This guide is intended to help people doing research in the History of the United States of America, defined broadly. It is not intended to be comprehensive. The focus is on topics of research in History Department.
This database provides archival access to the following magazines: U. S. News & World Report, Time, Sports Illustrated, People, Life, Fortune, Forbes, Esquire, Businessweek, Architectural Digest, Maclean's, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and Moment. Users can search across these magazines, or select individual titles.
American Civil Liberties Union Papers, 1912-1990 includes case documents and primary sources relating to the American Civil Liberties Union from 1912-1990.
Making of Modern Law: Foreign, Comparative and International Law, 1600-1926 provides access to international and foreign law, including monographs on the laws of foreign jurisdictions. This resource includes titles from the 19th and early 20th century, as well as classics in European international law since the 17th century.
Making of Modern Law: Foreign Primary Sources, 1600-1970 complements the collection of treatises found in Foreign, Comparative and International Law 1600-1926. Importantly, it provides an interpretive analysis with books on codes, the “primary sources” of law.
The Making of Modern Law: Legal Treatises 1800-1926 provides access to all US and British law published from 1800 through 1926. Users can search the full text of these documents.
Making of Modern Law: Primary Sources 1620-1926 is a fully searchable digital archive of the published records of the American colonies, documents published by state constitutional conventions, state codes, city charters, law dictionaries, digests and more from 1620-1926.
Making of Modern Law: U.S. Supreme Court Records and Briefs, 1832-1978 includes transcripts, applications for review, motions, petitions, supplements and other official papers of the most-studied and talked-about cases, including many that resulted in landmark decisions. It serves the needs of students and researchers in American legal history, politics, society and government, as well as practicing attorneys.
The Making of the Modern World: Goldsmiths'-Kress Library of Economic Literature 1450-1850" provides digital facsimile images on every page of 61,000 works of literature on economic and business published from 1450 through 1850. Full-text searching on more than 12 million pages provides researchers unparalleled access to this vast collection of material on commerce, finance, social conditions, politics, trade and transport.
Manuscript Women's Letters and Diaries brings together the personal writings of women of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries from the collections of the American Antiquarian Society. Manuscripts in this collection can be browsed and read as high-resolution page images.
The March of Time is a digitized archive of the newsreel series of the same name, which was broadcast to American theatergoers and television audiences from 1935 to 1967.
Provides a unique insight into the American consumer boom of the mid-20th century through access to the complete market research reports of Ernest Dichter, the era’s foremost consumer analyst, market research pioneer and widely-recognised ‘father’ of Motivational Research.
Mass Incarceration and Prison Studies is part of the Global Issues Library, this curated database provides a study for students to investigate both crucial global trends in mass incarceration, and the detailed prison infrastructure of specific countries. The database is organized around a selection of key historical and contemporary events and themes, bringing together archival and reference materials, court cases, first-hand accounts, videos, Supreme Court audio files, research on rehabilitation, training materials and artistic works.
The MEDLINE database is widely recognized as the premier source for bibliographic and abstract coverage of biomedical literature. MEDLINE encompasses information from Index Medicus, Index to Dental Literature, and International Nursing, as well as other sources of coverage in the areas of allied health, biological and physical sciences, humanities and information science as they relate to medicine and health care, communication disorders, population biology, and reproductive biology.
PubMed comprises over 30 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. PubMed citations and abstracts include the fields of biomedicine and health, covering portions of the life sciences, behavioral sciences, chemical sciences, and bioengineering. PubMed also provides access to additional relevant web sites and links to the other NCBI molecular biology resources.
Meet the Press is an archive of every episode of the weekly NBC news show Meet the Press, which features interviews, panels, and debates about politics. Videos are available as streaming episodes, from 1947-present. Users can explore content by keyword, place, historical event, and time period, and can create compilations of clips to embed in other multimedia projects.
Users must create an account with Alexander Street Press to publish embedded clips.
MEMSO is a resource for the study of Britain and its place in the world during the medieval and early modern period (c. 1100-1800). It combines the key printed sources for English, Irish, Scottish and Colonial history with original manuscripts and the latest web technologies.
The MLA International Bibliography provides bibliographic records for books, book chapters, journal articles, and dissertations published in the fields of modern languages, literatures, folklore, and linguistics. Full text is available for some articles. The MLAIB covers items published from around 1920 to the present.
