Category Archives: Electronic resources

Trial access: Colonial America (ended 20th March 2022)

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[UPDATE: This trial has now finished as of 20th March, 2022.]

I am pleased to report that the Vere Harmsworth Library has organised trial access to Colonial America for Bodleian Readers. The trial will run until the 20th March, 2022.

Decorative screenshot of the Colonial America database.

Colonial America consists of all 1,450 volumes of the CO 5 series of Colonial Office files held at The National Archives in London, plus all extracted documents associated with them. This unique collection of largely manuscript material from the archives of the British government is an invaluable one for students and researchers of all aspects of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American history and the early-modern Atlantic world.

Documents can be browsed by title, date, volume, theme, document type and colony/region. They are also indexed with relevant keywords, names, and places. Print and manuscript materials are full-text searchable, thanks to handwritten text recognition technology.

The resource is made up of 5 modules:

Module 1: Early Settlement, Expansion and Rivalries

The first module of Colonial America documents the early history of the colonies, and includes founding charters, material on the effects of 1688’s Glorious Revolution in North America, records of piracy and seaborne rivalry with the French and Spanish, and copious military material from the French and Indian War of 1756-63.

Module 2: Towards Revolution

This module focuses on the 1760s and 1770s and the social and political protest that led to the Declaration of Independence, including legal materials covering the aftermath of the Boston Tea Party. It is also particularly rich in material relating to military affairs and American Indians.

Module 3: The American Revolution

This module charts the upheavals of the 1770s and 1780s which saw the throwing off of British rule in the Thirteen Colonies. Contents include volumes of intercepted letters between colonists, the military correspondence of the British commanders in the field and material produced by the Ordnance Office and the office of the Secretary at War, as well as two copies of the ‘Dunlap’ edition of the Declaration of Independence printed on the night of the 4th-5th July 1776.

Module 4: Legislation and Politics in the Colonies

This module traces the colonies’ legal and political evolution between 1636-1782. Copies of council and assembly minutes record debates on international politics, including Britain’s war with Spain, expeditions against the French in Canada, and trade regulations. Court journals also trace legal cases and trials heard in the colonies, whilst series of official correspondence and revisions of acts reveal attempts to increase jurisdiction of British officials in the colonies, expand settlement, and improve public facilities and trade. The extensive revisions and annotations of these documents also expose the internal (and often personal) political agendas of their creators.

Module 5: Growth, Trade and Development

The preponderant part of this module consists of correspondence with the Board of Trade. There are also details of land grants, financial accounts and documents focusing on American Indian relations, as well as George Vancouver’s despatches to London from his 1791 expedition to the Pacific Northwest. The module contains a number of shipping returns, accompanied by a video interview with Hannah Knox Tucker (PhD candidate, University of Virginia), who discusses these documents and their value for researchers in detail.

You can access Colonial America using your Single Sign On here. 

Please send any feedback you have regarding this resource to bethan.davies@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

New e-Resource – Black Authors, 1556-1922: Imprints from the Library Company of Philadelphia

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[Item originally posted on on the EFL blogpost]

Black Authors, 1556-1922This online collection consists of 550 fully searchable works written by Black authors from Africa, the Americas, and Europe, and spans from the mid-sixteenth century to the early twentieth century. The collection is remarkable for the diversity of its content and contains texts that fall within a wide range of genres, including autobiographies, essays, letters and poems, as well as examples of more unusual genres such as maps and sheet music.

The archive may be browsed by author, genre or subject (such as agriculture, economics and trade, education, government, health, law and crime, literature, philosophy, politics, and slavery and race relations). It is also possible to narrow down search results within a given subject as each is further divided into several subtopics. The archive can also be searched by place of publication and by publisher.

Individual authors include Olaudah Equiano, Ignatius Sancho and Bethany Veney.

The Bodleian Libraries have committed substantial external funding to a one-off set of purchases of electronic research resources deemed to be important to researchers in the University. This follows a project to identify desiderata across all subjects and to list suggestions from readers.

Purchase of this resource was partly funded by the Drue Heinz Fund.

New in Oxford: Time and The Atlantic magazine archive

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I am pleased to announce the the Vere Harmsworth Library has purchased the online archives for The Atlantic and Time magazines.

