American Culture

The collection presents multiple aspects of the African American community through personal diaries and scrapbooks, pamphlets, newspapers and periodicals, correspondence, official records and in-depth oral histories, revealing the prevalent challenges of racism, discrimination and integration, and a unique African American culture and identity.

Rare printed documents that were never intended to last. Includes notices, advertisements, playbills, music programs, menus, greeting cards, sailing cards, cookbooks, stamps and more, providing a unique perspective on early American life.

The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History holds one of the outstanding collections on American history. It is full of spectacular individual items, but it also has rich veins of manuscript research material. This makes it ideal for teaching survey courses on American history, but equally valuable as a platform for undergraduate essay work and postgraduate research.

Contains the following modules:
• Module I: Settlement, Commerce, Revolution and Reform: 1493-1859
• Module II: Civil War, Reconstruction and the Modern Era: 1860-1945

Upon completion, American History in Video will contain over 5700 documentary films and newsreels (over 2000 hours) of significant events in U.S. history, in streaming video. Each film includes a transcript. Clips and playlists can be created, saved and shared. Videos can be downloaded to an Apple OS or Android phone, good for 48 hours.

Contains nearly a million collection descriptions contributed by thousands of libraries, museums, and archives. A combination of brief descriptions derived from catalog records in the RLG Union Catalog, and more detailed archival finding aids harvested from the Internet, including those that conform to the EAD (Encoded Archival Description) format standard.

Includes collections in the following areas:

• Civil Rights and the Black Freedom Struggle
• Southern Life, Slavery, and the Civil War
• American Indians and the American West
• American Politics and Society
• International Relations and Military Conflicts
• Women's Studies
• Workers and Labor Unions

American Memory is a digital record of American history and creativity, providing free and open access to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience. These materials, from the collections of the Library of Congress and other institutions, chronicle historical events, people, places, and ideas that continue to shape America, serving the public as a resource for education and lifelong learning.

This text collection consists of over 4,700 plays published in the United States from the early nineteenth century to its close. Included within Nineteenth-Century American Drama: Popular Culture & Entertainment, 1820-1900 are hundreds of annotated copies of prompt books and manuscripts that serve to reveal the changing intentions of authors and the artistic views of directors. Also included is a wide variety of works, such as historical plays, melodramas, political satires, minstrel shows, comic operas, musical extravaganzas, parlor entertainments, adaptations of novels, and many others. The resource seeks to shed light on areas of study generally supported to this point only by imprints and newspapers: daily life in the United States; politics, both local and national; culture in all of its forms; and the shifting and evolving tastes of Americans from across the country.

Documents the history of "popular" remedies and treatments in nineteenth century America, through primary source materials drawn from the extensive collections at the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Emphasis is on material that was aimed at the general public rather than medical professionals. Explore an array of printed sources, including rare books, pamphlets, trade cards, and visually-rich advertising ephemera. The material covers popular trends such as phrenology, herbal medicine and hydrotherapy, and documents the rise of widespread advertising by commercial manufacturers of medical aids.

Based at Fisk University from 1943-1970, the Race Relations Department and its annual Institute were set up by the American Missionary Association to investigate problem areas in race relations and develop methods for educating communities and preventing conflict.

Documenting three pivotal decades in the fight for civil rights, this resource compiles the speeches, reports, surveys and analyses produced by the Department’s staff and Institute participants, including Charles S. Johnson, Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., and Thurgood Marshall.

Sanborn maps, large-scale plans of a city or town, were created to assist fire insurance companies assess the risk associated with insuring a particular property. This collection includes 660,000 maps of more than 12,000 American towns and cities.

Sanborn maps are large-scale plans of American cities and towns, created 1867-1970. They were created to assist fire insurance companies to assess the risk associated with insuring a property. The maps were drawn at a scale of 50 feet to one inch. ProQuest Sanborn Maps Geo Edition provides geo-coding and indexing by address for a selection of Sanborn maps. Searching can be done by address or by latitutde/longitude coordinates. Maps from different years can be layered, including modern maps using the Google Map interface.