The Music Index offers comprehensive indexing and abstracts for more than 660 journals in the field of music, with selective coverage for an additional 200-plus journals. The online database extends back to 1964; for publication dates 1949-1964, consult the physical print volumes in the Music Reference section (Bobst 7th floor), call number ML118.M987.
Music Periodicals Database (formerly International Index to Music Periodicals) is a research database for periodical articles in music from 1874 to the present, with indexing for more than 600 journals and full text for more than 220.
NCJRS contains summaries of U.S. and international publications, including federal, state, and local government reports, books, research reports, journal articles, audiovisual presentations, and unpublished research related to criminal justice, juvenile justice, and substance abuse. Dates of coverage: 1975 to present.
National Geographic Virtual Library is a complete archive of National Geographic magazine, with a cross-searchable collection of National Geographic books, maps, images and videos. This collection includes: National Geographic Magazine Archive, 1888-1994 National Geographic Magazine Archive, 1995-Current National Geographic: People, Animals, and the World National Geographic Kids. Users can discover images and search for word frequencies across the publication range of the magazine.
The Nation Archive Premium Edition contains indexing, abstracting, and full text for the complete archive of The Nation, beginning with its first issue in 1865 all the way to the present. The Nation is America’s oldest weekly magazine and one if its premier journals of opinion since its inception in 1865.
The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) includes the entire run of NBER Working Papers and NBER working paper series on historical factors in long-run growth and the NBER Technical Working Papers.
News, Policy & Politics Magazine Archive offers digital access to the archival runs of 15 20th/21st-century consumer magazines covering such fields as the history of politics, current events, public policy, and international relations. Each title has a backfile and issues are scanned from cover to cover. Central to this collection is the archive of Newsweek, one of the 20th century's most prominent, highest circulating general interest magazines.
In combination these publications provide access to contemporary responses to the key events, trends, and preoccupations of the period, from a range of perspectives. In addition to the representation of various political and religious orientations, the collection is international in scope. Alongside leading US publications such as Newsweek and In These Times are magazines that are published outside of North America and/or are engaged with international affairs, such as Europe, New Internationalist, and NATO Review.
Newsbank searches a collection of databases from the information vendor Newsbank, including the Archive of Americana, World News Archive, Foreign Broadcast Information Service Reports, and Access World News. These collections include: Early American Newspapers, Series XV, 1822-1879: Immigrant Communities; American Underworld: The Flash Press; African American Newspapers, Series 1, African American Newspapers, Series 2, Ethnic American Newspapers (Balch), 1799-1971; Joint Publications Research Service Reports (JPRS), 1957-1995; Sowetan Collection; Financial Mail Collection, Sunday Times Collection; Business Day Collection
Access New York Newspaper Archives and discover stories of the past with NewspaperArchive.com. The archive covers New York history from 1753-2023, with lots of content from smaller, local newspapers. Articles have been scanned as PDFs and include images and advertisements, and are full text searchable.
Newspaper Source Plus provides selected full text coverage for hundreds of national and international newspapers, newswires, and other sources. Content is a mix of full text html stories (which do not include images or advertisements) and full text PDFs of each article (including images and advertisements).
Newswires provides access to newswire articles from the Associated Press, United Press International, PR Newswire, Xinhua, CNN Wire, and Business Wire. Dates of coverage include the most recent few years, and articles are available as html full text.
New World Cinema: Independent Features and Shorts, 1990-present is a collection selected from the catalogues of independent distributors Kino Lorber, First Run Features, Film Movement, MK2, and Global Lens.
The New York Times with Index database provides access to the full text, "as printed" edition of The New York Times, including images and advertisements. Coverage begins with the first edition published in 1851 and extends to three years from the present day (due to a rolling embargo).
Nineteenth-Century American Drama: Popular Culture and Entertainment, 1820-1900 includes a wide variety of works such as historical plays, melodramas, political satires, minstrel shows, comic operas, musical extravaganzas, parlor entertainments, adaptations of novels, and many others.