Both of these magazines greatly add to our 20th Century newspaper and magazine holdings, and provide fascinating primary resources for modern American history, politics and culture.

Time magazine archive (1923-2000)

Published weekly by Time Inc., Time Magazine has focused on conveying to a broad audience both domestic and international news and analysis on a spectrum of subjects.

Intended to be read in under an hour, each issue of Time contains reports of national and international current events, politics, sports, and entertainment. Capturing the relevant news for a given week, the magazine remains an important resource for researchers studying just about any aspect of 20th-Century history and life.

Four covers from Time Magazine's past editions.

An example of magazine covers from Time magazine. Top row, from left to right: Clarke Gable (August 31st, 1936); Jackie Robinson (September 22nd, 1947). Bottom row, from left to right: Richard Nixon (November 5th, 1973, “The Push to Impeach”); Ronald Regan (January 5th, 1981, “The Man of the Year”)

 

Articles and cover pages are fully indexed and advertisements are individually identified, ensuring researchers and readers can quickly and accurately locate the information they seek. The Time Magazine Archive is valuable to researchers of 20th-Century current events, politics and culture, as well as those interested in the history of business, advertising, and popular culture.

The archival collection compliments our current online access to Time magazine via EBSCO Business Source Complete (1990-current), alongside our physical collection held in the BSF.

The Atlantic magazine archive (1857-2014)

The Atlantic was originally created with a focus on publishing leading writers’ commentary on abolition, education and other major issues in contemporary political affairs at the time. Over its more than 150 years of publication. It has featured articles in the fields of politics, foreign affairs, business and the economy, culture and the arts, technology, science and more.

Some of the founding sponsors of the magazine include prominent writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Greenleaf Whittier.

Images of the front covers of the Atlantic Magazine.

Examples of front covers of The Atlantic Magazine. Top row, from left to right: November 1947 (90th Anniversary special); April 1956 (Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman). Bottom row, from left to right: September 2008 (Special Election issue); March 2012 (Special Commemorative Issue to mark 150th anniversary of the Civil War.)

 

The Atlantic Magazine Archive, covers events and political issues through literary and cultural commentary. It includes more than 1,800 issues providing a broad view of 19th, 20th and early 21st-Century American thought.

You may also be interested in our other periodical resources such as The National Review, The Nation, The New Republic and Vogue. For more information on our newspaper and periodicals, please visit our online guide.

New in Oxford: Black Thought and Culture

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Following a trial period, and positive feedback from readers, I am pleased to announce that the Vere Harmsworth Library has purchased access to the online resource, Black Thought and Culture.

This impressive database contains a collection of approximately 100,000 pages of non-fiction writings by major American black leaders—teachers, artists, politicians, religious leaders, athletes, war veterans, entertainers, and other figures—covering 250 years of history. In addition to the most familiar works, Black Thought and Culture presents a great deal of previously inaccessible material, including letters, speeches, prefatory essays, political leaflets, interviews, periodicals, and trial transcripts.

The collection spans from the works of Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois and Ida B. Wells Barnett, to Zora Neal Hurston, Audra Lorde, and Jesse Jackson. Most notably, the collection includes items previously undigitized, and difficult to obtain, such as:

  • The transcript of the Muhammad Ali trial
  • A full run of The Black Panther newspaper, with full-colour images of every page as well as searchable text
  • 2,500 pages of exclusive Black Panther oral histories owned by the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation
  • Selected audio files, heard here for the first time
  • the full run of Artist and Influence journal, tracking African American cultural trends in the 20th Century.

This resource will be of interest to those interested in African American history, politics, literature and culture.

You may access the resource here.

Trial Access: Black Authors and Native American Indians (ended 9th March 2021)

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Note: These trials ended on 9th March, 2021.

I am pleased to report that the Vere Harmsworth Library has organised trial access to two online resources for Bodleian Readers; Black Authors, 1556-1922 and Native American Indians, 1645-1819.The trials will run until the 9th March, 2021.

These trials are running alongside our trial access of Black Thought and Culture, which you can read about in our previous blogpost. 

