Database List

The largest single collection of English news media from these two centuries, 17th and 18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers provides rare and often unique content for scholarly research into a wide range of political, educational, economic or journalistic study.

The original Burney volumes are now in fragile condition and have been restricted from ordinary reading room use. Until now, the only access to this unprecedented collection has been through microfilm. This digital collection, made possible by a partnership with the British Library, puts these early newspapers into the hands of scholars and researchers and is an invaluable research tool for all disciplines.

Specifically, historians interested in this period of UK history will find the cultural trends, political currents and social problems reflected in these newspapers – and their advertisements – especially useful as they give freshness and immediacy to historical events.

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African American Archives provides over one million pages of original historical documents pertaining to the African American experience over several centuries, and is richly-detailed with narratives and quantitative data alike. The earliest materials in this collection come from Essential Records Concerning Slavery and Emancipation from the Danish West Indies (1672-1917).

There are several other slavery-related collections, including letters, account books, annual reports, and news clippings. Files contain detailed narrative accounts of subjects' activities and include information about families, occupations, and general activities. There are also related manuscripts from the American Colonization Society, an organization best known for its role in establishing Liberia, a colony in Africa for free people of color from the United States.
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Created from the Library Company's acclaimed Afro-Americana Collection — an accumulation that began with Benjamin Franklin and steadily increased throughout its entire history — this unique online resource will provide researchers with more than 12,000 printed works. These essential books, pamphlets and broadsides, including many lesser-known imprints, hold an unparalleled record of African American history, literature and culture.

From African society to the struggle for justice
This collection spans nearly 400 years, from the early 16th to the early 20th century. Critically important subjects covered include the West's discovery and exploitation of Africa; the rise of slavery in the New World along with the growth and success of abolitionist movements; the development of racial thought and racism; descriptions of African American life -- slave and free -- throughout the Americas; and slavery and race in fiction and drama. Also featured are printed works of African American individuals and organizations.

Fresh scholarship on slavery and African American history
The Afro-Americana Collection began to gain international renown for its size, range, and significance in the late 1960s as scholars initiated fresh studies of slavery's part in the American story. As researchers rediscovered the importance of the long-neglected writings of African Americans, the Library Company's collection became increasingly vital to new scholarship. Today it serves as a critical resource for scholars and students, and a plethora of new research and teaching opportunities will arise from its digitization.

The landmark work behind the digital edition
The magisterial bibliography Afro-Americana 1553-1906 was first published in 1973. A second edition published in 2008, including 2,500 works acquired since 1973, now provides the bibliographic control for the Readex edition. Afro-Americana Imprints, 1535-1922 will be fully integrated into America's Historical Imprints for seamless searching with Early American Imprints, Series I and II, including Supplements from the Library Company of Philadelphia.
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American History in Video provides the largest and richest collection of video available online for the study of American history, with 2,000 hours and more than 5,000 titles on completion. The collection allows students and researchers to analyze historical events, and their presentation over time, through commercial and governmental newsreels, archival footage, public affairs footage, and important documentaries. This release now provides 5,858 titles, equaling approximately 1517 hours.
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Black Studies in Video is a signature Alexander Street Press collection featuring award-winning documentaries, newsreels, interviews and archival footage surveying the evolution of black culture in the United States. In partnership with California Newsreel, the database provides unique access to their African American Perspectives collection, and includes films covering history, politics, art and culture, family structure, social and economic pressures, and gender relations.
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With Music Online, Alexander Street Press aims to provide the most comprehensive database in streaming audio, video, reference, and scores on the web. Music Online allows users cross search all of the music databases published by Alexander Street Press. Music Online brings together on a single cross-searchable platform the entire suite of Alexander Street Press music products that your institution subscribes to. Music Online can potentially cross-search any combination of these databases:

 

    African American Music Reference
    American Song
    Classical Music Library
    Classical Music Reference Library
    Classical Scores Library
    Contemporary World Music
    Dance in Video
    The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music Online
    Jazz Music Library
    Opera in Video
    Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries

 

Music Online will offer hundreds of thousands of audio recordings, growing monthly, plus 400,000 pages of scores, 100,000 pages of music reference, and over 500 hours of video. Every object in the collection is indexed for subjects, historical events, genres, people, cultural groups, places, time periods, ensembles. As a result, students and scholars can combine keyword and fielded search capabilities to frame creative and highly targeted queries. Users can also select to view a single database by using the "Go to" dropdown menu at the top of any page of Music Online.

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PsycCRITIQUES®, produced by the American Psychological Association (APA), is a database of full-text book reviews featuring current scholarly and professional books in psychology. It also publishes reviews from a psychological perspective of popular films and trade books. PsycCRITIQUES includes approximately 40,000 reviews dating back to 1956 and is indexed with controlled vocabulary from APA's Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms®.
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The largest and most ambitious project of its kind, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive is a thematically organized, four-part historical archive devoted to the scholarly study and understanding of slavery from a multinational perspective. An unprecedented collection developed under the guidance of a board of scholars, it offers never before available research opportunities and endless teaching possibilities.

Slavery and Anti-Slavery, Part I: Debates over Slavery and Abolition contains 7,277 books and pamphlets, more than 80 newspaper and periodical titles, and 18 major manuscript collections. Varied sources — from well-known journals to private papers — open up endless possibilities for academic researchers, historians, undergraduate and graduate students, faculty and others studying the history of slavery.

Part II, The Slave Trade in the Atlantic World continues this ground-breaking series by charting the inception of slavery in Africa and its rise throughout the Atlantic world, with particular focus on the United Kingdom, France, and the United States. This collection features a wide range of materials, from monographs and individual papers to company records, newspapers, and a variety of government documents. More international in scope than Part I, this collection was developed by an international editorial board with scholars specializing in European, African, Latin American/Caribbean, and United States aspects of the slave trade.

Part III: The Institution of Slavery explores in vivid detail the inner workings of slavery from 1492-1888. Through legal documents, plantation records, first-person accounts, newspapers, government records and other primary sources, Part III reveals how enslaved people struggled against the institution. Sourced from the National Archives at Kew, the British Library, the U.S. National Archives and the University of Miami, among others, these rare works explore such topics as slavery as a legal and labor system; the relationship between slavery and religion; freed slaves; the Shong Massacre; the Dememara insurrection; and many others.

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The Sixties: Primary Documents and Personal Narratives 1960–1974 brings the 1960s alive through diaries, letters, autobiographies and other memoirs, written and oral histories, manifestos, government documents, memorabilia, and scholarly commentary. With 150,000 pages of material at completion, this searchable collection is the definitive electronic resource for students and scholars researching this important period in American history, culture, and politics.
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