Nineteenth Century Collections Online is a multi-year global digitization and publishing program focusing on primary source collections of the nineteenth century, with archives releasing incrementally. ** The database includes the collections Asia and the West: Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange; British Politics & Society; British Theatre, Music, and Literature: High and Popular Culture; Children's Literature and Childhood; Europe and Africa: Commerce, Christianity, Civilization, and Conquest; European Literature, 1790-1840: The Corvey Collection; Mapping the World: Maps and Travel Literature; Photography: The World Through the Lens; Religion, Society, Spirituality, and Reform; Science, Technology, and Medicine: 1780-1925, Parts I and II; And Women: Transnational Networks. **
With digital facsimile images of both full pages and clipped articles for hundreds of 19th century U.S. newspapers and advanced searching capabilities, researchers will be able to research history in ways previously unavailable. For each issue, the newspaper is captured from cover-to-cover, providing access to every article, advertisement and illustration.
North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries and Oral Histories includes 2,162 authors and approximately 100,000 pages of information, so providing a unique and personal view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada between 1800 and 1950. Contains contemporaneous letters, diaries, oral histories, interviews, and other personal narratives.
This edition of North American Indian Drama contains 256 plays by 49 playwrights. More than half of the works are previously unpublished, and hard to find, representing groups such as Cherokee, Métis, Creek, Choctaw, Pembina Chippewa, Ojibway, Lenape, Comanche, Cree, Navajo, Rappahannock, Hawaiian/Samoan, and others
O’Dell’s Annals of the New York Stage, the Oxford University Press Companion series, and Greenwood’s American Theatre Companies series are just a few of the many in-copyright sources included in the Theatre in Context Collection. Placed alongside thousands of playbills, posters, photographs, and related theatrical ephemera, users will be able to paint a more comprehensive picture of the life and evolution of dramatic works.
Contains 1,517 plays by 330 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies. The database also includes selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays.
OpinionArchives provides access to commentaries and opinion pieces on topics related to politics, culture, and the arts. These titles include American Spectator, Americas Quarterly, Commentary, Commonweal, Dissent, Harpers Magazine, The National Review, The New Republic, Washington Examiner, and The New Yorker. Coverage extends as far back as 1850.
Provides in-depth indexing to more than 2,700 collections of Oral History in English from around the world. The collection provides keyword searching of almost 281,000 pages of full-text by close to 10,000 individuals from all walks of life.
The Oxford African American Studies Center provides more than 20,000 articles by top scholars in the field; over 2,500 images; more than 700 primary sources with specially written commentaries; and nearly 200 maps, all focused on the lives and events that have shaped African American and African history and culture.
Oxford Art Online allows searching across both the Benezit Dictionary of Artists and Grove Art Online. The Benezit Dictionary of Artists is a standard reference collection of artists' biographies. It is international in scope, and covers all periods and styles. In addition to biographies, many entries include bibliographies, auction sales data, and images of signatures, monograms, or other marks of identification. Grove Art Online is composed of signed, scholarly encyclopedia entries on all aspects of global art, design and architecture. Individual articles are updated periodically, and new articles reflecting contemporary developments in the arts are added on a regular basis.
Oxford Music Online is an integrated package of three important music reference publications: Grove Music Online, Oxford Companion to Music, Oxford Dictionary of Music.
PAIS International contains journal articles, books, government documents, statistical directories, grey literature, research reports, conference reports, publications of international agencies for public affairs, public and social policies, and international relations.
The Paley Center Seminars is a video collection of interviews with celebrities, television crews, and distinguished panels. It includes filmed seminars featuring lively discussions with the leading names in media discussing the creative process, contemporary issues in production, and issues such as the impact of the media on contemporary society.
The PBS video collection provides streaming access to selected documentaries and programs produced by the Public Broadcasting Service. Coverage runs from the 1970s to present day, and spans a wide range of topics including history, science and technology, diversity studies, business, current events, and biographies. Highlights include programs from Frontline, NOVA, American Experience, Odyssey, and films by Ken Burns and Michael Wood.
Performing Arts Periodicals Database provides indexing and abstracts for more than 210 international journals in the performing arts dating from 1864 to the near present.
PhiloLogic, developed by the ARTFL Project at the University of Chicago, allows for alternate and sophisticated search capabilities, as designed by ARTFL, to certain databases available through NYU. These databases include: African-American Poetry 1760-1900, American Poetry, American Poetry Full-Text, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, English Poetry, English Prose Drama, and Patrologia Latina Database.
Philosopher's Index contains citations and abstracts of scholarly research in all areas of philosophy and related fields. Included are information about journal articles, books, book chapters such as contributions to anthologies, and book reviews. The publication dates covered are from 1940 to present, and the full text of items is often available.