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Black Authors, 1556-1922

Created from the renowned holdings of the Library Company of Philadelphia, Black Authors, 1556-1922, offers more than 550 fully catalogued and searchable works by black authors from the Americas, Europe and Africa, expertly compiled by the curators of Afro-Americana Imprints collection, the largest existing collection of its kind. Genres include: personal narratives, autobiographies, histories, expedition reports, military reports, novels, essays, poems and musical compositions.

Authors included are Ignatius Sancho, Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, Solomon Northrup, Harriet Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Frederick Douglass, Bethany Veney, Paul Laurence Dunbar, W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles W. Chestnutt, Booker T. Washington, James Weldon Johnson and hundreds of others.

You can access this resource here.

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Native American Indians, 1645-1819

Native American Indians provides a comprehensive record of Native America in the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries. It Includes more than 1,600 publications, which offer unparalleled insight into the relationship between Native Americans and European settlers, alongside text analysis tools, author biographies and more.

Genres include treaties, transcribed letters from Native American leaders, the minutes of tribal meetings, histories of numerous tribes, missionary reports, captivity narratives, first-hand accounts of battles, trading records, military rosters, expedition logs and maps, trial records, legislative bills, books on Native American languages and grammar, military rosters, governors’ and legislators’ reports, ballads, songs, plays and more.

You can access this resource here.

Please send any feedback you have regarding this resource to bethan.davies@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

 

Trial Access: Black Thought and Culture (ended 1st March 2021)

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Note: This trial ended on 1st March, 2021. decoration only

 

 

 

I am pleased to report that the Vere Harmsworth Library has organised trial access to the online resource, Black Thought and Culture. The trial will run until the 1st March, 2021.

This impressive database contains a collection of approximately 100,000 pages of non-fiction writings by major American black leaders—teachers, artists, politicians, religious leaders, athletes, war veterans, entertainers, and other figures—covering 250 years of history. In addition to the most familiar works, Black Thought and Culture presents a great deal of previously inaccessible material, including letters, speeches, prefatory essays, political leaflets, interviews, periodicals, and trial transcripts.

The collection spans from the works of Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois and Ida B. Wells Barnett, to Zora Neal Hurston, Audra Lorde, and Jesse Jackson. Most notably, the collection includes items previously undigitized, and difficult to obtain, such as:

  • The transcript of the Muhammad Ali trial
  • A full run of The Black Panther newspaper, with full-colour images of every page as well as searchable text
  • 2,500 pages of exclusive Black Panther oral histories owned by the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation
  • Selected audio files, heard here for the first time
  • the full run of Artist and Influence journal, tracking African American cultural trends in the 20th Century.

This resource will be of interest to those interested in African American history, politics, literature and culture.

You may access the resource here.

Please send any feedback you have regarding this resource to bethan.davies@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

You can also find out more about our other two trials for Native American Indians and Black Authors on our new blogpost. 

 

New in Oxford: African American Periodicals

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I am pleased to announce that the Vere Harmsworth Library has purchased online access to the resource African American Periodicals for the University.

 

 

 

Based on the work of James P. Danky in African-American Newspapers and Periodicals: A National Bibliography (Harvard, 1998), this vast collection covers over 150 years of American history, from slavery up to the modern era. The collection features over 170 titles, written by and for African Americans.

Primary sources found here include news, commentary, advertisements, literature, drawings and photographs, Key titles in this unique resource include African Repository, El Mulato, The Black Warrior, Pennsylvania Freedmen’s Bulletin, Colored Harvest, Voice of the Negro, Horizon: A Journal of the Color Line, The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races, Blue Helmet: A Magazine for the American Negro Soldier of All Wars, Harlem Pointer, African World, Black Pride Newsletter, Right On! and others from every region of the United States. Primary sources found here include news, commentary, advertisements, literature, drawings and photographs, helping to capture the voice of African American history and culture.

Our online platform allows our readers to search the African American Periodicals by full-text, or to browse by periodical title, historic period, or themes. Readers may also search via article type, such as advertisements, or opinion pieces. You may access the resource by clicking here

Bodleian readers may also search across our Readex databases, using Readex AllSearch. This allows researchers to cross-search across multiple primary resources, including the African American Newspapers and Ethnic American Newspapers.

