Category Archives: LG1789

American magazines

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In a previous post, I described how to find digitised magazine archives via Google Books, and I have also previously blogged about newspaper sources available in Oxford, but have not yet written about what American magazines are available here. Following our purchase of three political magazine archives earlier in the year, it seems a good time to rectify that!

In this post:

Online archives

Our major online source for American magazine archives is American Periodicals. This database covers 1740-1943 and contains over 1,500 titles. These magazines are wide-ranging in focus, from political and current affairs titles, to women’s and children’s magazines, literary and scientific journals, and all sorts of other interests. Particular highlights include runs of Benjamin Franklin’s General Magazine, Ladies’ Home Journal, Vanity Fair, The Century Magazine, The Dial, Puck, and McClure’s among many others. Access is available to Oxford users via OxLIP+, on the ProQuest platform. If you are used to using the newspaper archives of the New York Times, Washington Post and others, the search interface will be familiar, and you can cross-search American Periodicals with these newspaper archives. As well as searching for individual articles, you can search and browse the list of titles included by clicking on the ‘publications’ link:

American Periodicals Also available via ProQuest is the complete archive of American Vogue from 1892 to the present, which can again be cross-searched with American Periodicals and the newspaper archives available via ProQuest.

To cross-search ProQuest titles, click on the ‘searching 1 database’ link in the blue bar at the top of the screen. This will open up a list of all the ProQuest databases the Bodleian Libraries subscribe to. You can select as many of these as you like and, on clicking ‘use selected databases’, you will be taken to a generic search screen which will allow you to search across all the ones you chose at once.

Cross-searching on ProQuestAs previously mentioned, earlier this year we subscribed to three new online magazine archives: those of The Nation (1865-), National Review (1955-) and The New Republic (1914-). These are three of the most significant American political magazines of the twentieth century (and earlier, in the case of The Nation), covering both sides of the political spectrum. All three are available via OxLIP+ on the EBSCO platform, and as with the ProQuest titles above, can be cross-searched with each other. To do this, click on the ‘choose databases’ link just above the search boxes and, as with ProQuest, you will then be presented with a list of all the EBSCO databases we have access to to select from.

Cross-searching on EBSCOAs well as these three, we also have access to CQ Weekly courtesy of the Rothermere American Institute, directly from their website at http://www.cq.com/displayweekly.do from 1983-. It’s not immediately obvious how to get to the back issues beyond the past few years from their website, but if you go to the advanced search screen you will find that you can search the archives back to 1983.

Other magazine archives can often be found in larger journal collections, such as JSTOR or Periodicals Archive Online, or in odd cases, in various other online collections, for example Commonweal in Literature Online (1992-) or The New Yorker in the Shakespeare Collection from 2002-.

If you are looking for magazines dating from before the 1920s, it’s well worth searching some of the major websites for free digitised materials, such as the Hathi Trust, Internet Archive and the Library of Congress’s American Memory site. You can also find a huge number of 19th century journals in the Making of America sites hosted at Cornell and the University of Michigan.

Alternatively, for recent years, there are a few large databases, mostly business or legal collections, which contain back issues of a surprising number of American magazines:

  • ABI/INFORM: The American Enterprise (1994-2006), The American Prospect (1996-), The Atlantic (1986-), Forbes (1992-2006), Foreign Policy (1994-), The New Republic (1988-), Newsweek (1998-2012), Policy Review (1994-2013), The Public Interest (1988-2005), Scientific American (1986-), US News & World Report (2010-), The Washington Monthly (1988-)
  • Business Source Complete: The American Enterprise (1994-2006), Bloomberg Businessweek (1996-2010), Forbes (1990-), Foreign Affairs (1964-), Foreign Policy (1990-), Fortune (1992-), The New Republic (1990-), Newsweek (1990-2002), Policy Review (1990-), The Public Interest (1990-2005), Time (1990-), US News & World Report (1990-2010)
  • Factiva: Forbes (1992-), Foreign Affairs (1999-), Newsweek (1994-), The New Yorker (2005-), The Weekly Standard (1997-2010)
  • Nexis UK: The American Prospect (1992-), The American Spectator (1994-), Bloomberg Businessweek (1975-), The Christian Science Monitor (1980-), Ebony 1984-), Foreign Affairs (1982-), Human Events (2006-), The National Interest (1993-), National Review (1998-), The New Republic (1994-), New York (2005-), Slate (1996-), US News & World Report (1975-), The Weekly Standard (1994-)
  • vLex Global: The American Conservative (2007-), The American Prospect (2004-), The American Spectator (2004-), Commonweal (2009-), Human Events (2009-), Mother Jones (2004-), The National Interest (1993-), Policy Review (2004-), The Progressive (1993-), Reason (1993-), Saturday Evening Post (1984-)

All of these databases may be found via OxLIP+ and there should be records on SOLO for the individual titles as well. Note that these archives may not be comprehensive and in most cases, are not digitised versions of the print issues but just provide access to the text of the articles.

Printed and microfilm collections in Oxford

As well as the various online archives, there are a lot of American magazines available in print or on microfilm in the Vere Harmsworth, Bodleian, or other Oxford libraries. Several key titles are listed in the newspapers section of our online guide, and below I’ve listed a selection of titles where Oxford has a more extensive run available in print or on microfilm than may be found online through one of the archives above. Note that for some titles, the Bodleian holds the European or International edition rather than the US one; this should be indicated in the record on SOLO.