Use this source to locate plays published individually or in anthologies published from 1949 to the present. Play Index covers a wide range of plays written in or translated into English, including mysteries, pageants, plays in verse, puppet performances, radio and television plays, and classic drama.
Policy FIle offers access to U.S. foreign and domestic policy papers and gray literature, with abstracts and links to timely reports, papers, and documents from think tanks, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), research institutes, advocacy groups, agencies, and other entities.
PolicyMap is a web mapping platform that contains data on demographics, real estate, city crime rates, health, schools, housing affordability, employment, energy, and public investments. Users can create online, interactive maps that can be shared and can upload their own point data to be juxtaposed with the data PolicyMap contains.
Political Extremism and Radicalism offers researchers a diverse range of rare primary-source content, including campaign materials, periodicals, propaganda, government records, oral histories, and various ephemera. This digital archive allow researchers to explore a wide variety of fringe groups from both the right and left of the political spectrum in new and innovative ways, supporting questions on philosophical, social, political, and economic ideologies as well as on contemporary issues surrounding gender, sexuality, race, religion, civil rights, universal suffrage, and much more. It contains three modules: 1. Far-Right and Left Political Groups in the U.S., Europe, and Australia in the Twentieth Century; 2. Far-Right Groups in America; and 3. Global Communist and Socialist Movements.
Polling the Nations is a compilation of public opinion data gathered by polling organizations in the United States and 100 other countries from 1986 to the present. Sources include Harris International, The Pew Center, television news organizations (e.g., CBS, NBS, Fox, CNN), and international polling organizations (e.g., Eurobarometer). Users can search by question and survey and export data in Excel format.
Rock and Roll explores the dynamic period of social, political and cultural change between 1950 and 1975. The resource offers thousands of colour images of manuscript and rare printed material as well as photographs, ephemera and memorabilia from this exciting period in our recent history. It includes an interactive chronology, visual resources, video footage, and more.
Popular Medicine in America documents the history of medicine in America during the nineteenth century, through an extensive range of material that was aimed at the general public rather than medical professionals. Explore an array of printed sources, including rare books, pamphlets, trade cards, and visually-rich advertising ephemera.
PRISMA: Publicaciones y Revistas Sociales y Humanísticas (with HAPI index) provides access to full-text scholarly journals in the social sciences and humanities for the study of Latin America and the Caribbean. Content is in Spanish, Portuguese, and English. Publications in this database that are indexed in UCLA's Hispanic American Periodicals Index can also be searched by subject. (Journals or articles in PRISMA not indexed in HAPI cannot be searched in this way.)
ProQuest Central is a large, multidisciplinary database with over 11,000 titles, with over 8,000 titles in full-text. It serves as the central resource for researchers at all levels in all markets. Over 160 subjects areas are covered extensively in this product including business and economics, health and medical, news and world affairs, technology, social sciences and more.
ProQuest Civil War Era offers access to comprehensive primary source materials that cover a range of topics including the formative economic factors and other forces that led to the abolitionist movement, the 600,000 battle casualties, and the emancipation of nearly 4 million slaves. The database combines continuous runs of regional newspapers, as well as pamphlets covering a wide range of topics. These sources focus on the entire era, from Manifest Destiny through the end of the Civil War--enabling researchers to investigate not just the battles, but also the rising tensions that led the country to war.
ProQuest Congressional allows you to explore Congress in action with the most comprehensive online resource available for congressional publications and legislative research. You can perform in-depth research in public policy, historical, and legal areas of interest.
This resource is not part of the depository library program.
ProQuest Historical Annual Reports contains companies' annual reports available through searchable pdf images. Key data (financial, Fortune 500 ranking, industry classification, key people, geographic location, auditor, and related companies) are indexed in the citation and can be searched.
APA PsycNET is an integrated collection of databases from the American Psychological Association (APA), including the following: PsycINFO, PsycBOOKS, PsycTESTS, PsycTHERAPY, PsycARTICLES, and PsycEXTRA.
PsycINFO, the most popular database in PsycNET, is a bibliographic index covering core literature in the psychological and behavioral sciences and their related disciplines. PsycBOOKS includes online versions of the APA Handbooks in Psychology Series, as well as other ebooks and online encyclopedias published by APA. PsycTESTS is a source of structured information about psychological tests and measures as well as a repository for the full text of select instruments. PsycTHERAPY provides access to streaming psychotherapy demonstration videos.