Similar resources include:

If you would like any advice on using our databases or resources, please contact the Vere Harmsworth Librarian, Bethan Davies bethan.davies@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

New in Oxford: Black Abolitionist Papers, and more!

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I am delighted to announce that access to a number of major new e-resources are now available.

The Bodleian Libraries have committed substantial external funding to a one-off set of purchases of electronic research resources deemed to be important to researchers in the University. This follows a project to identify desiderata across all subjects and to list suggestions from readers.

Of particular interest to US Studies are the Black Abolitionist Papers (1830-1865) 

This collection covers a unique set of primary sources from African Americans actively involved in the movement to end slavery in the United States between 1830 and 1865. The content includes letters, speeches, editorials, newspaper articles, sermons, and essays from libraries and archives in England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, and the United States. Over 15,000 items written by nearly 300 Black men and women are available for searching,with over 30% consisting of handwritten and unique documents.

As described on the Black Abolitionist Paper’s website 

“This collection, when first published in microfilm, literally transformed scholarly understanding of Black activism during this period. Now it is available in a searchable, easily accessible format for research, teaching, and study.”

Other resources recently purchased that may be of interest include:

Trench Journals and Unit Magazines of the First World War

Published by every type of military and support service unit, from every involved nation, trench journals were a means of expression through which men and women engaged in all aspects of World War I could share their thoughts and experiences. Over 1,500 periodicals, drawn from the holdings of major libraries and research collections, make this resource the most comprehensive collection of trench journals available to scholars anywhere in one place.

Collections can be narrowed to specific nations, languages and army units. This resource would be useful for Americanists interested in the US involvement in World War 1, the perception of US forces by other allied forces, and further social-cultural studies of US forces in the early 20th Century.

This resource brings together complete runs of journals from disparate sources. Functionality allows both browsing and precision searching for editorials, advertisements, poetry, cartoons and illustrations, photographs, and obituaries, opening up opportunities for research in multiple fields: literature, history, war studies, cultural studies, and gender studies.

Women and Social Movements, International

Through the writings of women activists, their personal letters and diaries, and the proceedings of conferences at which pivotal decisions were made, this collection lets you see how women’s social movements shaped much of the events and attitudes that have defined modern life. This digital archive includes 150,000 pages of conference proceedings, reports of international women’s organizations, publications and web pages of women’s non-governmental organizations, and letters, diaries, and memoirs of women active internationally since the mid-nineteenth century.  It also includes photographs and videos of major events and activists in the history of women’s international social movements. Additionally, there are 30 essays from leading contemporary scholars exploring themes illuminated by the primary documents in the archive.

Researchers can limit their searches to specific geographic areas, or search across resources to review information on specific themes or topics.

LGBT Magazine Archive

The resource archives of 26 leading but previously hard-to-find magazines are included in LGBT Magazine Archive, including many of the longest-running, most influential publications of this type in the US . The complete backfile of The Advocate is made available digitally for the first time. As one of the very few LGBT titles to pre-date the 1969 Stonewall riots, it spans the history of the gay rights movement.

Art and Architecture Archive

Full-text archive of periodicals (cover-to-cover colour scans) in the fields of art and architecture. Date range: 19thC – 21stC. Subjects covered include fine art, decorative arts, architecture, interior design, industrial design, and photography worldwide.

Oxford researchers should use their SSO to gain remote access. The resources can be access via SOLO or Databases A-Z.

American National Biography Update: April 2020

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Believing that the life of a nation is told by the lives of its people, the American National Biography consists of over 19,000 scholarly biographies of significant, influential, or notorious figures from American history.

The latest update to the American National Biography features five new essays, with a focus on important American writers and critics. It includes one of the nation’s foremost film critics, Pauline Kael; the noted black nationalist writer and poet Amiri Baraka; Esther Rome, co-author of the feminist bestseller Our Bodies, Ourselves; Chicano poet, artist, and civil rights activist José Montoya; and poet John Ashbery, whose collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award in 1976.

Pauline Kael (1919–2001), one of the most iconoclastic, controversial, and revered film critics in the history of American print journalism. She was known for the exuberant writing style, her vision of the movies as an unparalleled populist national theater, and her desire in the late 1960s and 1970s to generate a new seriousness and sophistication in American film audiences, directors, and critics.  She made movies and movie-going seem at the center of American culture. No critic had done so before with her panache, wit, and zeal.

