Category Archives: Resources

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

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.

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 One: 20th Century

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February is Black History Month, and so I thought I’d put together a couple of blog posts about some of the resources we have available in the library for African American history.  Resources for African American history are increasingly a particular strength of the VHL’s collection, and with our recent acquisition of the electronic archives of two major black newspapers of the 20th century (The New York Amsterdam News, 1922-1993 and The Pittsburgh Courier, 1911-2002 – see this blog post for more information), we are now the only institution in Western Europe to have access to the archives of three black newspapers.  In this first blog post I will focus on 20th century African American history resources, in particular relating to civil rights, and will follow it up (by the end of the month, I promise!) with one on the 19th century and slavery & emancipation.

Newspapers

To start briefly with newspapers and periodicals (but not too extensively, as they were the subject of my last two blog posts), in addition to the three archives mentioned above, we also have a collection of 17 black journals from the first half of the twentieth century available on microfiche (to see which, take a look at our online newspapers-on-microfilm list), as well as an extensive run of the leading African American magazine, Ebony, from 1945-1954 (on microfilm) and then 1958-2008 in print.   If you’re looking for really recent African American newspapers, then Ethnic NewsWatch (via OxLIP+) provides coverage of ethnic and minority newspapers from 1990 to the present.

For more information on finding newspapers in general, take a look at the previous two posts on this blog.

Microfilm collections

The Civil Rights Era is a particular strength of our collection, and we have several microfilm collections of papers and records relating to the Civil Rights struggle.   The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) Papers cover 1959-1976, and include the records and papers of this organisation, which was founded in 1942 in Chicago and advocated non-violent direct action to address racial discrimination.  A guide to the microfilm collection can be found at Micr. E 185.61 .C75455 1984.

We only have selections of the Papers of the NAACP, but even so this is a massive collection of records, speeches, reports, correspondence, branch files and campaign information from the National Association of the Advancement of Colored People.  We hold parts 1, 2, 11A, 11B, 12B, 12C, 12D, 26B, 26C, 26D, 28A, 28B, 29A, 29B, 29C, and 29D of this collection (along with guides), which cover a range of topics, locations and dates from 1909-1970.

Another substantial microfilm collection we hold is Civil rights during the Nixon Administration, which record the Nixon administration’s broadening of the concept of equal rights beyond desegregation to include affirmative action in hiring women, the elderly, the physically disabled, and an expanding and overlapping list of other groups. Even though the subject matter here is much broader, you will still find records covering the continuing controversy over school desegregation and other topics relating to African American history.

And finally for microfilms, jumping back a little in time, are the Records of the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, which was set up following the riot of July/August 1919 by Illinois governor Frank Lowden.

Government publications and official papers

You can, as expected, find a huge amount of material in our major government publications resources, particularly of course the US Congressional Serial Set (via OxLIP+) where you can browse for publications related to acts such as the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as well as search and browse by subject.

One thing you may not realise that we have though is a lot of the printed civil rights hearings, in particular those before the United States Commission on Civil Rights in the early 1960s – search for civil rights hearings on SOLO.  Many of these are down in our stack, so you will need to place a stack request via OLIS to get them fetched up for you.

I will write further blog posts in the future about finding government publications, so keep an eye on the blog for that if you need more guidance.

Books

Just a quick note that the shelfmark range for African Americans in the Library of Congress classification is E 184.5 – E185.98.  Obviously you can search SOLO to find out what books we have, but if you want to go and browse the shelves, that’s where to head for!

Online resources

As ever, there is a huge and growing amount of fantastic primary source material being made available online.   A good starting point is the VHL’s delicious page, and the sites we have saved there tagged as African American: http://www.delicious.com/vhllib/African_American.  Some particular highlights for the 20th century/civil rights are:

December 7, 1941: Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor

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One thing I thought might be fun to do on occasion on this blog is to showcase some individual documents from our various resources that tie in with events and days in history.  Yesterday was the 69th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and today is the anniversary of the USA’s declaration of war on Japan and entry into World War II (mutual declarations of war with Germany and Italy followed a few days later).  I’ve had a look through some of our e-resources to see what I could find relating to the Pearl Harbor attack, as follows:

Newspapers and contemporary reports
We have electronic access to the archives of both the New York Times and the Washington Post. You can search them individually or both at once, if you select them both on the first screen you come to after clicking through from OxLIP+.   Searching both for December 8, 1941 brings up a large number of articles and editorials, and you can also get to images of the front pages of both papers from that day.

