Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library: Humanities: American Studies Resources

American Studies Resources

Most Useful

African American Experience
African American history and culture reference from authorities in the field, and giving African Americans a voice to share their experiences.
America: History and Life with Fulltext

Reference tool for U.S. and Canadian history and culture. With full-text coverage of hundreds of journals and books, and selective indexing for journals from 1863 to present.
American Indian Experience
Features scholarship and reference content, hundreds of primary documents, and images of the indigenous peoples of the United States.
Indigenous Histories and Cultures in North America

Offers a unique insight into interactions between A American Indians and Europeans from their earliest contact, continuing through the turbulence of the American Civil War, the on-going repercussions of government legislation, right up to the civil rights movement of the mid- to late-twentieth century. This resource was previously known as “American Indian Histories and Cultures.”
Latino American Experience
documents the rich heritage and current culture of Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Guatemalans, Cubans, Dominicans, Colombians, Ecuadorians, and other Hispanic groups in the United States. Their stories are detailed through a robust collection of primary and secondary sources, beginning with pre-16th century Mayan, Incan, and Aztec empires and continuing through to the present day, with treatment also given to cultural themes including coming-of-age rituals, music, literature, and cuisine. On the controversial issues shaping the modern Latino American experience—such as immigration reform, media portrayals, and voting access and influence—credentialed academics offer varied perspectives to serve as both sources and exemplars of scholarly argumentation.
North American Indian Thought and Culture
The database represents the largest compilation ever created of biographical information on indigenous peoples from all areas of North America. Included are biographies, auto-biographies, personal narratives, speeches, diaries, letters, and oral histories.

Also Useful

Alt-PressWatch
Alternative and independent media coverage. Independent voices and regional, rural, and metropolitan perspectives on local, national, and international issues from some of the most respected and cited grassroots newspapers, magazines, and journals in the U.S. Approximately 260+ publications.
Chicano Database

Produced by the Ethnic Studies Library at UC Berkeley, this bibliographic index covers a wide range of materials focused on the Mexican-American and Chicano experience with selective indexing dating back to early 1900s. Coverage of the broader Latino experience of Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans and Central American immigrants begins with 1992 onwards. Covers Chicano/a art, education, folklore, health. history, labor, language & literature, music, politics, public policy, religion, sociology and women's studies.
Daily Life Databases (America, Pop Culture, Indian, Latino, etc)
Comprehensive, cross-disciplinary resource that supports history, social studies, English, and language students, Daily Life moves from past to present, providing context for contemporary life and culture. Lesson plans are included that explore everyday life, past and present in every geographic area.
Ethnic NewsWatch
This collection includes newspapers, magazines and journals of the ethnic, minority and native press, and offers diverse viewpoints and perspectives.
Gale OneFile Pop Culture Studies
Access to scholarly journals and magazines that both analyze and contribute to popular culture
Gender Watch

GenderWatch enhances gender and women's studies, and gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) research by providing authoritative perspectives from 1970 to present. This well-established and highly reviewed resource offers over 300 titles, with more than 250 in full-text, from an array of academic, radical, community and independent presses. Researchers and teachers may access more than 219,000 full articles on wide-ranging topics like sexuality, religion, societal roles, feminism, masculinity, eating disorders, healthcare, and the workplace.
Pop Culture Universe
Includes more than 250 volumes of reviewed material, images, lesson plans, overviews and more about American and world pop culture and history.
Women and Social Movements in the United States 1600-2000, Scholar's Edition
This collection seeks to advance scholarly debates and understanding about U.S. women’s history and currently includes 124 document projects and archives with more than 5,100 documents and 175,000 pages of additional full-text documents, written by 2,800 primary authors. It also includes book, film, and website reviews, notes from the archives, and teaching tools.

Primary Source Websites

Making of America
Making of America is a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology.

Primary Source Databases

African American Newspapers, 1827-1998
270+ newspapers covering life in the Antebellum South — abolitionism; the growth of the Black church; the Emancipation Proclamation; the Jim Crow Era; the rise of the N.A.A.C.P.; the Harlem Renaissance; the Civil Rights movement; political and economic empowerment; and more.
America's Historical Newspapers
Offers exact reproductions of 700+ historical American newspapers from the period 1690-1900.
American Civil War: Letters and Diaries
Diaries, letters, memoirs, bibliography & other primary source material about the Civil War
Images of the American Civil War
The collection is drawn from archives around the country, documenting the lives of Union and Confederate soldiers. Includes photographs, posters, and ephemera of nineteenth-century Americana as experienced from social, military, and political perspectives.
American State Papers
Search and browse legislative and executive documents of the first 14 U.S. Congresses. This collection covers such historical events as Lewis and Clark’s Expedition, Burr’s Conspiracy and Arrest, the Treaty of the Creek Indians made by Andrew Jackson and much more. Also includes speeches and messages of Presidents Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison. Note: Please refer to the U.S. Congressional Serial Set, 1817-1980 database for post 1816 documents.
Arte Público Hispanic Historical Collection Series 1