  • The American Enterprise: VHL 1990-2000, Nuffield 1990-1998. Previous title was Public Opinion, held in Nuffield 1978-1988. Also available online via ABI/INFORM and Business Source Complete from 1994-2006.
  • The Atlantic/The Atlantic Monthly: Bodleian 1857- (not necessarily complete). Title changes frequently so there are many records on SOLO. Also available online via Making of America (1857-1901), ABI/INFORM (1986-)
  • Collier’s/Collier’s Weekly/Collier’s Once a Week: Bodleian 1889-1890, 1902, 1905-1919
  • Commonweal: Bodleian 1947-1991. Also available online via Literature Online 1992- and vLex Global 2009-.
  • The Christian Science Monitor: Radcliffe Science Library 1975-2000, 2005-. Also available online via Nexis UK 1980-.
  • Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report/CQ Weekly: VHL 1953-2007. Also available online via cq.com 1983-.
  • Dissent: Bodleian 1954-1980, Social Science Library 1981-
  • Ebony: VHL 1958-2008. Also available online via Nexis UK 1984- and Google Books 1959-2008.
  • Fortune: Bodleian 1930-1943, 1953-1959, 1963-1978. Also available online via Business Source Complete 1992-.
  • Harper’s/Harper’s Magazine/Harper’s Monthly Magazine/Harper’s New Monthly Magazine: Bodleian 1880-, English Faculty Library 1880-1903, 1908-1909. Also available online via Making of America 1850-1899 and the Hathi Trust (various 19th century volumes).
  • Harper’s Weekly: VHL 1861-1865
  • Life: Bodleian 1936-1938, 1944-1955. Also available online via Google Books 1953-1972.
  • Monthly Review: Social Science Library 1965-2002, 2004-
  • The National Interest: VHL 1985-. Also available online via Nexis UK and vLex Global 1993-.
  • National Journal: VHL 1977-
  • Newsweek/News-week: Bodleian 1949-. Also available via Nexis UK 1975-, Business Source Complete 1990-2012, Factiva 1994- and ABI/INFORM 1998-2012.
  • New York: VHL 1969-1970. Available online via Google Books 1975-1997 and Nexis UK 2005-.
  • New York Review of Books: Bodleian (Lower Gladstone Link) 1963-, English Faculty Library 1968-1976, 1994-, VHL 2007-
  • The New Yorker: Bodleian 1925-. Also available online via the Shakespeare Collection 2002- and Factiva 2005-.
  • Political Affairs/The Communist/The New Masses/The Liberator/The Masses: Bodleian 1911-2008
  • The Progressive/Follette’s Magazine/La Follette’s: VHL 1948-1982
  • Rolling Stone: Bodleian 1971-1976
  • Saturday Evening Post: Bodleian 1900-1963. Also available online via American Periodicals 1821-1830, 1836-1885 and vLex Global 1984-.
  • Time: Bodleian 1943-. Also available online via Business Source Complete 1990-.
  • US News & World Report/United States News: VHL 1940-2010. Also available online via Nexis UK 1975-, Business Source Complete 1990-2010 and ABI/INFORM 2010-.

In addition to these, we also have a specific collection of African American magazines from the early to mid 20th century. These are available as microfiche/films in the VHL (shelfmarks Micr. USA 397-422) and include: African: a Journal of African Affairs (1937-1948), Alexander’s Magazine (1905-1909), The Brown American (1936-1945), Color Line (1946-1947), The Colored American Magazine (1900-1901), Competitor (1920-1921), Crisis (1910-1940), Fire!! (1926), Half-Century Magazine (1916-1925), Harlem Quarterly (1949-1950), Messenger (1917-1928), The National Negro Voice (1941), Negro Educational Review (1950-1965), Negro Farmer and Messenger (1914-1918), Negro Music Journal (1902-1903), The Negro Needs Education (1935-1936), The Negro Quarterly (1942-1943), Negro Story (1944-1946), New Challenge (1934, 1937), Quarterly Review of Higher Education Among Negroes (1933-1960), Race (1935-1936), The Southern Frontier (1940-1945), The Tuskegee Messenger (1924-1936) and The Voice of the Negro (1904-1907).

Finding magazines on SOLO

It can be tricky to find magazines on SOLO if you’re not sure exactly what you’re looking for, particularly if they have relatively generic titles such as Time or The Nation. Titles often change at various points in a magazine’s history which adds a further layer of complication. There are a couple of things you can do which can help you when searching SOLO for any given magazine:

  • Use the limit your search filter under the main search box to restrict your search to journals.
  • Check the date ranges carefully in the record. Note that the dates given will be for that specific title; if the journal you are looking for changed its title, even slightly, there will be a new record on SOLO for each time it does. The way to find this out is to look in the details tab of the record where you will see previous/subsequent titles listed as related titles. Unfortunately these aren’t links that you can then click on, but it will at least tell you what you need to search for!

Here’s a screenshot for a search for The Atlantic Monthly which illustrates these points. This is a particularly extreme example of title changes resulting in multiple records!

The Atlantic - title changes

Finding articles in magazines

Finding the magazines themselves is all very well, but particularly for those which are only available in print or microfilm, it can be a time-consuming process to work through indexes and tables of contents hunting for articles you might be interested in. One key resource to help you locate articles in American magazines and journals is the Readers’ Guide. This has been published since 1901 (with coverage back to 1890) and indexes articles in a huge number of American magazines and journals by subject. We have the printed volumes available in the library from 1900-1969, and also have access to the fully searchable online version which covers 1890-1982. You can get to this via OxLIP+, and when you click through, the search interface will look familiar if you are used to using either America: History & Life or the archives of The Nation, National Review and The New Republic as it is also provided by EBSCO. This means that the Readers’ Guide can be cross-searched with these if you follow the instructions above, and it will also provide access to the full text of articles in those three magazine archives, as well as some other titles it indexes.

When searching the Readers’ Guide, there are several useful features that can help you narrow down your results and find the articles you need. You can limit your results to those where the full text is available, or filter them to see articles from magazines or academic journals or other types of publication. You can also filter by individual publication itself, which can be helpful if you know what magazines are available to you here in Oxford. Any of these can be done pre- or post-searching (see screenshots below). And even if the articles you want are not available in full text within the database, you can use the Find it @ Oxford button next to any record to click through to see if that article is available to you via another means, such as one of the other online collections, or kick off a search in SOLO to look for the print. Readers' Guide search screenrgpl

Elections resources on the web

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With the elections now just a few days away, I thought I’d share a few links to useful and/or interesting websites relating to both historic and recent elections in the United States. This is a fairly random selection of sites that I have come across; feel free to share any sites I’ve missed in the comments!

As evidenced by our own US Elections Campaigns Archive (of which you can see some images on Flickr), US elections produce a wealth of ephemera. Unfortunately The Smithsonian has not digitised their collection, but Cornell University have a substantial archive of political Americana online, including a lot of campaign materials covering 1840-1952. More locally, the University of Maryland has digitised a collection of campaign materials donated by Professor Larry Gibson, who worked on campaigns at both state and national level from 1968 to 2008.  

Of course, campaigns are also fought on less physical media than the literature, posters, buttons and other random objects contained in such collections. The Museum of the Modern Image has a fantastic archive of more than 300 presidential campaign TV commercials from 1952 right up to the present elections, all of which can be viewed online and browsed by year, issue, and type of commercial, showing for example commercials where a candidates own words are being used against him, or which are intended to play on fears (including arguably the most famous campaign commercial of all, the 1964 “Daisy” commerical for Lyndon B Johnson). Campaigns keep up with the evolving media, and the Library of Congress has been archiving election-related websites from 2000.

Moving away from the campaign-controlled media, the Commission on Presidential Debates has a debate history section on their website, with basic information on early debates (1858, 1948, 1956), and transcripts and videos for all debates from 1960 to present. 

