Yale University Library Research Guides: HIST 193J Seances & Spirits: Science & the Occult in the Long 19th Century: Primary Source Databases and Web Resources

Freely Available Resources on the Web

The following web-accessible resources are freely available and do not require a Yale login to access.

Digital Occult Library (City University of New York)
It is unclear exactly who maintains this site. From the introductory page: "The name of this site is meant to invoke the impression of a small, dusty library filled with obscure volumes. I will be your host, guide, curator, and unofficial librarian sitting at the metaphorical help desk. While I fill these roles, I expect visitors to feel free to send me comments, questions, material, and suggestions. As the site progresses, I plan to implement pages where guests can do this directly as well as interact with one another."
HathiTrust Digital Library subject search on "Spiritualists"
HathiTrust is a partnership of academic and research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world. You can do Subject searches in the catalog or Keyword searches across the full-text content of the database. Try searching other terms relevant to your HIST 193J readings and research projects.
International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals website
The IAPSOP is a US-based private organization focused on the digital preservation of Spiritualist and occult periodicals published between the Congress of Vienna and the start of the Second World War.
Our all-volunteer staff digitizes, indexes and makes available free-of-charge these periodicals, in our archive, for use by students and researchers.
Internet Archive full-text keyword search for "spirit communication"
Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more. Try searching other terms relevant to your HIST 193J readings and research projects.
Library of Congress: Selected Digitized Books on Occultism
From the Library of Congress's digital collections search interface. Try searching for other topics relevant to your HIST 193J readings and research projects.
Medical Heritage Library
This site, hosted by the Internet Archive, provides access to more than 300,000 digitized publications on topics relating to medicine, including the occult and parapsychology. Use the "Search this collection" box to search for terms either in the catalog ("metadata") descriptions or in the full text of the publications.
Online Books Page (University of Pennsylvania Library)
This site, though a bit clunky to use, provides links to digitized books freely available on the internet. It uses Library of Congress subject headings, which you can browse, or you can search for relevant terms of interest, like 'parapsychology', or 'mesmerism', or 'channeling'.

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 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.
Nineteenth Century U.K. Periodicals
19th century UK periodicals provides access to magazines and journals published in Great Britain from 1800-1900 with color facsimiles of all articles. It includes publications on aspects of 19th century life, including literature, culture, empire, feminism, the history of the book, creative and performing arts, sport and leisure, science and medicine, and other professions.
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.

Digital Archives

You may find small amounts of material relevant to this course in many more broadly conceived databases of digital primary sources. Many of the databases below are included here because of this possibility. The Victorian Popular Culture and Nineteenth Century Collections Online databases listed below are probably a good place to start searching for digitized primary sources for your research project in this course.

Victorian Popular Culture
A collection of material focusing on popular entertainment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Includes full-text, full-color reproductions of books, ephemera, handbills, pamphlets, photos, posters, programs, scripts, and other types of materials. Coverage is most extensive for Great Britain; but there is also material from the U.S. Topics include spiritualism, sensation and magic; circuses, sideshows and freaks; music hall, theatre, popular entertainment and the advent of cinema.
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.
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."
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.
Making of the Modern World
This collection provides international coverage of social, economic, and business history, as well as political science, technology, industrialization, and the birth of the modern corporation. In page after page of primary source documents, researchers can evaluate the profound impact of the Industrial Revolution on the political and social conditions of nineteenth-century workers, factory owners and national economies.
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
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 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.

HIST 193J Seances & Spirits: Science & the Occult in the Long 19th Century: Primary Source Databases and Web Resources

Freely Available Resources on the Web

Newspapers and Periodicals

Digital Archives

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