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Vendors of digitized primary sources often bundle newspapers, magazines, government records, books, and unique items into thematic collections. Important tools for searching within and among such broad collections include
APS indexes over 1,100 periodicals that first began publishing between 1740 and 1900, including scholarly, special interest, and general magazines, literary and professional journals, children's and women's magazines, and many other historically-significant periodicals. Covers all academic disciplines including the sciences, though news and literary magazines are most prevalent. An excellent source of primary documents. Full text provided in HTML and PDF.
American Historical Periodicals Collection offers a documentary history of the American people from the Colonial Era into the 20th century, presenting North American thought, culture, and society through a variety of perspectives. Focused on American concerns, they were predominantly published in the US or Canada, though some were published overseas by Americans living abroad. From long-running publications to unusual and short-lived magazines, each periodical offers a cross section of the developing United States. Also with other digital archives in Gale Primary Sources (formerly Artemis) platform.
A smaller set of these works had been offered formerly on the EBSCOhost platform as American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collections.
Full-page images of these magazines are easily searched but not easily browsed. Cross-search any/all the magazines (including words in advertising) using the EbscoHost interface, select an article, then follow prompts in left sidebar to select articles in that issue or to change issues.
Architectural Digest Magazine Archive (1920-2011. ISSN: 2163-3819). Monthly international design magazine features beautiful photography and information on architecture and interior design, art and antiques, travel destinations, and extraordinary products.
Forbes Magazine Archive (1917-2000. ISSN: 0015-6914). Bi-weekly business magazine.
Life Magazine Archive (1936-2000. ISSN: 0024-3019). Complete run of the popular magazine that defined American photojournalism: national and world news, culture, lifestyle reporting, long feature articles, all heavily illustrated, including work by celebrated photographers.
National Review Archive (1955-present. ISSN: 0024-3019). Influential opinion magazine has been at the center of US conservative political and cultural discourse since the 1950s.
To restrict your search by publication, change the search field menu to sources (SO= ), and enter the name of the magazine. Clicking on the article title in the search results box may appear to produce nothing; select PDF Full Text option in a record to view that item. Browsing is difficult in the EbscoHost platform. It is easier to search the library's journal-title database for the bold-faced title or ISSN in the list above, select the magazine archive version, then pick publication year and drill down to an issue's table of contents to pick the article. To browse directly from one article to another, use PDF link in the left sidebar to browse through an issue in five-page increments or to navigate to another issue.
Browse, search, and retrieve full page images of Harper's Weekly, which chronicles the events of the American Civil War and reconstruction years. Page images are JPG; full text is HTML and PDF. Harper’s Weekly is a consistent, comprehensive, week-to-week chronological record of what happened worldwide in the last half of the nineteenth century.
In addition to the manually created Thesaurus-based index, HarpWeek has had the Full-text of Harper's Weekly typed and entered into an additional database. Clients now have another way to explore the nineteenth century.
The content is full-text searchable. If "Haiti" doesn't show up in Searchable Full-text, try it in the Thesaurus-based index; (it was spelled "Hayti" in the nineteenth century). If First Lieutenant J. E. Tuthill doesn't appear in the Thesaurus-based index, try him in Searchable Full-text.
Harper's Weekly is a consistent, comprehensive, week-to-week chronological record of what happened worldwide in the last half of the nineteenth century. Harper's was aimed at the middle and upper socio-economic classes, and tried not to print anything that it considered unfit for the entire family to read. In addition to the importance of illustrations and cartoons by artists like Winslow Homer and Thomas Nast, the paper's editorials played a significant role in shaping and reflecting public opinion from the start of the Civil War to the end of the century. George William Curtis, who was editor from 1863 until his death in 1892, was its most important editorial writer.
From its founding in 1857 until the Civil War broke out in April 1861, the publication took a moderate editorial stance on slavery and related volatile issues of the day. It had substantial readership in the South, and wanted to preserve the Union at all costs. Some critics called it "Harper's Weakly."