I’ve written on this blog before about Chronicling America, the Library of Congress’s website for digitised historic American newspapers. As well as the digitised newspapers themselves, they provide topic pages with links directly through to selected articles, and the list of topics includes several presidential elections/campaigns: Cleveland (1892), McKinley (1896), McKinley-Roosevelt (1900), Roosevelt (1904), Taft (1908), and Wilson (1912). Chronicling America unfortunately stops in 1922, due to US copyright law, but if you are an Oxford reader interested in looking at historic elections through newspapers then we do subscribe to the electronic archives of both the New York Times and Washington Post, available through SOLO/OxLIP+. Another nice media-related resource for 19th/early 20th century elections is the Harper’s Weekly Presidential Elections page, which provides digitised images of cartoons from Harper’s Weekly and other similar journals from 1860-1912.

If you’re more interested in the data side of things, there are a couple of useful sites which provide all sorts of voting statistics and other electoral data. Working backwards chronologically, the Roper Center’s public opinion archives has a US elections collection which includes all sorts of polling data for presidential elections from 1976- (and popular vote information from 1940-2008), and for congressional elections from 1994-. The Roper Center also provide the iPoll database, available to Oxford readers via SOLO/OxLIP+, which is a hugely comprehensive database of all sorts of opinion poll data from the 1930s to the present day. You can browse iPoll by topic, and polling data for the 2012 elections is available from as recently as a few days ago. The Voting America site from the University of Richmond covers 1840-2008, and offers a whole variety of interactive maps to explore electoral data. And finally, for the really early years, A New Nation Votes from Tufts University provides a searchable collection of election returns from 1787-1825

Finding primary sources on the web for US history: some tips

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A busy few months have meant little time for blogging, but I find myself with a slight lull on a Friday afternoon at long last! The History Thesis Fair for 2nd year undergraduates is also fast approaching, and it seems timely therefore to put together a post which might help in answering one of the questions that I most frequently get asked by undergraduates considering writing their thesis on some aspect of US history: is it possible to find sufficient primary source material without travelling to the United States?

Obviously we do subscribe to many extensive electronic resources that provide a wealth of primary source material, and we also have a substantial collection of primary sources available on microfilm in the library, but increasingly you are by no means limited to what we have purchased here in Oxford. The amount of primary source material that is being digitised and made freely available on the web by all sorts of institutions, organisations, and people in the US is vast, growing, and transformative. This whole area could fill several blog posts and still only scratch the surface, but what I will do here is provide some tips and suggestions for places to start looking beyond just throwing your search terms into Google and hoping you strike lucky. I will aim to follow up with more detailed posts on some of the resources mentioned here over the next few months.

Firstly, a plug for what we’ve been doing at the VHL to help our readers find useful web resources. We have a page on a site called Delicious which we use to save links to websites that we find as and when we come across them. It would be well worth checking our delicious page for the subject or area that you are interested in first to see what we have already found – you can search or use the tags on the right-hand side of the page to filter the full list to more relevant links for you. Delicious can also be a useful site to search in general. If you haven’t come across it before, it is a site entirely devoted to lists of useful websites created by its users; anything you find on Delicious has been consciously and deliberately saved by someone, and therefore evaluated at least to a certain extent, so you can perhaps be a little more confident in its quality than just from a random Google search. Other libraries are also using Delicious to create and maintain lists of free web resources too – the History Faculty Library has a page too, for example.

A strategic way to approach your search for primary source material on the web is to think about it in terms of the libraries, archives, and other institutions that are likely to be the homes for the originals. Almost all of these institutions are engaged in some kind of digitisation to a greater or lesser extent; you may not be able to travel to them physically but it’s amazing what you can find by visiting them virtually. The websites of the Library of Congress and US National Archives are both wonderful places to start. The Library of Congress have extensive digital collections available at http://www.loc.gov/library/libarch-digital.html (click on the ‘Digital Collections’ button at the top of their homepage), including American Memory (numerous themed historic collections on all sorts of topics), Chronicling America (historic newspapers – see the earlier post on this blog for more information) and Prints & Photographs. They also have a huge list of thematic bibliographies and guides at http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/bibhome.html to help you navigate their collections (both physical and digital) as well as pointing out to other useful online resources from elsewhere. The National Archives have less material on their main website, but are making thousands of digitised sources available on other, dedicated sites such as DocsTeach (aimed at teachers and schools) and the Digital Vaults, and subscription-based sites such as Fold3 (which has a military/veterans focus).

Other institutions are all doing the same kind of thing. If you’re interested in a particular geographical location, start with the website for the relevant State Historical Association or major universities in the area; many states also have digital library programs, designed to provide access to digitised resources from many different institutions throughout the state on a single website. Examples are Calisphere (for California), Digital Commonwealth (Massachusetts), LOUISiana Digital Library, Digital NC (North Carolina), the Portal to Texas History, and so on. These kind of sites are particularly good for documents such as letters and diaries, photographs, oral history, audiovisual materials, and maps. An earlier post on this blog gives pointers to some places to look for historic American newspapers online.

Likewise, if your area is political history, particularly for 20th century Presidents, the website of the relevant Presidential Library would be a good place to start. Some of them, like the JFK Library, are engaged in particularly extensive digitisation projects. If you’re looking for material on Presidents and their administrations, the Miller Center at the University of Virginia have a really good reference resource arranged by President on their website which points to all sorts of sources both from their own collections and elsewhere on the web.

As well as looking for digitised collections, another good tip is to search for exhibitions, either fully online ones or websites set up to accompany physical exhibitions, such as those listed on the Library of Congress or National Archives websites. Exhibitions are a big driver of digitisation, but tend to be more narrowly focused on their theme than the kind of material you may find in the more extensive digital collections portals.
Another tip is to look at the various social media profiles of many of these institutions, as these are often used for outreach and promotion with digitised materials frequently posted. As well as Facebook and Twitter pages, look at institutional profiles on sites such as Flickr, Tumblr, and YouTube. Flickr has a project called the Flickr Commons, where many libraries and archives are uploading their historic photographs and other images. An excellent example on Tumblr is Today’s Document from the National Archives. There are also some fantastic mash-up sites such as Old Maps Online and HistoryPin which overlay historic maps and photographs from all sorts of institutions onto Google maps, for example.

There are a few things to be aware of when looking for and making use of free web resources though. Unlike library-purchased e-resources, you will often find that these are not full-text searchable and are often just images; you may well have to decipher handwriting and may not be able to easily find which particular page of a document is going to be relevant to your needs. The cataloguing can be less extensive as well, and you may have to rely on browsing through the documents and images rather than expecting to find what you want by searching. And what is freely available can be rather hit-and-miss itself. While it’s true that there is now a huge amount of material available in this way, it’s still a tiny drop in the ocean, and so you may be lucky and find a lot for your topic, or you may find that there’s hardly anything relevant to your particular area of research. It’s always worth having a look though! And if you come across something useful that we don’t have on our Delicious list, please let us know so that we can save it for others to find too.

Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, 1836-1922

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Yesterday we had a visit from Deborah Thomas from the National Digital Newspaper Program at the Library of Congress, who gave a presentation on the Library’s Chronicling America website. I thought I’d write up my notes from her presentation here for anyone who was unable to attend and also for future reference.

