Databases & E-Reference Materials

Access biographies of individuals from all eras who have influenced and shaped American history and culture. The portraits reflect the rich diversity of American life from pre-colonial times onwards. Full text is available.

Provides access to over 1,100 periodicals that began publishing between 1740 and 1900, including special interest and general magazines, journals, and other historically significant periodicals. Full text is available.

American Prison Newspapers is an open access collection that brings together hundreds of newspapers published within prisons by incarcerated people over the past 200 years. The collection contains newspapers from prisons in every state, representing penal institutions of all kinds, with special attention paid to women-only institutions.

This database contains primary resources such as radio broadcasts, periodicals, newspapers, and government documents from around the world and provides in depth analysis of the roots and history of the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

Digital archive covering foreign perspectives of American racial issues in the mid-20th century, containing unique primary source documents on racial justice from around the world and providing insight into many important historical events and movements. Built from the Foreign Broadcast Information Service Daily Reports (FBIS) and the Joint Publications Research Service Reports (JPRS).

Provides access to the Everett D. Graff Collection of Western Americana at the Newberry Library in Chicago. Includes a mixture of original manuscripts, maps, artwork, ephemeral material, and rare printed sources. Subjects include frontier life, Native American history and culture, vigilantes and outlaws, the gold rush, the growth of urban centres and railways, the environmental impact of westward expansion and of life in the borderlands, and much more. Full text available.

Provides coverage on the best-known American women writers spanning from colonial days to the present, including biography, criticism, and bibliography for each; also includes lesser-known writers whose work is found in journals, letters, stories, and even hymns. Entries feature an assessment of the writer's works, basic biography and complete bibliography, as well as comprehensive data on writers' names, including pseudonyms, aliases, parents' names and husbands' names, etc.

Examines the diverse peoples of early European civilization through a series of 212 essays, presented in chronological order. Coverage includes prehistoric origins through the early Middle Ages (8000 B.C. to A.D. 1000). Includes maps, photos, and chronologies.

L'Année Philologique is an international bibliography of books, periodical articles, and dissertations that covers works dealing with all aspects of classical antiquity, from prehistory to the Middle Ages.

Provides access to an electronic literary index that covers literary output from 1892-1962, in addition to current records. This database lists monographs, periodical articles, critical editions of literary works, book reviews, collections of essays, and doctoral dissertations published around the world.