Databases

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

Includes nearly 3,000 poems written by African-American poets in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Over 40,000 poems by more than 200 American poets from the Colonial Period to the early twentieth century.

Compiled by the Modern Humanities Research Association, ABELL is a key bibliographical source for English studies.  It indexes monographs, periodical articles, critical editions of literary works, book reviews, essay collections and dissertations published worldwide on English language and literature.

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.

This edition of Asian American Drama contains 252 plays by 42 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. Some 50% of these plays have never been published before. The database also includes selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays.

A still-growing list of scholarship about 738 recovered writers and located texts, canonical and non-canonical. The bibliography identifies many hitherto unknown writers, including among them not only already familiar figures, but also women refugees such as the recusants, women in the colonies, Marrano women (Anusot), women translators, and English women writers in French, Greek, Latin, Spanish, Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic and Welsh.  While "comprehensiveness" remains the ideal goal of the bibliography, in the case of some particularly famous women, like Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart, listings are limited to materials connected to these women's writings, rather than their lives.

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

Contains approximately 1200 plays from the mid-1800s to the present by more than 200 playwrights from North America, English-speaking Africa, the Caribbean, and other African diaspora countries. Some 440 of the plays are published here for the first time, including a number by major authors. 

British Literary Manuscripts Online c.1660-1900 provides an intimate look into the lives and works of Britain’s major writers across more than two hundred years. From the rise of Charles II to the death of Queen Victoria British Literary Manuscripts Online c.1660-1900 contains complete facsimile copies of author manuscripts including poems,plays, and novels, diaries and letters as well as drawings and handwritten drafts. The collection traces the development of literary movements from the classicism of Pope and Johnson to the Romanticism of Wordsworth and the gothic novels of the Brontës.

British Periodicals provides access to the searchable full text of British periodicals from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century (the same periodicals as are covered in the UMI microfilm collection "Early British Periodicals"). It includes millions of high-resolution facsimile page images. Subject areas covered include literature, philosophy, history, science, the fine arts and the social sciences.

Provides over 200 fulltext French-language journals in the disciplines of economics, law, history and geography, literature and linguistics, psychology, education, political science, sociology, and sport.

"Retrouvez sur ce site 44 697 articles parus depuis 2001 dans 161 revues de recherche et de débat. Les archives sont en accès gratuit, ainsi que les résumés, sommaires et plans d'articles, et le texte intégral de certains articles récents."

Cambridge Companions are a series of guides to major writers, artists, philosophers, topics, and periods. With over 600 titles and 4,000 essays, it offers subject or theme based cross-searchable collections, available in three sub-collections: Cambridge Companions to Literature and Classics, Cambridge Companions to Philosophy, Religion and Culture, and Cambridge Companions to Music.

Cambridge Histories is a series reference works of over 400 volumes spanning fifteen subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, with a concentration on political and cultural history, literature, philosophy, religious studies, music and the arts.

Cambridge is a not-for-profit publisher dedicated to the world-wide dissemination of knowledge across a wide range of subject areas, and currently publishes over 380 peer-reviewed academic journals covering subjects across the humanities, social sciences and science, technology and medicine. As well as those journals owned by the Press itself, they publish on behalf of over 100 learned and professional societies.

Includes content from a broad range of Canadian sources including scholarly journals, magazines, reports, news, radio & television transcripts and dissertations. Useful for research on hundreds of topics in the fields of business, science and technology, medicine, humanities and the arts.

The collection includes more than 100,000 pages of poems, drama, novels, stories, and related material—carefully located and secured from archives and rare book libraries, licensed from local publishing houses, and received from the authors themselves.

More than a million and a half Africans, along with many Indians and South Asians, were brought to the Caribbean between the 15th and 19th centuries. Today, their descendants are active in literature and the arts, producing literature with strong and direct ties to traditional African expressions. This literary connection, combined with the tales of survival, exile, resistance, endurance, and emigration to other parts of the Americas, makes for a body of work that is essential for the study of the Caribbean and the Black Diaspora.

Founded in 1974 in Trinidad & Tobago, Banyan Productions was the first television producer of innovative and entertaining programs for, about, and by the Caribbean people and culture. Banyan’s mission was to provide the Caribbean people with the means to tell their stories to one anotherwithout influence from the outside world. Now, for the first time, those stories will be available on the Alexander Street platform.

With a mixture of history, entertainment, and social commentary, Banyan has produced a film library  covering documentary, drama, music, dance, and much more, spanning the past forty years.

Previously inaccessible in streaming format, this collection features more than 1,100 hours of edited programs along with unedited footage that will enhance study across a host of disciplines and subjects, including: Caribbean Studies, Black Studies, History, Anthropology, Sociology, Religion, Visual Arts, Dance, Music, Literature, Theatre and Media Studies.

Articles from key Canadian journals, magazines and newspapers. Multidisciplinary database with selected full-text.

A bio-bibliographical database that includes notable Canadian English-language women writers who published before 1950, their audience and genre ranging from travel journalism and scientific writing to poetry and fiction.

Brings together approximately 50,000 images of original manuscript and printed material, including a strong core of documents from the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Ephemeral material such as ballads, cartoons and pamphlets is featured alongside diaries, advice literature, medical journals, conduct books and periodicals. The database is structured into five thematic sections:

• Conduct and Politeness
• Domesticity and the Family 
• Consumption and Leisure
• Education and Sensibility
• The Body

Streaming video collection of independent, social-issue and environmental films from renowned leaders in documentary film distribution, including titles from Bullfrog Films, Collective Eye, GOOD DOCS, Women Make Movies, and many others.

EEBO contains page images of almost every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1470-1700.  From the first book printed in English through to the ages of Spenser, Shakespeare and of the English Civil War, EEBO's content draws on authoritative and respected short-title catalogues of the period and features a substantial number of text transcriptions. 

The Text Creation Partnership, which provides highly searchable versions of the texts, made the first 25,000 works freely available in 2015.  This interface, at the University of Michigan, allows proximity and boolean searching within the available works, but does not search the full EEBO database.  

Over 200 complete works in fictional prose from the period 1500-1700.

Provides access to works printed in Europe before 1701, bringing together a diverse array of printed sources, regardless of language, as well as works published further afield. Full-color, high-resolution facsimile images of some of the world's most significant collections of early printed books in Europe are included. McMaster has access to Collection 3, 5, 6, 10 and 12 of Early European Books.

ECCO provides online access to every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom between 1701 and 1800, along with thousands of important works from the Americas. Content consists of books, pamphlets, broadsides, ephemera, and more.

McMaster has purchased both ECCO and the update, ECCO II, giving us access to over 180,000 titles (200,000 volumes).  Subject coverage includes history, literature, religion, law, fine arts, and science.

Brings together rare journals printed between c1680 and 1816, illuminating all aspects of eighteenth-century social, political and literary life. Many are ephemeral, lasting only for a handful of issues, others run for several years. Topics covered are extremely wide-ranging and include: the writings of Sir Isaac Newton; the French Revolution; reviews of literature and fashion throughout Europe; political debates; and coffee house gossip and discussion.

Includes 96 complete works in English prose from the period 1700-1780, by writers from the British Isles. Includes a scanned version of Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and two different editions of Richardson's Clarissa and Pamela and of Swift's Gulliver's Travels.

Lists over 480,000 items published between 1473 and 1800 mainly in Britain and North America mainly, but not exclusively, in English from the collections of the British Library and over 2,000 other libraries.  Also see Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) for full-text.