About Chronicling America and the National Digital Newspaper Program

Chronicling America (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov) is a website that provides access to digitised pages of selected American newspapers from 1836-1922, and is hosted and maintained by the Library of Congress as part of the National Digital Newspaper Program. This program is a partnership between the Library and the National Endowment for the Humanities and has been running since 2005. It funds state projects to digitise historic newspapers from this time period (each grant funds the digitisation of 100,000 pages), which are then made available through the Chronicling America site. The program builds on the earlier United States Newspaper Program, which inventoried, catalogued and microfilmed some 75 million pages from 140,000 historic American newspapers over a period of 25 years. The current programme aims to make a representative sample of those pages available online – right now there are almost 4.3 million pages from 25 states (and the District of Columbia), and it is hoped that eventually (within 15-20 years) all states will be covered.  The latest three states to join in are Indiana, North Dakota, and West Virginia, and their content will start to be made available next Spring.  This state-specific approach is driven by the nature of newspaper publishing and newspaper collections in the United States – local institutions have the most comprehensive collections for their area, and there is no single national US newspaper collection as in many other countries. However, aggregating the content in the website at a national level provides a much better and more accessible online service to researchers, and this is one of the main goals of the project.

Each state is responsible for selecting the newspapers and editions that they will digitise, and so the type of content that you will find within the site varies from state to state. Some have picked long runs of a few large papers; others have picked a lot of smaller titles – Kentucky, for example, wanted to ensure that each of their eighty counties were represented in their sample.  As part of the process, the contributing institutions were asked to write short essays for each newspaper title that they digitised, explaining why they chose that title and its significance and context – these essays are all available as part of the bibliographic record for the title within the US Newspaper Directory (of which more later in this post), so you can see the rationale behind what could otherwise seem like a fairly arbitrary sample.

The material being digitised is all within the date range of 1836-1922.  The end date is determined by US copyright law, whose threshold is 1923 – all content from before that date is in the public domain and may therefore be freely digitised and made available by the Library in this way, whereas anything more recent would require the permission of a complicated network of rights-holders.  This does mean that you are able to download, copy and re-use any of the content from the site entirely freely yourself!  The start date is rather more arbitrary, but was chosen because of the increasing difficulty of digitising the older material and because the format of newspapers changes and is less consistent the further back in time you go.

Searching the site

The Chronicling America interface provides several different routes in to access the content. On the main page you will find a search bar which defaults to the basic full-text search – this allows you to search for terms and restrict your search to a specific state and/or date range. The search box here acts as a proximity search, so if you put more than one term in it will search for instances where those terms appear within five words of each other.  The digitised pages have been converted for full-text search using Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which can have a variable success rate – it’s less than 100%, and in some instances can even be less than 50% accurate. However chances are if you are searching for significant terms, those words will turn up more than once in an article which does compensate for this a little!

The advanced search gives you more options to construct your search terms, and allows you to restrict by more than one state and/or newspaper title as well as enter date ranges by day and month as well as year.

The next tab (All Digitized Newspapers) is the means by which you can browse the collection, either in its entirety, or by state, ethnicity, or language.  The newspapers that are included are almost entirely English-language, though there are two in French, two Hawaiian, three Spanish and one Choctaw title and more French and Spanish content will be added later this year. 

Once you have found some results, the page image interface is really nice and smooth, with scrolling zoom and click and drag, and really high quality scans. You can navigate through the full edition of that paper, and view or download page images as text and PDF (with the bibliographic information attached, ready for referencing).  You can also ‘clip’ images to get an image of part of a page – the ‘clip image’ button will essentially cut out whatever is visible in the viewer at that moment.  All the page images, and clipped images that you make, have persistent URLs, which means you can bookmark or save the link and you will always be able to get back to it.  As an example, this link will take you to the following clipped image:

US Newspaper Directory, 1690-

As well as the full-text material in Chronicling America, the site also provides access to the full US Newspaper Directory.  This contains bibliographic information about all 140,000 titles that were catalogued as part of the United States Newspaper Program, along with information about which libraries hold them. These bibliographic records also include links to full-text digitised versions both within Chronicling America and on other sites where available.  Quite often if something is in Chronicling America it will also be available online from the institution which scanned it in the first place, so you are likely to find some titles duplicated.  For the titles that are included in Chronicling America, this is where you will find the contextual essays written by the people that selected the title for inclusion.

Topics in Chronicling America

The Library of Congress also provides around 100 topic guides to the site, which are designed to give you starting points in researching a whole variety of events, subjects and themes within Chronicling America. The topics available are quite a random selection, ranging from Presidential administrations and elections, to events such as the Haymarket Affair or the Annexation of Hawaii, and people like Booker T. Washington and Nikola Tesla, as well as all sorts of other things like the ping-pong craze of 1900 to 1902.  Each topical guide gives you a bit of the background as well as links to sample articles and (perhaps most usefully), suggested search terms to use. You can see a full list of the topics at http://www.loc.gov/rr/news/topics/topics.html, but check back again in the future as more are being created and added.

Keeping up-to-date with the site

Chronicling America is growing rapidly and continually, so it’s worth going back again and again to see if new material has been added that is relevant to your research.  The site also provides you with ways to keep up with the new content as it becomes available and to be alerted when there are additions.  You can subscribe to general updates (of content as well as points of interest and research) both by RSS and email, or subscribe to an RSS feed of just the new content as it is added, from the subscribe link available throughout the site.

And finally…
All the data from the site is freely available for re-use and can be obtained via the site’s API. To see an example of one of the innovative uses of the data from the US Newspaper Directory, see Stanford University’s data visualisation of the growth of newspapers across the United States from 1690-2011.  

Introduction to the US Congressional Serial Set

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At last, the long-promised introduction to the US Congressional Serial Set, one of our major resources.

What is the Serial Set?

The US Congressional Serial Set is the official collection of reports and documents of Congress. It began with the 15th Congress in 1817; older documents (from 1789-) can be found in the American State Papers. It is as important to get to grips what the Serial Set is not as what it is, as it is very specific as to which documents/reports are included and which are published separately.

The Serial Set contains the following named categories of documents:

  • House & Senate Reports
  • House & Senate Documents
  • House & Senate Journals (until the 82nd Congress in 1952)
  • Senate Executive Reports and Treaty Documents (from the 95th Congress in 1977 onwards). 

It does not include the text of debates (for which, see the Congressional Record), bills & resolutions, Committee Hearings or Prints, or other miscellaneous House or Senate documents.
House & Senate Reports are the official communications of the House & Senate Committees to the full House & Senate. They are mostly legislative reports, but also include special reports on various subjects. They are numbered as H.Rpt. or S.Rpt., so if you see a reference beginning with either of these terms you will definitely be able to find it in the Serial Set.

