These databases are licensed by the Yale Library for your use and require you to be on the Yale campus or authenticated to the Yale network via CAS or VPN. This guide provides more information about off-campus access to licensed database resources.
Background or "reference" sources are a great place to start your research. They are also incredibly useful for gleaning background information to use in situating your biography subject in a time period or events with which you aren't familiar. Reference works include bibliographies, scholarly encyclopedias, dictionaries, handbooks, and other sources that provide overviews of topics and suggestions for further reading.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History
A scholarly encyclopedia of potentially great use in the early stages of your research project. Each article has a discussion of the literature, including primary sources. A great starting point for finding more sources and arranged into browsable subject areas. For example browse the results (44 articles) from a keyword search on the term sports.
This resource brings together reference articles, along with selected primary and secondary sources for getting started on your research. For example browse thousands of results (scholarly articles, images, newspaper and magazine articles, videos, etc.) from an advanced keyword search for the terms sports AND women.
This is an extensive collection of annotated bibliographies that are keyword searchable and can also be browsed by subject and geographic areas. These bibliographies are a great starting point for finding resources, primary and secondary, for your research topic.
Oxford Handbooks Online
Lengthy chapters in the Oxford Handbooks usually provide helpful overviews of scholarly topics and historical literature, along with suggestions for further reading. A number of the handbooks may be helpful depending on your research topic.
Includes scholarly journal articles and monographs as well as reference works. Often a single chapter or two within a reference work can provide a helpful starting point for research. Thousands of articles in this reference database touch on topics relating to eugenics. Titles include A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and A Companion to Post-1945 America.
The following bibliographic databases will be helpful for finding secondary sources, especially scholarly/peer-reviewed journal articles, magazine articles, book reviews, and citations to book chapters and edited collections of books. Please note: the full text of articles will not always be available in these databases. If you see the "YaleLinks" icon instead of a PDF, click on the icon to discover whether we have online access to the article:
Full-text information and perspectives from over 600 U.S. and over 700 international sources at the local, regional, national and international level. Coverage from ca. 1982 to present.
Approximately 170 periodicals. Click here for title list.
This database covers the colonial period to the late 20th c. Most of the content is pre-20th century, but several collections cover the 20th c. and include 20th Century American Newspapers, Series 1-3; African American Newspapers, Series 1 (1827-1998) and 2 (1835-1956); Ethnic American Newspapers, 1799-1971; Hispanic American Newspapers, 1808-1980.
Includes publications of a range of communities, with an extensive list of periodicals produced in the United States and British Columbia from 1828 to 2016. This resource covers: community news, public health and welfare, education, cultural promotion and language revitalization, consumerism and commercial enterprises, activism and protest, American Indian Movement, natural resources and environmentalism, tribal laws, process and elections, sovereignty, land cession, property and land rights, media representation and conflict, war and conscription.
This resource provides full-length streaming videos and clips, including newsreels and video news footage. It covers different subject areas, genres and time periods, all drawn from various producers.
Historical newspaper archive providing online access to thousands of historical newspapers, dating from the early 1700s into the early 2000s.
Provides interactive, digital access to nearly 7,000 newspapers and magazines globally. Coverage is very contemporary, generally for the last 90 days.
A collection of several sets of news sources, newspapers, and journals -- contemporary and historical. Includes Alt-PressWatch, Ethnic NewsWatch, GenderWatch, ProQuest Historical Newspapers, ProQuest Recent Newspapers, U.S. Hispanic Newsstream, U.S. Major Dailies (1980 to present, updated daily).
collection spans the presidential administrations of Lyndon Baines Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The core collection includes evening news from ABC, CBS, and NBC (since 1968), an hour per day of CNN (since 1995) and Fox News (since 2004).
Coverage from late 19th c. to 2005 for the following magazines: Better Homes and Gardens, Chatelaine, Cosmopolitan, Essence, Good Housekeeping, Ladies' Home Journal, Parents, Redbook, Seventeen, Town & Country, Women's International Network News, Woman's Day.
Focuses on African American communities in Atlanta, Chicago, New York, towns and cities in North Carolina, and St. Louis largely during the second half of the 20th century. Materials include pamphlets, newspapers and periodicals, correspondence, official records, oral histories, maps, and photographs.
Brings together 54 collections of primary sources for the historical study of sex, sexuality, and gender. Access via Yale Library to collections in the following three broad archives:
- LGBTQ History and Culture Since 1940, Part I
- LGBTQ History and Culture Since 1940, Part II
- Sex and Sexuality, Sixteenth to Twentieth Century
Click on the "Collections" link in the navigation bar for an overview of all 54 collections.
Provides access to 205 digitized manuscript collections. Click on the "Collections" link for an overview. Filter by "Topic" in order to browse the subject areas that are covered.
Please note: the archival finding aids and other original archival descriptions are often not included in these collections, so this can be a challenging database to use. Please reach out for assistance if any of the collections are of interest or relevant to your research.
Includes primary sources, supporting materials, and archives, along with video. The content covers "not only in the growing disciplines of disability history and disability studies, but also in history, media, the arts, political science, education, and other areas where the contributions of the disability community are typically overlooked."
Digital archive of African American video oral histories. Approximately 2700 oral history interviews with African Americans from a variety of fields.
A set of 52 collections spanning the 17th to 20th c. Includes manuscripts, rare books and monographs, newspapers, periodicals, census records, legal documents, maps, drawings and sketches, oral histories, photos, and videos. Click on the "Collections" link in the navigation bar for an overview of all 52 collections.
Explores the history of Jewish communities in America. All of the typescript and printed material is full-text searchable. The resource also contains supplementary resources; these include a chronology, interactive maps, scholarly essays, a selection of American Jewish Year Book articles, a visual resources gallery, biographies and links to other useful websites.
Nineteenth century collections online features primary source collections of the nineteenth century. Includes a variety of material types: monographs, newspapers, pamphlets, manuscripts, ephemera, maps, and statistics.
Provides access to primary source, cross-searchable, full-text, full-image documents from ProQuest's University Publications of America (UPA) collection on topics related to 19th and 20th-century U.S. history. Numerous collections are organized into the following modules:
- Civil Rights and the Black Freedom Struggle
- Southern Life, Slavery, and the Civil War
- American Indians and the American West
- American Politics and Society
- International Relations and Military Conflicts
This database documents the rise of the twentieth-century public health system in the United States through correspondence, reports, pamphlets, ephemera, and more. Through primary sources that record the evolution and impact of public health legislation, policies, and campaigns at the local, national, and federal levels, this archive opens a new window on the roles played by key organizations and individuals to advance public health practices and outcomes. Collections include items from the Children’s Bureau, Committee on Public Health of the New York Academy of Medicine, rare public health pamphlets, and materials on national health care, medical economics and sociology, and other health policies. Items related to eugenics are also included.
This collection brings together material on instructional, prescriptive, behavioral, and etiquette literature that defined standards of personal conduct for millions of Americans and reflected the prevailing social mores across the twentieth century. The collection contains over 150,000 pages of fully searchable handbooks, manuals, textbooks, etiquette guides, self-help books, instructional pamphlets, and how-to books that illustrate both how Americans actually behaved and how they felt they ought to behave.
Archival materials documenting the evolution of feminism throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and women’s political activism in areas such as suffrage, birth control, pacifism, civil rights, and socialism. Click on the "Collections" link for an overview of 15 collections.
Organized around the history of women in social movements in the U.S. between 1600 and 2000, this collection 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.
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