Research Guides: Resources by format: Speeches and transcripts

Speeches and other oral communications on topics such as politics, history, science and business can be vital sources for research. Often you will be looking for transcripts of these speeches as opposed to recordings of the speech itself. The library also has sources for transcripts of radio and television programs, particularly news programs. When accessing text of speeches or programs, be sure to check if the text is a summary, except or the full transcript of the speech or program.

Speech and transcript databases

Oral History Online from Alexander Street Press
Oral History Online is both an index of full-text interviews and other oral history narratives and free oral history information online. The narratives cover diverse subjects, including civil rights and race relations, labor history, African American history, women's history, immigration studies, political history, American Indian history, regional history, and more.
Drama Online
Drama Online provides over 2000 full-text plays and monologues You can search by content type, genre, period, author, setting, theme, cast size, and roles. Its Reader can show original pagination, tables of contents, or scholarly annotations, and you can add bookmarks and notes or extract citations or a parts book. The library subscribes to Nick Hern books, Canadian Playwrights, Stage on Screen, and the Hollow Crown.
America's Historical Imprints from Readex
America's Historical Imprints is a digital collection containing virtually every book, pamphlet, and broadside published in America over a 200-year period. It is comprised of a vast range of publications, including advertisements, almanacs, bibles, broadsides, catalogs, charters and by-laws, contracts, cookbooks, elegies, eulogies, laws, maps, narratives, novels, operas, pamphlets, plays, poems, primers, sermons, songs, speeches, textbooks, tracts, travelogues, treaties, and more. Scanned pages available as JPEG, TIFF, and PDF.

Also known as Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans, 1639-1800 and Series II, Shaw-Shoemaker, 1801-1819. Contains virtually every known book, pamphlet and broadside published in America between 1640 and the first two decades of the 19th century—more than 75,000 printed items in all. Based on renowned bibliographies by Charles Evans and Roger Bristol and by Ralph R. Shaw and Richard H. Shoemaker.
Presidential Speeches
The Scripps Library, through cooperation with various presidential libraries, has been collecting some of the most important presidential speeches in American history. These speeches all have transcripts, and some are available in their entirety in audio or video. 1789-present.

General databases

Databases that primarily index speeches and transcripts of programs are listed below. Search by author for speeches by that author (also search the author by keyword or subject for articles on that author). Limit by date range for transcripts of specific speeches or programs.

Academic Search Complete from EBSCOhost
Try searching the speech-giver or topic of the speech as a subject and limiting by Document Type to Speech. Also includes content from Vital Speeches of the Day from 1934-present, which reprints 8-12 speeches in each issue. Use the Search Within This Publication feature to search this publication.
Access World News from Newsbank
Access World News provides full-text newspapers, magazines, and broadcast transcripts for American and international publications. Use the Browse by: Source Type menu and choose Transcript to choose a particular source or to limit your search to just transcripts. 1978-present.
Factiva
Under the search box, use the Subject menu, then Subject Category > Content Types and select Transcripts by using the up-pointing triangle. A code will be added to the search box. Add the word AND and your search terms to search against transcripts.

Factiva provides full-text news articles and business information. From the Search tab, use the Free Text search box to explore an archive of over 50 years of news and other sources.

From the News Pages tab, you can browse current issues of major newspapers and business magazines from around the world.

From the Companies/Markets tab, you can research competitors, suppliers, customers, and partners through market data, interactive charts, financial statements, and more for individual companies or industries. Data includes current and historical pricing on a variety of financial instruments like stocks, funds, currencies, and market indexes.
General OneFile from Gale
Use the Select Document Type menu to select Transcript to limit your search.
ProQuest One Business
ProQuest One Business combines multiple ProQuest business information databases to a total of more than 130 million documents. It contains more than 2,400 journals and magazines, several hundred news sources, thousands of ebooks and videos, and hundreds of thousands of reports from renowned publishers such as J.P. Morgan, Economist Intelligence Unit, Oxford Economics, Hoovers, and others. ProQuest One Business indexes citations, abstracts, and full text news articles, market and SWOT analyses, industry reports, country reports, downloadable data sets, dissertations, business cases, working papers, annual reports from North American companies, and company profiles and histories.

ProQuest developed a new business subject thesaurus as well as a new corporation thesaurus for ProQuest One Business. All documents included in this collection were reindexed, using these new thesauri. In addition, all company, industry and country reports were reindexed allowing you to limit your search to specific content that must appear in the reports like e.g. a SWOT analysis or a financial forecast. This makes it significantly easier to get more precise and relevant results.

For several thousand companies ProQuest One Business offers special portal pages - so called Company Overviews - and each of these pages provides you with direct access to different types of material for the respective company:

Company Overview
Recent News from Major Publications
Company Reports (grouped by type of information)
All Content for this Company (a bibliometric graph)
Scholarly Journal Articles
Magazines and Trade Journal Articles
Related Companies in this Industry

Subject specific databases

Speeches by experts in various fields can be reprinted or analyzed in academic journals and other academic sources. These sources will be indexed in subject specific databases found through the subject guides. Search the speech's author and the topic of the speech. Bibliographies may give references to sources of the text of the speech.

Print indexes and sources of speeches

Speeches can be found in a wide variety of sources, including print indexes. Use Discovery Search to locate other sources. If it is not owned by the University Libraries, Login to ILLiad (interlibrary loan) to request the title.

Speech index by Roberta Briggs Sutton
Publication Date: 1966-1982

Covers speeches published between 1900 and 1978. Indexing is by author, subject, and type of speech.
Documents of American history by Henry Steele Commager; Milton Cantor
Call Number: E173 .C66 1988

ISBN: 0132172747

Publication Date: 1988-04-01

This volume covers 1492 to 1898, and the second volume from 1899 to the 1970s; together they total 670 important documents, each with its own introduction.
Index to American women speakers, 1828-1978 by Beverly Manning
Call Number: PS400 .M36 1980

ISBN: 0810812827

Publication Date: 1980-04-28

In addition to books, this source also indexes speeches in periodicals, government documents, and conference proceedings.
Representative American speeches
Call Number: PS668 .B3

Publication Date: 1937-2009

Each volume contains 10 to 20 representative speeches of the year. Check at the back of the latest volume for information on using the cumulative author indexes. This source is also indexed in Speech Index and its supplements (see separate entry).