House & Senate Documents are less closely linked to legislation. Some examples of the type of publication that would be classed as a House or Senate Document are as follows:

  • Congress’s rules of operation
  • Memorials, ceremonial reports
  • Results of investigations (including occasionally transcripts of hearings)
  • Executive Department materials (annual reports, special reports)
  • Materials from outside the Federal Government which were of use to Congress

House & Senate Documents are numbered H.Doc. and S.Doc. One exception to be aware of is that from the 30th to the 53rd Congresses (1847-1895), Documents were further split into Miscellaneous Documents and Executive Documents, with the latter exclusively reserved for documents which came from the Executive Branch. Be careful not to mix these up with the entirely different Senate Executive Reports which are included in the Serial Set after 1977!

The House & Senate Journals are the daily record of business of each chamber. Unlike the Congressional Record they don’t record the debates verbatim, but you may find excerpts of speeches included on occasion. Like the Congressional Record, they also do not include the text of bills or resolutions.

Overall, the Serial Set is a vast collection of hundreds of thousands of documents, including thousands of maps and illustrations, covering every conceivable topic and both US and worldwide events – anything Congress had an interest in. Whatever you’re researching, you’re sure to find something of relevance in the Serial Set, but do be aware of the limitations of the set in terms of the types of documents included.

American State Papers

The American State Papers contain legislative and executive documents of Congress from 1789 to 1838. Documents within the American State Papers are arranged into ten topical classes, as follows:

I. Foreign relations
II. Indian affairs
III. Finances
IV. Commerce and navigation
V. Military affairs
VI. Naval affairs
VII. Post Office Department
VIII. Public lands
IX. Claims
X. Miscellaneous

How to access the Serial Set

We have access to the electronic version of the Serial Set from Readex for 1817-1994, which is available via SOLO/OxLIP+.  The easiest way to find it is to search for ‘Congressional Serial Set’ – the database you want is entitled US Congressional Serial Set, 1817-1994 [in progress] (with American State Papers, 1789-1838).  There is also the American State Papers (with US Congressional Serial Set) and US Congressional Serial Set Maps, which allow you to search those specifically, but if you’re after access to the main thing, the option highlighted below is the one you want.


If you want to find documents in the Serial Set post-1994, they are freely available (and full-text searchable) via the GPO’s Federal Digital System site – links as follows:

The VHL also has an extensive run of Serial Set volumes from the 19th century (up to approximately 1880) in print down in the stack, as well as the printed volumes of the American State Papers. 

Searching the Readex Serial Set

The Readex interface offers several different ways to search or browse the Serial Set. I will concentrate here on the search and browse options available for the main Serial Set, but if you are searching the American State Papers via the Readex interface you will find it works in basically the same way.

The easiest way by far is if you know the exact document you are looking for, as you can then enter the reference in the publication search and it will take you straight to it.  However, in most cases you won’t necessarily know this, and will be wanting to carry out more speculative keyword searches.

When you click through from SOLO or OxLIP+, you will be taken straight to the advanced search screen. Here you can enter your search terms either in the top two boxes (which search the citations), and/or the third box down, which is the full-text search box. You can specify the Serial Set volume if you know it, and add a date range in the last box.  This latter is particularly useful as the Serial Set covers such a long time period.

(Note the links to the publication search and also the bill number search at the bottom)
As the Serial Set is such a large database, you may well find that you get back a lot of results, and it can be difficult to work out what terms to put in in the first place to bring back a manageable number. One really good feature of this database though is the ways in which it allows you to filter after you have carried out an intitial search. Once you have a set of results in the lower part of the page, you will still have your search boxes available at the top, but now you have the option to carry out further searches within your results set only:

This allows you to be quite speculative and broad in your initial search terms, and then throw more terms in in subsequent searches (and the full text is particularly helpful at this point I find) in order to reduce your results set to something more manageable and focused.

One thing to be aware of is the ‘also consider these topics’ feature, which you will see on the right-hand side of your results list. This lists various associated subject/person/geographic etc terms which you can click on, but if you do click on one of these it will not narrow your search, but rather broaden it to show you all documents that are linked to that term. If you find you’ve carried out too narrow a search, or what you’ve come back with is not actually useful to you, this can be a good way to broaden things out again, but don’t click on these terms expecting it to filter your existing results!

As well as search options, there is a whole variety of ways to browse the Serial Set. At the bottom of the main search screen you will see a set of tabs, which allow you to browse by a huge number of categories.  Within each tab there are subcategories, so that you can drill down to find the term you want and then the documents that are associated with that subject/person/organisation/committee etc. I find that sometimes these can be very useful, but for other things they are just too broad.  If you are wanting to find a specific person, or documents relating to a specific Act of Congress though, then this can be easier than conducting a keyword search. And as with searches, once you have selected a category you will find that you then have the option to conduct a search just within that category, which can again be a very useful way to start off broadly and narrow down.

Finally, it is also possible to search the Serial Set for documents relating to specific bills and resolutions if you know the bill number. To do this, select the bill number search from the options below the search boxes.
Working with documents
Once you have found the document you are after, there are several things that you can do. The documents are all scanned page images which you can zoom into and move around on the page (particularly useful for maps). You can download pages either individually or in bulk, as JPGs (single pages only) or PDFs.  Each document has a full citation, which you can view, download or print, and you can save documents to a temporary collection and then email yourself the links and references to come back to later.  There is also a full-text search box at the top of the document view page which allows you to search within that document for specific terms, which is particularly useful for lengthy reports. 
Other ways to access the Serial Set
As well as searching the Readex database, we do have a set of printed indexes to the Serial Set, which cover 1817-1969 (as well as the American State Papers from 1789-).  They are available in the reference section on the ground floor, and if you use these they will give you the exact publication reference which you can then use in the publication search in the electronic version. Another useful reference is an online guide to the Serial Set which allows you to browse by agency to find publication and volume numbers.
With thanks to August Imholtz for providing me with some of the descriptions used above.

New electronic resource: The American Founding Era Collection (Rotunda)

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We have just purchased permanent access to the American Founding Era Collection, which we trialled back in December and January.  If you’ll forgive me for re-using old material, I thought it would be helpful therefore to re-post one of the earliest posts on this blog, which goes into detail about what the collection contains and how to navigate it.

The American Founding Era Collection contains digital versions of the published papers of several major figures of the time.  The collections it contains are as follows:

  • The Adams Papers
  • The Papers of Thomas Jefferson
  • The Dolley Madison Digital Edition
  • The Papers of James Madison
  • The Papers of George Washington
  • The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution 
  • The Papers of Alexander Hamilton (coming soon!)

With the exception of the Dolley Madison papers, these are digital editions of the print versions, which have been being published in large, ongoing series for many years.  We do have these print volumes at the VHL (which you can locate by searching SOLO), but the digital versions offer a variety of ways to access the papers and are of course fully searchable – no need to go hunting through indexes or worry you might miss a reference along the way, which for such enormous publications is a huge help.

