Research Guides: Theater Arts: Online Primary Source Databases

Coming soon!

London Low Life
Contains primary source materials on Victorian street culture, including ephemera, penny fiction, cartoons, chapbooks, reform literature, and guides to prostitution.

Empire Online
Manuscript, printed, and visual primary source materials from the past 500 years on the study of "empire" and its theories, practices, and consequences. Composed of five sections: Cultural Contacts, 1492-1969; Empire Writing & the Literature of Empire; The Visible Empire; Religion & Empire; and Race, Class, Colonialism, Imperialism.

Find Online Primary Source Databases

Use these databases to find digitized books, journals, magazines, pamphlets, advertisements, reviews, interviews, and other print ephemera.

American Periodicals
Special interest and general magazines, literary and professional journals, children's and women's magazines, and historically significant periodicals, covering 1740-1900.
Early English Books Online
Digitized facsimiles of all printed materials published in Great Britain between 1473 and 1700, and materials published elsewhere in the world in English during the same period. Includes searchable text from the Text Creation Project, Phase I.
Materials include books, tracts, pamphlets, advertisements, ballads, rhymes, and other ephemera. The database continues to develop, with over 100,000 records currently included and increasing capabilities for direct keyword searching of the texts.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online
If searches in this database retrieve incorrect results, clear cache/cookies to resolve the problem.
18th century English-language publications in the humanities, arts, and sciences.
Digitized copies of significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in Great Britain during the eighteenth century, along with thousands of important works from the Americas. ECCO includes a variety of materials from books and directories, Bibles, sheet music, sermons, advertisements, and other works by both well-known and lesser-known men and women writers.
Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive
Archival research resource containing the essential primary sources for studying the history of the film and entertainment industries, from the era of vaudeville and silent movies through to 2000.
Core US and UK trade magazines covering film, music, broadcasting and theater are all included, together with film fan magazines and music press titles. Magazines have been scanned cover-to-cover in high-resolution color, with granular indexing of all articles, covers, ads and reviews.