Yale University Library Research Guides: HIST 191J / Women, Gender, and Grassroots Politics in the U.S. after World War II: Primary Source Databases

Newspapers and Periodicals

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.

Access World News
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.
African American Newspapers, Series 2, 1835-1956
African American Newspapers, Series 2, complements and expands on Series 1 with newspapers written for or by African Americans, covering the period from Abolitionism to the Harlem Renaissance.
African American Periodicals, 1825-1995
Approximately 170 periodicals. Click here for title list.
America's Historical Newspapers
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.
American Indian Newspapers
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.
Films on Demand
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.
Newspapers.com Library Edition
Historical newspaper archive providing online access to thousands of historical newspapers, dating from the early 1700s into the early 2000s.
Opinion Archives
Provides full text searchable archives for journals of opinion, such as American spectator, Commentary, Commonweal, Dissent, Harper's magazine, LaFollette's magazine, Moment, The Nation, National review, The New leader, The New republic, New York review of books, The New Yorker, Orion magazine, The Progressive, Washington monthly, and The Weekly standard. Covers domestic and international politics, arts and culture from leading authors, poets, journalists, and statesmen.
Press Reader
Provides interactive, digital access to nearly 7,000 newspapers and magazines globally. Coverage is very contemporary, generally for the last 90 days.
ProQuest News and Newspapers
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).
Vanderbilt Television News Archive
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).
Women's Magazine Archive
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.

Government Information and Legal Resources

Hein Online
A key resource for legal research and government information. Includes: Law Journal Library, Federal Register Library, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Supreme Court Library, Treaties and Agreements Library, U.S. Attorney General Opinions, Legal Classics, U.S. Federal Legislative History Library, U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Presidential Library.
The Making of Modern Law. American Civil Liberties Union Papers. Part I, 1912-1990
The link here goes to the catalog record for part one, but the "Online database" link goes to the home page for all three parts of the collection to which Yale researchers have access: Southern Regional Office Files, 1945-1990; The Roger Baldwin Years, 1912-1950; Years of Expansion,1950-1990.
ProQuest Congressional Publications
Key resource for finding Congressional documents, such as the Congressional Record, Hearings, House and Senate Documents and Reports (i.e., U.S. Congressional Serial Set), and more.
Social Explorer
Social explorer provides access to census and demographic data. The online interface lets users create maps and reports to illustrate, analyze, and understand demography and social change. Included is the entire U.S. census history from 1790 to 2010, the American Community Survey (ACS) from 2005 to 2012, the Religious Congregations and Membership Study (RCMS) from 1980 to 2010, InfoGroup data on religious congregations in the US for 2009 and 2010, and carbon emissions data for 2002 from the Vulcan Project.

Digital Archives

African American Communities
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.
Archives of Sexuality and Gender
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.
Archives Unbound
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.
Disability in the Modern World
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."
The HistoryMakers
Digital archive of African American video oral histories. Approximately 2700 oral history interviews with African Americans from a variety of fields.
Indigenous Peoples of North America
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.
Jewish Life in America c1654-1954: Sources from the American Jewish Historical Society, New York
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
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.
ProQuest History Vault
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
Public Health Archives: Public Health in Modern America, 1890-1970
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.
Twentieth Century Advice Literature: North American Guides on Race, Gender, Sex, and the Family
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.
Women's Studies Archive
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.
Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000
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.

A Pitch for Microfilmed Collections | NOTE: These are all digitized now (by ProQuest [CORE] and Gale (first and third ones on list), and Stanton by the Library of Congress)

Yale's library holds the second largest collection of microfilm in the U.S. after the Library of Congress. Microfilm was the pre-digitization way that libraries shared their collections, and there are many, many microfilmed archival collections that may be of interest for research projects in this course. Don't hesitate to consult the staff at the Sterling Memorial Library information desk (in the middle of the Nave) if you have questions or would like assistance with microfilmed collections. All of Yale's microfilm is described in Orbis, the library's online catalog, which is also available through Quicksearch. For example:

Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance archive, circa 1972-1994. A microfilmed archival collection on 189 reels of microfilm. A guide to the microfilm reels is available through links in the Orbis record. The original collection is held in the Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University.
Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) papers, 1959-1976. A microfilmed archival collection on 80 reels of microfilm. A guide to the reels is available in the Microforms Reading Room in Sterling Memorial Library. The original collection is held by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.
Lesbian Herstory Archives newsletter collection. A microfilmed collection of newsletters from a variety of organizations on 69 reels of microfilm. A physical guide to the reels is available in the Microforms Reading Room in Sterling Memorial Library. The original collection is held in the Lesbian Herstory Archives, Brooklyn, NY.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton papers, 1814-1946. A microfilmed archival collection on 5 reels of microfilm. A guide to the microfilm reels is available on reel 1. The original collection is held in the Library of Congress.

HIST 191J / Women, Gender, and Grassroots Politics in the U.S. after World War II: Primary Source Databases

Introduction

Newspapers and Periodicals

Government Information and Legal Resources

Digital Archives

A Pitch for Microfilmed Collections | NOTE: These are all digitized now (by ProQuest [CORE] and Gale (first and third ones on list), and Stanton by the Library of Congress)

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