Harper's Weekly would have preferred William Seward or possibly even Stephen Douglas for president in 1860, and was lukewarm towards Lincoln early in his administration. When war came, however, its editorials embraced Lincoln, preservation of the Union, and the Republican Party. Military coverage became paramount in every issue, as its news and illustrations kept soldiers at the various fronts and their loved ones at home up to date on the details of the fighting.
The following quotation from the April 1865 issue of the North American Review shows how a leading peer publication viewed the wartime contributions of Harper's Weekly.
"Its vast circulation, deservedly secured and maintained by the excellence and variety of its illustrations of the scenes and events of the war, as well as by the spirit and tone of its editorials, has carried it far and wide. It has been read in city parlors, in the log hut of the pioneer, by every camp-fire of our armies, in the wards of our hospitals, in the trenches before Petersburg, and in the ruins of Charleston; and wherever it has gone, it has kindled a warmer glow of patriotism, it has nerved the hearts and strengthened the arms of the people, and it has done its full part in the furtherance of the great cause of the Union, Freedom, and the Law."
After the war, Harper's Weekly continued to be a major factor in Ulysses Grant's presidential victories in 1868 and 1872, the overthrow of New York City political boss William Tweed in 1871 and the first election of Grover Cleveland in 1884. Its circulation exceeded 100,000, peaking at 300,00 on occasion, while readership probably exceeded half a million people.
Search synopses of literary works within Harper's Weekly
Throughout the course of its run, Harper's Weekly featured nearly 2,700 fictional works. HarpWeek indexers have summarized many of these works in the form of Literary Synopses. Using HarpWeek's Synopsis feature, you can access these indexer-authored summaries. Serialized works, that is, works that spanned multiple issues of Harper's Weekly, can be accessed by installment from a convenient summary document. Using HarpWeek's search features, you can find text or phrases within these summaries and then be directed to the original work as it first appeared within Harper's Weekly.
Making of America (19th Century in Print)
Making of America is a digital library of primary sources in US 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. MoA collection is split between Cornell and the University of Michigan; each collection is searchable and browseable.
MoA (Cornell). Approximately 270 books (including Civil War official histories), 22 magazines/~100,000 articles, published 1840-1900. (Cornell MoA is hosted by HathiTrust.)
MoA (Michigan). Approximately 10,000 books and 13 magazines/~50,000 articles, published 1850-1877.
The National Geographic Virtual Library allows searching and browsing of the complete National Geographic archive of publications, using a proprietary viewer.
Searchable and browseable, full-page, color scans of both Smithsonian Magazine (1970-2010) and Air & Space Smithsonian (1986-2010) reflect the broad scientific, historical, and cultural range of the namesake institution. This digital archive parallels and serves same functions as National Geographic Archive, providing complete, full-color page images. Cross-searchable with other archival collections in Gale's Primary Sources [Artemis] portal.
Weekly political news magazine featuring in-depth reporting on public policy, politics, congressional legislation, and elections extending back to 1983, including: a complete wrap-up of news on Congress, the status of bills in play, behind-the-scenes maneuvering, committee and floor activity, debates, and all roll-call votes.
CQ Researcher publishes single-themed, 12,000-word reports researched and written by a seasoned journalist and noted for in-depth, unbiased coverage of health, social trends, criminal justice, international affairs, education, the environment, technology, and the economy. Reports provides an overview; background and chronology; assessment of the current situation; tables and maps; pro/con statements from opposing positions; and bibliographies. Pre-1996 are HTML; newer are PDFs. 1991-present.
Academic journal archives (could be primary or secondary, depending on use)
Complementing the better-known JSTOR with a more international orientation, PAO is a archive of more than 700 periodicals in the humanities and social sciences since their first issues. More than 150 are in languages other than English. Coverage is from volume 1, issue 1 of each journal, and all issues are digitized from cover to cover.
an archive of academic journals in the humanities, social science, and sciences, back to their earliest issues. So for some purposes, it is a collection of secondary sources and for others, primary sources. If you want to do a comprehensive search of the literature on a topic, don't start in JSTOR; use a discipline-specific database instead and/or Humanities & Social Sciences Index Retrospective: 1907-1984, a simple but historically deep index of academic articles that includes historical headings mapped to current ones:
Although a few journals in JSTOR include content up to the current issue, in most cases the latest content in JSTOR will be at least two years old.