A collection of historical content pertaining to U.S. Hispanic history, literature and culture. Content comes from the “Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project,” the largest national project ever to locate, preserve, and disseminate Latino-Hispanic culture of the United States in its written form, from colonial times to 1960. The project functions under the direction of Dr. Nicolás Kanellos, founder and director of Arte Público Press.
Asian American Drama
This edition contains 252 plays by 42 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. Also includes selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays.
Black Thought and Culture
700+ published essays, letters, song lyrics, interviews, and speeches written by African American social, cultural and political notables from the 17th century to the present documenting the African American experience in the United States.
Images of the American Civil War
The collection is drawn from archives around the country, documenting the lives of Union and Confederate soldiers. Includes photographs, posters, and ephemera of nineteenth-century Americana as experienced from social, military, and political perspectives.
Indigenous Newspapers in North America

Digital collection of print journalism from Indigenous peoples of the US and Canada over more than 9,000 individual editions from 1828-2016. This collection provides research opportunities into subjects including the self-determination era and American Indian Movement (AIM), education, environmentalism, land rights and cultural representation from an Indigenous perspective. The 45 unique titles also include bi-lingual and Indigenous-language editions, such as Hawaiian, Cherokee and Navajo languages. This resource was previously known as “American Indian Newspapers.”
North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries and Oral Histories
A full-text database including over 10,000 pages of primary source material written by over 2000 different authors, all dealing with the experience of immigrating to the United States and Canada between 1800 and 1950.
North American Women's Letters and Diaries: Colonial to 1950
This resource contains 150,000 pages of materials drawn from the letters and diaries of 1,325 women beginning with early Colonial period through to the 1950’s.
Sixties: Primary Documents and Personal Narratives 1960 - 1974
Documents the key events, trends, and movements in 1960s America—vividly conveying the zeitgeist of the decade and its effects into the middle of the next. Alongside 75,000 pages of letters, diaries, and oral histories, there are more than 75,000 pages of posters, broadsides, pamphlets, advertisements, and rare audio and video materials—150,000 pages total upon completion. The collection is further enhanced by dozens of scholarly document projects, featuring richly annotated primary-source content that is analyzed and contextualized through interpretive essays by leading historians.
Social and Cultural History: Letters and Diaries Online
Social and Cultural History: Letters and Diaries Online offers not only keyword searching across thousands of collections freely available on the Web, but also allows users to perform in-depth fielded searches across all of the letter, diary, and oral history collections published commercially by Alexander Street Press.
U.S. Congressional Serial Set, 1817-1994
Includes House & Senate Reports, Senate treaty documents and Senate executive reports, and presidential messages. To see documents before this date, refer to the American State Papers, 1789-1838.
Women and Social Movements in the United States 1600-2000, Scholar's Edition
This collection seeks to advance scholarly debates and understanding about U.S. women’s history and currently includes 124 document projects and archives with more than 5,100 documents and 175,000 pages of additional full-text documents, written by 2,800 primary authors. It also includes book, film, and website reviews, notes from the archives, and teaching tools.

Most Useful

The Library of Congress: American Memory
Digital versions of the Americana holdings at the Library of Congress. Includes photographs, manuscripts, rare books, maps, sound and moving pictures.
The African American Migration Experience
A collection of texts, illustrations, and maps about the thirteen defining migrations that have formed and transformed African America and the nation since the 15th Century
Immigration to the United States, 1789-1930
A web-based collection of selected historical materials from Harvard's libraries, archives, and museums that document voluntary immigration to the US from the signing of the Constitution to the onset of the Great Depression
American Rhetoric
Online database of and index to 5000+ full text, audio, and video versions of public speeches, sermons, legal proceedings, lectures, debates, interviews, and other recorded media events.
Say it Plain, Say it Loud: A Century of Great African American Speeches
AMERICAN RADIOWORKS® is the national documentary unit of American Public Media. ARW is public radio's largest documentary production unit; it creates documentaries, series projects, and investigative reports for the public radio system and the Internet.
North American Vexillological Association (NAVA)
The North American Vexillological Association shares information on flags and flag history through its website that includes links to its publications, a newsletter called NAVA news and its scholarly journal, RAVEN, a journal of Vexillology.

Also Useful

American Antiquarian Society
The American Antiquarian Society (AAS) is an independent research library founded in 1812 in Worcester, Massachusetts. The library's collections document the life of America's people from the colonial era through the Civil War and Reconstruction. Collections include books, pamphlets, newspapers, periodicals, broadsides, manuscripts, music, graphic arts, and local histories.
Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association
The PCA/ACA is a group of scholars and enthusiasts, who study the popular culture--writing, sharing, and publishing in the field. The PCA/ACA offers a venue to come together and share ideas and interests about the field or about a particular subject within the field.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
The Smithsonian American Art Museum, the nation's first collection of American art, is an unparalleled record of the American experience. The collection captures the aspirations, character and imagination of the American people throughout three centuries. The American Art Museum is the home to one of the largest and most inclusive collections of American art in the world. Its artworks reveal key aspects of America's rich artistic and cultural history from the colonial period to today.
C-SPAN.org
C-SPAN is a private, non-profit company, created in 1979 by the cable television industry as a public service. Our mission is to provide public access to the political process.
Project Vote Smart: The Voter's Self Defense System
The database, accessed through the Project website at www.votesmart.org, provides online access to information on more than 40,000 candidates at all levels of government, including campaign finance, voting records, issue positions, biographical information, and public statements, and interest group ratings.