Note on the Adams Papers: The Founding Era Collection only contains these papers from the founding-generation of the Adams family, and so the bulk of the papers available date from the 18th century.

Note on the Dolley Madison Digital Edition:  This is the first ever complete edition of all Dolley Madison’s correspondence. This collection was ‘born digital’, and is currently complete up to 1837. It is included in and can be accessed via the Founding Era Collection, but also has a separate platform, the one on which it was originally built, which also includes annotations that aren’t accessible from the Founding Era platform. There are links across to the standalone platform from each document in the Founding Era Collection so that these annotations can be found easily.

Note on the Papers of Alexander Hamilton: This collection was not available when we initially trialled the resource, but we have decided to add it to our purchase. We will gain access to these papers when they become available later this summer.

How to use the database
As well as the full-text search, the browsing options are very powerful. You can browse collections individually or the whole lot at once, and have a choice of doing so by chronology (date of document) or by contents (order of the documents in the published volumes).  There are also browsable indexes available to the Adams, Jefferson, and Washington Papers.

Once you have started browsing any of the contents, chronology, indexes or your search results, there is a navigation compass to take you forward and back through the different levels and documents.  It looks a bit like part of the background (at least, I didn’t realise what it was at first!), so in case it’s not just me that overlooked it, I thought it was worth pointing out.  The platform’s own guide describes how the compass works as follows:

 The navigation compass can be used to move between different places in the current view. The up and down arrows are used to move up and down within the hierarchy. For example, starting at the top of the contents view and repeatedly clicking the down arrow takes you from the publication to a series to a volume and so on down to individual documents. For the chronology view, doing the same thing takes you from decade to year to month to day to documents within that day. The left and right arrows are used to navigate between adjacent items at the same hierarchical level. Thus, if you are in the level corresponding to volumes of a publication, then clicking the left or right arrow takes you to the preceding or following volume, respectively. Again, if you are at the months level of the chronological hierarchy, then clicking the left or right arrows takes you to the preceding or following month. 

It took me a bit of getting used to, but once you’ve got your head round the structure of the collection, it is an easy way to move from one part to another.  Next to it you always see where you are in the hierarchy.

The documents themselves are transcribed, not page images, and contain links to notes, explanatory references and other documents where relevant. You can print documents, but there are no options for exporting/saving records other than to make a note of the durable URL given in the citation box at the bottom of each document.  This box is a useful addition though, giving you guidance on how to cite the document in bibliographies, which can often be tricky to know how to do for online resources.

The collections are still being added to, as the print publication projects are still ongoing.  There is also a complementary project, Founders Early Access, which is freely available online as well as accessible within the main site.  The Early Access collection contains documents that are in the process of being prepared for both print and online publication.  Once the documents are added to the main collection, they disappear from the Early Access site.  The link for the Early Access collection is: http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/FOEA.html and you can keep up with updates to it at http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/FOEA-history.html.  It might also be worth pointing out that the University of Virginia is working with the National Archives to make some of the Founders’ papers freely available online from 2012. 

The American Founding Era Collection is accessible via OxLIP+.  If you are away from Oxford, you can get into the database as long as you sign in via SOLO/OxLIP+ first with your University single sign-on.

North American Women’s Letters and Diaries

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For International Women’s Day, here’s a blog post on one of our e-resources available via OxLIP+: North American Women’s Letters and Diaries.  This database contains 150,000 pages of letters and diaries written by 1,325 women from Colonial times to 1950.  More than 7,000 of these pages are previously unpublished.  The material is drawn from over 600 different sources, including journals, pamphlets, newsletters, monographs and conference proceedings, and was largely collated using existing bibliographies.  It’s important to note that much of the material is still in copyright.

The database creators had strict criteria for deciding whether to include material:

  • Authors must be women and must have been resident in North America for a significant time.
  • Materials must have been written contemporaneously. Autobiographical material are excluded, unless they are considered of particular value.
  • Memoirs are included when they are of particular value.
  • Collections of letters begun before 1950 are included until they are complete. Collections of letters written after 1950 are excluded.
  • Diaries that began before 1950 are included until they are complete. Diaries that began after 1950 are excluded.
  • Letters written by men are excluded.

They state that “all age groups and life stages, all ethnicities, many geographical regions, the famous and the not so famous” are respresented by the material contained within the database.  There are also biographies and an extensive annotated bibliography to support the primary source material.

Using the database

There is a variety of ways to access the material within the database. In the top menu bar are the options to browse, find and search. The first few browse options and the simple search are pretty straightforward (browse by author, source, year, and simple full-text keyword search with some options to limit your results by author, year, document type etc), however this database offers some really nice other search/browse options that provide a different way to find material.

Under browse you will find options to browse by place (which also demonstrates that the material in this database has a much wider geographical interest than just North America, even if the authors are all American), historical events (eg Salem Witch Trials, Lincoln’s assassination, the sinking of the Titanic), and personal events (death of child, emigration, religious experience, starting a job).  There is also a showcase of a few selected documents of interest.

The difference between find and search is basically whether you are trying to find documents themselves, or search within them.  Under ‘find’ you have the option to search for sources (ie, the documents) or authors.  Searching for sources will only search on the bibliographic information attached to that document, and will bring you to the record (from where you can click through to the full text).  Searching for authors is useful both when you’re trying to find a known author (for which there is also an alphabetical browse index at the top of the search screen), and if you’re trying to find authors that match certain criteria – ie, from a certain time period, place, ethnicity, religion etc. By each search box in all the different search screens is a ‘terms’ button, which will bring up a list of all the terms available in the index that you can select and add to your search – this also effectively offers you another way to browse, or restrict your search to specific subsets of the database.

The search menu options allow you to search within the text of the documents. As well as the usual simple and advanced search options, there are also options to specifically search either letters or diaries, and each search can be limited by a whole variety of different terms.  The advanced search is particularly good if you want to search for something very specific (eg, restricting your search to letters written on military bases).  The advanced search option also allows you to specify a proximity range for more than one search term.  These incredibly detailed search options are a particular strength of this resource.

Where this resource is not quite so amazing is in what you can do with the results when you get them.  Most of the documents are available only as transcriptions, not page images, although there are some page images available.  There also aren’t any save, export, or print options, so all you can really do is copy & paste or print directly from your browser (though bear in mind the fact that most of the material is still under copyright, so fair dealing principles apply).  You can however easily click through from the bibliographic records to other documents by the same author or in the same source, as well as access the author’s biography (where available).

For more information about this resource, see the publisher’s description at: http://alexanderstreet.com/products/nwld.htm.