While JSTOR journals are among the most reputable in their subject areas, not all subject areas are included.
JSTOR articles are presented as they were originally published: they will include terms and information that today could be regarded as inappropriate, incomplete, or worse. But if you want to know what scholars in, say, the 1930s said about controversial topics like race, some religious traditions, gender and sexuality, or mental or physical impairments, you will need to use search terms that match those of that time, even though they may offend you deeply.
Large and wide-ranging collections of historical and contemporary legal materials, including codes, treaties, constitutions, topical collections of historical documents, law reviews (resembling JSTOR), legal treatises from the US, Canada, and the UK. Not limited to narrowly legal topics: includes, for example, Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture & Law.
Bringing together rare journals printed between c.1685 and 1835, this resource illuminates all aspects of eighteenth-century social, political and literary life. Topics covered are wide-ranging and include colonial life, provincial and rural affairs, the French and American revolutions, reviews of literature and fashion throughout Europe, political debates, and London coffee house gossip and discussion.
British Periodicals is a collection of digitized periodicals covering the humanities, performing arts, history, science, architecture, and especially literature. Documents are available as high-resolution images and downloadable PDFs. Browse individual journals or search across the collection. All content is indexed, including advertising. Searches can be limited to multimedia types, including maps, illustrations, comics, photos, and music scores. 1681-1939.
The Economist Historical Archive delivers a complete, searchable copy of every issue of The Economist from 1843 to 2013. Content emphasizes business and economics, but world politics, science, technology, and culture are also covered. Pages display as JPEGs; use the Save button to generate a PDF of the entire article.
The Economist Historical Archive delivers a complete searchable copy of every issue of The Economist from 1843 to 2013. New full-color images, multiple search indexes, exportable financial tables, and a gallery of front covers highlighting a key topic of each week—all combine to offer a primary source of research covering the 19th and 20th centuries.
The many Supplements, Special Reports and Surveys which appear regularly in The Economist will be particularly useful to students working on projects, teachers seeking to expand their reading lists, and researchers working on company and industry trends and history.
Searches can be limited to photographs, maps, advertising, and tables. Pages display as JPEGs; use the Save button to generate a PDF of the entire article.
Church Missionary Society Periodicals provides digitized publications from the Church Missionary Society (CMS), the South American Missionary Society and the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society (CEZMS). 1804-2009.
Service Newspapers of World War Two contains an extensive range of both rare and well-known wartime publications for soldiers serving in major theatres around the world. Publications are included from many key nations involved in the conflict, such as the US, Canada, New Zealand, India, and the countries of Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Both Allied and Axis publications are presented, offering a broad view of the war and the experiences of those on its front lines. 1939-1948.
Portal to citations in American and British periodical indexes from the "long" 19th century. Search individually or cross-search with several governmental and book indexes. On Chadwyck-Healey platform: linking to full-text is flaky, even to other ProQuest databases; use the bibliographic information to search Discovery Search by author names or article titles to find in full-text online and/or by publication title for our print or microform holdings of the periodical.
These periodical indexes are included in whole or part in C:19:
American Periodicals Series, 1770-1919*
British Periodicals, 1790-1931*
Cotgreaves Index, 1770-1900
Index to Legal Periodical Literature, 1791-1908
Niles' Register Index, 1811-1849
Palmer's Index to The Times [of London]**
Periodicals Index Online, 1770-1919***
Poole's Index to Periodical Literature, 1802-1906
Stead's Index to Periodicals, 1891-1903
Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824-1900
*Full-text database on ProQuest platform
**Full-text of the London Times available in the Times Digital Archive, 1785-2014 from Gale
***Incorporated in ProQuest's full-text Periodicals Archive Online
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