Eight states are included: Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

Cities included: Baltimore, Boston, Charlotte, Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Newark, Philadelphia, Richmond, Seattle and Washington DC.

For other all areas use Sanborn Maps 1867-1970, without geo-coding.

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.

North American Indigenous journalism spanning two centuries with this major digital resource. Featuring publications from a range of communities, with an extensive list of periodicals produced in the United States and Canada, including Alaska and Hawaii, from 1828 to 2016.

Languages represented include English, Chinuk Wawa, Dakota, Diné Bizaad, Lakota, Sm'algyax, and Ōlelo Hawaiʻi.

Full-text access to the complete backfile of the Detroit News, going back to 1873. Important notes about searching the Detroit News:

• Page images are available for the years 1873-1988
• When searching for content or topics between or relevant to 1873-1988, do NOT use the drop-down menu options under "Select a Field" in the Advanced Search. No article-level metadata is included for these years (i.e., there are no headlines, bylines, section headings, etc., identified). Use the default search options.
• Some web-only content is included (2005-current)

Drawn from the special collections of participating libraries, these periodicals were produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press, and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century.

Independent Voices is made possible by the funding support received from libraries and donors across the U.S., Canada and the U.K. Through their funding, these libraries and donors are demonstrating their commitment to open access digital collections. Full access to Independent Voices is available exclusively to funding libraries through December 2018. The collection will become entirely open access in January 2019.

From its birth immediately following the Civil War to its re-awakening inspired by the film Birth of a Nation in 1915 through today’s fractured organizations using the Klan’s name, the Ku Klux Klan has occupied a persistent place in American society. At its peak in 1924, Klan-paid membership exceeded 4,000,000 and its national newspaper, the Imperial Night-Hawk, had a circulation larger than the New York Times.

Includes the following:
• Architectural Digest Archive, 1922-2011
• Bloomberg BusinessWeek Archive, 1929-2000
• Esquire Magazine Archive, 1933-2014
• Forbes Archive, 1917-2000
• Fortune Magazine Archive, 1930-2000
• Life Magazine Archive, 1936-2000
• The Nation Archive, 1865-present
• National Review Archive, 1955-present
• The New Republic Archive, 1914-present
• People Magazine Archive, 1974-2000
• Sports Illustrated Magazine Archive, 1954-2000
• Time Magazine Archive, 1923-2000

Includes:
• Arizona Republican (1890-1922)
• Atlanta Constitution (1868-1984)
• Atlanta Daily World (1931-2003)‎ *
• Baltimore Afro-American (1893-1988) *
•‎ Baltimore Sun (1837-1922)
• Chicago Defender (1909-1975) *
• Chicago Tribune (1849-1994)
• Christian Science Monitor (1908-2004)
• Cincinnati Enquirer‎ (1841-1922)
• Cleveland Call and Post‎ (1934-1991) *
• Dayton Daily News‎ (1831-1999)
• Detroit Free Press (1831-1922)‎
• The Guardian (1821-2003) & The Observer (1791-2003)‎
• Jerusalem Post (1932-2008)‎
• Los Angeles Sentinel (1934-2005) *
• Los Angeles Times (1881-1994)
• Louisville Courier Journal‎ (1830-1922)
• Nashville Tennessean‎ (1812-1922)
•‎ New York Amsterdam News (1922-1993) *
• New York Times (1851-2014)‎
•‎ Norfolk Journal and Guide (1916-2003)
•‎ Philadelphia Tribune (1912-2001)
• Pittsburgh Courier (1911-2002) *
•‎ South China Morning Post‎ (1903-1998)
•‎ Wall Street Journal (1889-2000)‎
• Washington Post (1877-2001)‎

All the newspapers can be searched individually or in combinations in this database. They are listed separately in the A-Z list as "Historical Newspapers: Title." Newspapers noted with * are also searchable in the database Black Historical Newspapers.

Includes the following collections, which can also be searched separately:
• Religious Periodicals for Women, Children, and Families, 1804-1878
• Women’s Periodicals of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century, 1733-1844
• Women’s Periodicals of the Nineteenth Century, 1845-1865
• Women’s Periodicals of the Nineteenth Century, 1866-1891