African American History Resources, Part Two: pre-20th century, slavery, emancipation etc

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To follow up my previous post listing some of the resources we have available for African American history in the 20th century, here I’ll set out some of the resources we have for earlier time periods, in particular related to slavery/anti-slavery, emancipation, and the Civil War (another core area of our collection). My period-division here has been very rough, just to avoid having an enormously long post, so some of the resources listed here will reach into the 20th century, and I will also not repeat resources here from my previous post that do cover earlier periods (especially our government publications and newspaper resources).

Microfilm and archival collections

The Freedmen’s Aid Society Records cover 1866-1932, and extend to 120 reels of microfilm (guide available at Micr. BX 8235 .F74 2000).  The Freedman’s Aid Society was originally founded as the Fugitives’ Aid Society with the aim to assist fugitive slaves and to lobby and protest against slavery in the United States. With the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, the Fugitives’ Aid Society became the Freedmen’s Aid Society. The organisation sent money and volunteer aid to the South after the defeat of the Confederacy. They also had a strong education initiative and was responsible for the establishment of many historically Black colleges and universities.

One of the major archival collections held in Rhodes House Library (next door) are the Papers of the (British) Anti-Slavery Society. This society, founded in 1835, had as its aim the abolition of slavery throughout the world in general and in the United States in particular. It convened the first World Anti-Slavery Convention, held in London in June 1840, at which some fifty leading American abolitionists were present. After 1840 the society’s transatlantic prestige declined and a second convention held in 1843 attracted only a few American delegates. The Society continued to concern itself with American problems and correspond with American abolitionists up to the Civil War but it was affected by the divisions in the American movement and there came a realisation that it could do little to affect the outcome of the Americn situation. If you’re interested in consulting papers from this archive, contact staff in Rhodes House Library.  See http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/dept/scwmss/wmss/online/blcas/anti-slavery-society.html for more information.

Another archival collection held at Rhodes House is that of the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, which was founded in 1701 as a result of an enquiry into the state of the Church of England in the American colonies. Its remit was broadened to encompass evangelisation of slaves and Native Americans. More information can be found at http://www.mundus.ac.uk/cats/11/1052.htm, and again, if you want to consult this archive, contact staff in Rhodes House Library.

In addition to these papers of societies, we have several microfilm collections of the papers of individuals who were active in American politics in the mid-19th century, and which will include material on slavery and emancipation to a greater or lesser extent.  These are the papers of James Buchanan (Micr. USA 458), Salmon P. Chase (Micr. USA 331), William H. Seward (Micr. USA 346), and Thaddeus Stevens (Micr. USA 353).  Abraham Lincoln‘s papers can be found online via the Libary of Congress, who have digitised around 20,000 documents from the 1850s through to Lincoln’s death in 1865.

The Records of the American Colonization Society, founded in 1817 to resettle African Americans in West Africa, cover 1792-1964, but the bulk of the material dates from 1823-1912. There is a guide available at Micr. E 448 .U54 1979, and selections of these records are also available online via footnote.com.

On a similar theme, we also have the Records of the Office of the Secretary of the Interior relating to the suppression of the African slave trade and Negro colonization, which is a comprehensive set of government papers on many aspects of executive federal involvement in colonisation between 1854 and 1872. These are on microfilm at Micr. USA 456, and can also be found online via footnote.com.

Online resources

And finally, here’s a list of some of the useful free online resources I have come across relating to African American history pre-20th century, slavery, emancipation etc, all saved on our delicious page for future reference: 

These are just some of the more specific online resources available, but there is so much more to be found in various state digital libraries or wider Civil War web resources, just to point you to two subsets of our delicious list.  Happy hunting!

Credit: some of the text in this post was originally written by the History Librarian, Isabel Holowaty, as I have just borrowed her descriptions where they already existed.

Finding US Newspapers II: On the web and elsewhere in the UK

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My last post focused on the newspaper sources that the VHL holds, both in print and as electronic resources.  However, there are a lot more sources of historic US newspapers freely available on the web and in library collections elsewhere in the UK.  This post will point you to some useful sites online where you can find some of these.

Chronicling America (Library of Congress)
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/ 
This is the Library of Congress’s historic newspapers site, and has two distinct purposes.  One is the Chronicling America Directory, which provides bibliographic information about newspapers published in the United States from 1690 to the present as well as listings of libraries in the States that have copies.   The second is to provide access to thousands of digitised pages of a wide range of newspapers from 1860-1922.   Full-text coverage is only for certain states: Arizona, California, District of Columbia, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Washington.   You can restrict your search by state or date range, as well as search within a specific newspaper title.  Pages can be viewed online or downloaded as PDFs or image files.

The Library of Congress also provides a couple of different ways into the collection.  There is the topics interface, which allows you to browse articles relating to a wide range of topics, from Presidential administrations and events such as the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, to the baseball World Series, Butch Cassidy, or Nikola Tesla.  They are also working with Flickr, uploading images of cover pages from the New York Tribune‘s illustrated newspaper supplements.  They even make their API available, for anyone wanting to create different ways to explore the data.

Google News Archive
http://news.google.com/newspapers 
As well as the Google Books project, Google are also digitising thousands and thousands of pages of newspapers, and the Google News Archive page allows you to browse these directly.  It’s a very basic interface, with just an alphabetical listing of all the newspaper titles available, and information as to what dates are covered, but once you click on a specific title you are brought to a nice timeline view, from where you can easily browse issues by date.  It being Google, the search function is very straightforward, but there is an advanced search available from the very tiny link next to the search box at the top of the page.
 
Newspapers on Footnote.com
http://go.footnote.com/newspapers/
Footnote.com is a subscription website that works with the National Archives to digitise vast quantities of records, images and archival material, as well as encouraging the public to add annotations and upload their own material.   They also have a large collection of digitised newspapers, comprising some 4 million pages.   You can search the collections without signing up, but be aware that a lot of the content is only available to paid subscribers, so you may not be able to see the full-text if you have not paid over your subscription fee.

NewspaperCat
http://www.newspapercat.org/
NewspaperCat is an online catalogue of digitised historical newspapers from the United States and Caribbean, hosted by the University of Florida.  It currently links through to over 1000 titles and is expanding.   You can search or browse by title or location.

Internet Archive
http://www.archive.org/details/texts
The Internet Archive is the other major site for freely available digitised material on the web, and contains scanned images of books and journals from many major American libraries, including therefore also newspaper issues.   However, tt is not the easiest site to search, particularly for newspapers and periodicals as the search results list doesn’t show you the date of the item, you can’t browse, and there’s no way to limit your search to this kind of material.  Worth checking though if you know the title you’re looking for and have struck out elsewhere – you might be in luck!