Amiri Baraka, (1934–2014), born Le Roi Jones, one of the most influential African American writers of the twentieth century. A poet, playwright, and jazz critic, Baraka galvanized the Black Arts Movement, making an indelible contribution to modern African American culture and consciousness.

Esther Rome (1945–1995), women’s health activist who helped found the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. Its 1973 book Our Bodies, Ourselves was a revelation, arguing that women were the best experts on women’s health at a time when the vast majority of physicians and medical professionals were male. Rome continued to work on women’s health issues for the rest of her life.

José Montoya (1932–2013), who in 1969 co-founded Rebel Chicano Art Front (RCAF), a Chicano artist collective that sought to bring a consciousness towards laborers’ rights and Chicano identity through public art. Montoya also wrote many iconic poems that represented Chicano culture.

John Lawrence Ashbery (1927–2017), part of a group of postwar poets who added new lyrical forms to contemporary American poetry, even as those forms proved inaccessible to many contemporary readers. As he explains in “The Lament upon the Waters” “the problem isn’t how to proceed/ But is one of being.”

 

 

American National Biography: March 2020 Update

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Believing that the life of a nation is told by the lives of its people, the American National Biography consists of over 19,000 scholarly biographies of significant, influential, or notorious figures from American history.

The latest update to the American National Biography adds six new biographies of lives spanning from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first. New additions include Eugene Cernan (1934–2017), astronaut who was the second American to walk in space and the first to circle the earth. On his next mission, in 1969, he piloted the Apollo 10 lunar module, coming within 50,000 feet of the surface of the moon. He would reach the moon on his third trip to space. All told, seventy three of the 566 hours Cernan logged in space were on the surface of the moon. His time included 22 hours of moonwalks, more than any other astronaut. In 1972, upon leaving the moon for the final time, and making him to this point the last person to walk on the moon, Cernan said, “We leave as we came, and God willing, we shall return with peace and hope for all mankind.”

Tisquantum (ca. 1590-Nov. 1622), the Native American interpreter and emissary referred to in the original ANB essay as Squanto. Historian Neal Salisbury has written this new essay, which reflects the advances in scholarship that have occurred over the last two decades. English authors, particularly William Bradford and Edward Winslow, shaped the popular image of Tisquantum as the broker of Anglo-Wampanoag peace in Plymouth colony. That image dominated scholarship on Tisquantum until the late twentieth century. More recent scholars show a man no less singular but far more complicated and hardly heroic.

Chris Burden (1946­–2015), a sculptor who pioneered body and endurance art. He gained international renown in 1971 with Shoot, in which Burden asked his marksman friend, artist Bruce Dunlap, to graze his arm with a bullet, using a .22 rifle from a distance of 15 feet. At 7:45 P.M. Dunlap missed his aim and the bullet penetrated Burden’s upper left arm. He was rushed to hospital. Shoot represented Burden’s response to pervasive violence in the United Stats during the 1960s.

Anne Anastasi (1908­­–2001), psychologist, psychometrician, and educator who was a key architect of mass educational and psychological testing in the twentieth century. Across her remarkable 71-year career, she published two hundred journal articles and many books that reshaped her field, including Differential Psychology (1937), Psychological Testing (1954), and Fields of Applied Psychology (1964).

Rudi Gernreich (1922–1985), designer of women’s fashion and swimwear whose bold, futuristic fashions were innovative body-conscious designs that not only anticipated the social changes of the 1950s and 1960s. He also provoked change by challenging social taboos and conventions. His vision of the liberated body and freedom from gender-norm constraints in dress were revolutionary and have inspired designers ever since.

Esther Wheelwright (1696–1780), religious leader and Indian captive who was the rare colonial North American woman to live in three different cultures in the eighteenth century: Indigenous, French, and British. She became the first and only foreign-born Mother Superior of the Ursuline convent in Québec.  Ursuline religious life gave the former child captive an opportunity for leadership and prominence not offered to most women in colonial North America.

Believing that the life of a nation is told by the lives of its people, the American National Biography consists of over 19,000 scholarly biographies of significant, influential, or notorious figures from American history.