McMaster users, use the "Book Status" filter and select "Owned and subscribed to by my library." 

Individual titles are also listed in McMaster's library catalogue and in the standard ProQuest databases platform.

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 series of old-spelling, SGML-encoded editions of early individual copies of English Renaissance books and manuscripts, and of plain transcriptions of such works, published on the World Wide Web as a free resource for students of the period.

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.

Covers the protest movements, revolutions, and civil wars that have transformed societies and human experience from the 18th century through the early 21st century. Organized around more than thirty events and areas, representing a variety of time periods, regions, and topics, this collection will include at completion 175 hours of video, 100,000 pages of printed materials (personal papers, organizations, government documents, journals, reports, monographs, and speeches), and more than 1,000 images.