Various local digitisation projects
Examples on the VHL’s delicious page: http://www.delicious.com/vhllib/Newspapers 
More comprehensive listing on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_online_newspaper_archives#United_States 
There are a huge number of digitisation projects by University and State libraries, archives and historical societies all over the US, and many of these include newspapers.  Some are distinct projects to digitise runs of specific newspapers, whereas others are wider projects that include newspaper articles, pages or entire issues within them.   I’ve been saving any I’ve come across on the VHL delicious page, but find more and more all the time.  There’s also an excellent listing available on Wikipedia, as well as one provided by Penn Libraries.   If I haven’t already found a site that’s useful to you, then it’s always worth checking the website of the relevant State Historical Society and major University libraries.  The content available and presentation of the interfaces may vary wildly from place to place, but overall there’s an awful lot of good stuff out there.

Newspaper holdings elswhere in the UK
Between them, libraries in the UK hold quite a wide range of US newspapers, so if you can’t find things here in Oxford or online, you may well be able to track them down in other libraries.   The best starting place is the British Library Newspaper Library at Colindale, and you can search their newspaper catalogues online.

For other libraries in the UK as well, the British Association of American Studies (BAAS) maintains a list of US newspaper holdings on their website, which can be searched and browsed by title, and will tell you which UK library holds what.  One caveat about this list is that it relies on the invidual libraries updating BAAS when their holdings change, so you’d be wise to check with the individual library that they definitely do have what you’re looking for before making a trip.

Finding US newspapers I: Oxford resources

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The VHL has just acquired access to the online archives of two new newspapers, The New York Amsterdam News, 1922-1993 and The Pittsburgh Courier, 1911-2002. Along with the access that we already had to the archive of the Chicago Defender, 1910-1975, Oxford is now the only institution in Western Europe with access to three major black newspapers.  We were able to purchase these two major new resources thanks to a generous donation received by the History Faculty, and it brings our total number of US newspaper e-resources up to five (along with The New York Times and Washington Post).  However, if you’re looking for US newspapers, this is by no means all we have!   Prompted by our new acquisitions, this blog post will provide a summary of some of the US newspaper sources available in Oxford and how to use them.   A second blog post soon will cover newspapers freely available online and elsewhere in the UK.  News magazines and other periodicals will also largely be left to a subsequent post.

ProQuest Historical Newspapers (online via OxLIP+)

  • The New York Times (1851-2007)
  • The Washington Post (1877-1994) [1995-2005 available on microfilm in the VHL – see below]
  • The Chicago Defender (1910-1975)
  • The New York Amsterdam News (1922-1993)
  • The Pittsburgh Courier (1911-2002)

The above five newspaper archives are all provided by ProQuest and available via OxLIP+.  As they are all available from the same provider, they are cross-searchable with one another, as well as with other ProQuest historical databases (such as the American Periodicals Series or some British and Irish newspapers which Oxford also has access to).   When you click through from any of the titles on OxLIP+, you will be taken to the same ProQuest screen listing available databases.  The historical databases are listed at the bottom of the page so you may need to scroll down. You can then either select several to search, or click on an individual title to just look at that one archive.

Both the basic and the advanced search screen make it easy for you to restrict your searches by date (before, after, or between), and have a ‘more search options’ tab at the bottom which allows you to search specifically by author or document type (advert, editorial, article, etc).  Once you have found an article that interests you, you can view, download, email and print PDFs of the article itself or the page that the article is on.  You can also get citation information and direct links to the article so that you can come back to it later.   Another useful function is the ‘page map’ display, which not only shows you the full page, but allows you to click on other articles within the image to view them, putting the article in context within the newspaper as a whole.

The ProQuest platform also offers a range of options for saving records.  You can mark documents both from the article view and from the results list, and they are then available by clicking on the ‘My research’ tab at the top of the search screen.  From here, there are a variety of options for exporting your list of records – as a printed or emailed bibliography, as citations into reference manager software, or as HTML files.  The email option also allows you to send yourself the articles themselves as PDFs (though you might not want to do this for too many at once!).

19th Century US Newspapers (online via OxLIP+)

 19th Century U.S. Newspapers provides access to approximately 1.7 million pages of primary source newspaper content from the 19th century, featuring full-text content and images from numerous newspapers from a range of urban and rural regions throughout the U.S. The collection encompasses the entire 19th century, with an emphasis on such topics as the American Civil War, African-American culture and history, Western migration and Antebellum-era life among other subjects.

The search interface offers both basic and advanced keyword searching, with options to restrict by location or newspaper title as well as by date and type of article.  In addition there is a newspaper search screen, which allows you to search for specific publications, again with the option to limit by location (state or city).  It is not possible to browse the newspaper titles available but you can download a list of all the newspapers included as a Word document.  Once you have found a newspaper that you are interested in, it is then possible to browse the available issues.

Much like the ProQuest interface described above, you can download PDFs of pages or individual articles, and the same page map facility is also offered here, allowing you to click through to the individual articles from the full page.

Newspapers available on microfilm in the VHL

In addition to the newspaper archives we have access to electronically, the VHL also has a substantial collection of American newspapers on microfilm.   Most of the newspapers we have are either part of the Early American Newspapers collection, or the Black Journals collection, but we also have runs of both the New York Times (the printed index to which is also available in the reference section) and Washington Post from 1851/1877 respectively up to the end of 2005.  For the Washington Post, the electronic version stops in 1994, so the microfilms are the only way to access the years after that.

The titles that make up the Early American Newspapers collection cover the years 1690-1876 (largely 1760-1860), and include titles from all thirteen original states, plus Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, Ohio, Tennessee, Vermont, West Virginia and the District of Columbia.  The VHL holds 79 titles from this collection on microfilm, as well as a guide to the entire collection (in the reference section at Micr. PN 4855 .E18 1987) which contains descriptions of each newspaper.

The Black Journals collection contains 17 titles from the first half of the 20th century, providing a historical record of black Americans and their culture. Titles include The Crisis, Colored American Magazine, Harlem Quarterly, Race Relations and the Tuskegee Messenger.

A list of all the newspapers that we hold on microfilm can be found in the microfilm subject guide in the library, and also viewed online. 

Ethnic NewsWatch (online via OxLIP+)

This bilingual database (English and Spanish) covers US ethnic and minority newspapers and other periodicals. Coverage begins in 1990, although you can find full-text access to some articles dating further back, and abstracts for more.  A full list of titles included in the database can be found by clicking on the ‘Publications’ tab at the top of the search screen, and there are also RSS feeds available for current titles if you want to keep up to date.   Ethnic NewsWatch is provided by ProQuest, like the Historical Newspapers, so the search interface should look familiar if you have used those before.  However as it is not a historical database it cannot be cross-searched with those newspapers and must be searched separately.  

Nexis UK (online via OxLIP+)
Nexis UK is a vast database that provides access to thousands of news sources from all over the world. Its coverage is largely current and recent, but does go back 20 years in some cases.  If you want to restrict your search to US newspapers you can do so by selecting ‘US news’ in the ‘sources’ box towards the bottom of the search screen.  This will then provide you with a list of available titles to restrict your search further by specific publications if you would like to do so.