Link to full page image (Oxford users only)


Link to full page image (Oxford users only)

 
The official response
The US Congressional Serial Set is our major e-resource for US government publications. I’ll write in more detail about it in forthcoming blog posts, but it contains all the reports and documents submitted to Congress from 1817-1994.  A search for ‘Pearl Harbor’ and ‘1941’ brings up both the House and Senate Documents from the Joint Session where President Roosevelt addressed Congress and requested that they declare war:

Serial Set Vol. No. 10599, Session Vol. No.22
77th Congress, 1st Session
H.Doc. 453
State of war between the United States and the Japanese empire. Address from the President of the United States before a joint session of the two houses of Congress requesting that Congress declare that there exists a state of war between the United States and the Japanese empire. December 8, 1941. 

Link to access the full document from the Congressional Serial Set (Oxford users only)

The President’s address can also be found in the Congressional Record, along with the resolution to declare war and the record of the proceedings in the Joint Session. We don’t have the Congressional Record as an electronic resource, but the print volumes are all held in the library – the volume that includes the proceedings on December 8th is v.87, pt.24.  The Senate record also includes various newspaper editorials in response to the attack that were entered into the record at the request of Senator Bridges.  This is the kind of material that is sometimes additionally found in the Congressional Record that you might not otherwise expect or be able to get hold of here in Oxford, as we don’t have holdings of many US newspapers for the 20th century.
 
Another Pearl Harbor-related document that you can find in the Serial Set is the report of the commission appointed by the President to investigate the attack, which was submitted to the Senate in January 1942.

Serial Set Vol. No. 10676, Session Vol. No.8
77th Congress, 2nd Session
S.Doc. 159
Attack upon Pearl Harbor by Japanese armed forces. Report of the commission appointed by the President of the United States to investigate and report the facts relating to the attack made by Japanese armed forces upon Pearl Harbor in the Territory of Hawaii on December 7, 1941.

Link to access the full document from the Congressional Serial Set (Oxford users only)

On the web: Eyewitness accounts and more
As ever, there is a huge amount of material available on the internet, including eyewitness accounts, oral histories, documents and images of all sorts.  Here’s just a sample of things available on the web related to the Pearl Harbor attack:

  • World War II diaries (Footnote.com): Footnote.com is a subscription website, but regularly makes parts of its collections free for a month at a time.  For December, they have opened up their World War II diaries collection.  Most of the content starts in 1942, but it does include this eyewitness account of the 1941 attack.
  • Hawaii War Records Depository Photos: a wealth of digitised photographs documenting the impact of World War II in Hawaii, which were deposited at the Hawaii War Records Depository at the University of Hawaii.  The collection includes 86 images related to the Pearl Harbor attack.
  • Japanese American Relocation Digital Archives (University of California): Not about the attack per se, but this online archive contains a huge number of images (photographs, paintings and drawings) and some documents relating to the internment of Japanese Americans following the attack.
  • Various oral histories can also be found on YouTube, and even some old film footage, such as the video embedded below.

For more links to freely available web resources, take a look at the VHL’s delicious page.

American Founding Era Collection

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For the first proper post on this blog, I thought I’d start with a resource that we don’t actually own yet, but which we are currently trialling.   We have access to the American Founding Era Collection from the University of Virginia Press until 3rd January 2011, and so if this is your period, I’d encourage you to make the most of this resource while we do.   We would like to be able to purchase it permanently, funds-permitting, and if you’d like us to do so, then lots of usage and positive feedback would be great!

UPDATE: We have now purchased this resource.

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 

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.

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.  This is of course less relevant for Oxford users at the moment, as we will lose access after 3rd January, but if we do purchase the collection then it will continue to grow from what is currently available.   There is also a complementary project, Founders Early Access, which is freely available online (and therefore available to Oxford users even after 3rd January) 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, but whether we do purchase the entire collection or not, it’s useful to know that you can access unpublished papers here.  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+, and as a trial it is currently listed on the front page. 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.