American Culture: A Guide to Library Research

Tips for using this collection are available in the Adam Matthew Digital Help Centre.

Includes these collections:
 

• African American Communities
   
• Age of Exploration
   
• America in World War Two
   
• American History
   
• American Indian Histories and Cultures
   
• American West
   
• Apartheid South Africa, 1948 - 1980
   
• Central Asia, Persia and Afghanistan, 1834-1922
   
• Children's Literature and Culture
   
• China, America and the Pacific
   
• China: Culture and Society
   
• China: Trade, Politics and Culture
   
• Church Missionary Society
   
• Colonial America
   
• Confidential Print: Africa
   
• Confidential Print: Latin America
   
• Confidential Print: North America
   
• Defining Gender
   
• Early Modern England
   
• East India Company
   
• Eighteenth Century Drama
   
• Eighteenth Century Journals
   
• Empire Online
   
• Everyday Life and Women in America
   
• First World War
   
• Food and Drink
   
• Foreign Office Files for China
   
• Foreign Office Files for India
   
• Foreign Office Files for Japan
   
• Foreign Office Files for South East Asia
   
• Foreign Office Files for the Middle East
   
• Frontier Life
   
• Gender Identity and Social Change
   
• Gilded Age
   
• Global Commodities
   
• India, Raj and Empire
   
• J Walter Thompson: Advertising America
   
• Jewish Life in America c.1654-1954
   
• Leisure, Travel & Mass Culture
   
• Life at Sea
   
• Literary Manuscripts Berg
   
• Literary Manuscripts Leeds
   
• Literary Print Culture
   
• London Low Life
   
• Macmillan Cabinet Papers
   
• Market Research and American Business
   
• Mass Observation Online
   
• Medical Services and Warfare
   
• Medieval Family Life
   
• Medieval Travel
   
• Meiji Japan
   
• Migration to New Worlds
   
• Nineteenth Century Literary Society: The John Murray Publishing Archive
   
• Perdita Manuscripts
   
• Popular Medicine in America, 1800-1900
   
• Race Relations in America
   
• Research Source - AS:China and Southeast Asia
   
• Research Source - AS:India
   
• Research Source - AS:Japan
   
• Research Source - Business, Economic and Labour History
   
• Research Source - CMS
   
• Research Source - Empire
   
• Research Source - Literary Studies
   
• Research Source - Medieval and Early Modern Studies
   
• Research Source - Missionary Studies
   
• Research Source - Women's Studies
   
• Research Source - World War Two Studies
   
• Romanticism: Life, Literature and Landscape
   
• Service Newspapers of World War 2
   
• Shakespeare In Performance
   
• Shakespeare's Globe Archive
   
• Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice
   
• Socialism on Film: The Cold War
   
• The Grand Tour
   
• The Nixon Years
   
• Trade Catalogues and the American Home
   
• Travel Writing
   
• Victorian Popular Culture
   
• Victorians on Film
   
• Virginia Company Archives
   
• Women in the National Archives
   
• Worlds Fairs

Citations to books, essays, journal articles, and government documents of the United States and Canada. BNNA covers all aspects of native North American culture, history and life. Content range covers sixteenth century through the present. Earliest indexed publication is from 1890; some coverage throughout 20th century; bulk of the collection was published after 1990.

Extensive historical collection of materials on the indigenous peoples of North America. Includes monographs, manuscripts, newspapers, periodicals and photographs. Sources include the National Archives and the Federal Bureau of Investigation Library, the Alaska Indian Language Collection of Gonzaga University, and the W.S. Prettyman photograph collection of Wichita State University.

This database represents the largest compilation ever created of biographical information on indigenous peoples from all areas of North America. North American Indian Thought and Culture contains around 120,000 pages of text and images, including biographies, auto-biographies, personal narratives, speeches, diaries, letters, and oral histories. Particular care has been taken to index this material so that it can be searched thoroughly. Full-length reference works also are included to give background and context to the narratives.

This resource brings together more than 100,000 pages of poetry, fiction, and over 450 plays written in English and Spanish by hundreds of Chicano, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and other Latino authors working in the United States. Among the gems of the collection are nearly 800 items (poems, novels, and plays) that have never been published before. Researchers will also find numerous Chicano folk tales and audio files of selected poems and plays.

Offers rare first-person accounts and seldom-heard voices. It contains 24,838 pages of articles published by interned Japanese-Americans between 1942 and 1945.

The 25 newspapers presented here are sourced from the Library of Congress. Many of the titles in this archive are complete or substantially complete. Editions have been carefully collated and omissions are noted. Although articles in these files frequently appear in Japanese, most of the papers are in English.

Ethnic NewsWatch is a current resource of full-text newspapers, magazines, and journals of the ethnic and minority press, providing researchers access to essential, often overlooked perspectives. It also contains Ethnic NewsWatch: A History, which provides historical coverage of Native American, African American, and Hispanic American periodicals from 1959-1989.

Ethnicity & Culture Magazine Archive contains the backfiles of more than thirty 20th and 21st-century magazines, each aimed at ethnically specific audiences. Titles range from political publications to those concerned with lifestyle, fashion / beauty, culture, and identity. The collection reflects diverse voices and gives insight into cultural perspectives, societal shifts, and historical events. Titles are presented in color page-image format with article-level metadata and searchable text.

Searchable handbooks, manuals, textbooks, etiquette guides, self-help books, instructional pamphlets, and how-to books of instructional, prescriptive, behavioral, and etiquette literature that defined standards of personal conduct for millions of Americans and reflected the prevailing social mores across the twentieth century. When complete, the collection will contain 150,000 pages that illustrate both how Americans actually behaved and how they felt they ought to behave.