Altogether, PsycNET provides information about and access to journal articles, books and ebooks, dissertations, conference presentations, tests and measures, videos, gray literature, and many other other publication types in the psychological, social, behavioral, and health sciences.
To search only a specific database (e.g., PsycINFO) within the PsycNET interface, use the "Select Databases" features at the top of the PsycNET landing page and check (or uncheck) the database(s) that apply.
Based at Fisk University from 1943-1970, the Race Relations Department and its annual Institute were set up by the American Missionary Association to investigate problem areas in race relations and develop methods for educating communities and preventing conflict. Documenting three pivotal decades in the fight for civil rights, this resource showcases the speeches, reports, surveys and analyses produced by the Department’s staff and Institute participants, including Charles S. Johnson, Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., and Thurgood Marshall.
Provides indexing and abstracting of the most popular general-interest periodicals published in the United States and Canada, plus the full text of selected periodicals. Dates of coverage: 1983 to present.
Provides indexing of the most popular general-interest periodicals published in the United States and reflects the history of 20th century America.Dates of coverage: 1890-1982. Use the Readers' Guide Full Text for 1983 forward.
Regulatory Insight creates regulatory histories for individual federal statutes and Executive Orders by compiling pertinent Federal Register articles into a research-friendly workspace similar to the workspace provided in Legislative Insight. Regulatory histories associated with a public law are compilations of Federal Register (FR) notices, proposed rules, and rules representing the complete rulemaking process associated with specific Public Laws. These histories are compiled by human researchers.
The Religion Database, sponsored by the American Theological Library Association, is the premier index to journal articles, book reviews, and collections of essays in all fields of religion. Dates of coverage: 1949 to the present.
Religions of America traces the history and unique character of religious movements that originated in or were re-shaped by the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The collection pays especially close attention to America’s unique role as a birthplace for new religious movements within the context of the nation’s origins as a home for religious dissenters.
Reveal Digital develops open access primary source collections from under-represented 20th-century voices of dissent, sourced from libraries, museums, historical societies, and individual collectors. NYU Libraries subscribe to following collections: American Prison Newspapers, 1800s-present: Voices from the Inside; Behind the Scenes of the Civil Rights Movements; Black Periodicals: From the Great Migration through Black Power; HIV, AIDS & the Arts; Independent Voices; Student Activism.
Examine how revolutions, protests, resistance, and social movements have shaped and transformed the human experience globally from the 18th to 21st century.
The Revolutionary War Era Orderly Books from the New-York Historical Society as developed in conjunction with the New-York Historical Society offers access to Orderly Books and contains handwritten volumes documenting military orders, movements and engagements by brigade, regiment, company and other specific military units between 1748 and 1817. The content in Orderly Books provides detailed accounts of troops' daily lives, documenting everything from court martial cases to the price of necessities charged by locals. Given the dearth of soldiers' diaries, Orderly Books provides historically valuable information about soldiers' lives.
RILM Abstracts is a comprehensive research database of international scholarship in the field of music, with over 1 million records in 143 languages from 178 countries, including journal articles, books, dissertations, concert and record reviews, and more.
RIPM (Répertoire internationale de la presse musicale, or Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals) is a digital repository of historic music periodicals originally published 1768 to 1966, the majority of them reproduced in complete runs with searchable full text.
RISM Series A/II: Music Manuscripts after 1600, published by the Répertoire International des Sources Musicale (International Inventory of Musical Sources), is an annotated index of music manuscripts held in libraries, archives, monasteries, schools and private collections around the world. Other publications of the RISM project are in book form and may be found in the Music Reference section on the 7th floor of Bobst Library, call number ML113.I67.
Rock's Backpages Library is a digital archive of articles, reviews, interviews and more for the study of rock, pop, r&b, hip hop, and other popular music genres since the 1950s.
The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research archives include datasets from thousands of public opinion surveys with national adult, state, foreign, and special subpopulation samples. The data catalog also includes the iPoll search tool, which allows users to discover data by searching keywords that appear in survey questions. Along with information on survey organization, interview dates, and type of sample, most results include abstracts indicating the subjects covered by the questions in the survey.
Important: Users must create a distinct account within the Roper system after authenticating with NYU to search and download data.
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