Research Guides: English Literature/Criticism: Databases Serving the Field of English, Overview

PRIMARY TEXTS (General)

Early English Books Online
Searchable 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.
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
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.
Gale Literature. LitFinder
Provides access to literary works and authors throughout history and includes more than 130,000 full-text poems and 650,000+ poetry citations, as well as short stories, speeches, plays, and some secondary works.
HathiTrust digital library
HathiTrust offers a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world.
NCCO (Nineteenth Century Collections Online)
Digital collections now organized in a dozen separate topic modules, such as Asia and West Diplomacy & Cultural Exchange; British Politics and Society, etc. For full list go to Databases A-Z on library's home page and follow instructions.
Project Gutenberg
Large collection of free electronic books that are out of copyright in the United States.

PRIMARY TEXTS (Thematic)

Arte Público Hispanic historical collection. Series 1
An archive of publications focused exclusively on U.S. Hispanic history, literature and culture from colonial times until 1960.
Caribbean history and culture, 1535-1920
A collection of more than 1,200 fully cataloged and searchable books, pamphlets, almanacs, broadsides and ephemera covering the history of this region from the 16th to the early 20th century.
Corpus of Middle English prose and verse
Collection of about 300 Middle English primary texts. Provides a publicly accessible, cross-searchable sampling of Middle English from a widely diverse range of genres, times, and places.
Empire Online
Primary source material from American, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, German and British sources offering perspective on colonial history, politics, culture and society. Also includes documents from Africa, India and North America.
Indigenous peoples of North America
Digitized primary sources covering the cultural, political and social history of Native Peoples from the 17th through the 20th centuries.
London Low Life
A digital collection that brings to life the the dark underworld of Victorian London.
19th Century British Pamphlets
A corpus of 26,000 pamphlets for the study of sociopolitical and economic factors impacting 19th-century Britain.
ProQuest history vault: Civil Rights and the Black Freedom Struggle.
Access to federal documents relating to African-American history and social movements. Includes material from different Presidential administrations, the FBI, and federal agencies such as the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Victorian women writers project
A collection of poetry, novels, children's books, political pamphlets, religious tracts, histories, and more from scores of authors, both prolific and rare.
Wright American fiction, 1851-1875
Wright American Fiction is a full-text collection of nearly 3,000 works of American Fiction spanning the period from 1851-1875, many of which are otherwise difficult to find.

PRIMARY TEXTS (Periodicals)

African American Newspapers
A collection that covers the events and issues of the day from the perspective of 19th-century African American communities.
Caribbean newspapers, 1718-1876
The largest collection of newspapers from this region in this period.
Chicago Defender (1910-1975)
A leading newspaper for the black community in the United States during the 20th century.
The newspaper was a proponent of The Great Migration, the move of over 1.5 million African-Americans from the segregated South to the industrial North from 1915 to 1925. It reported on the Red Summer race riots of 1919, and editorialized for anti-lynching legislation and the integration of blacks into the U.S. military.
Chronicling America : historic American newspapers
Contains digitized newspaper pages from 1777-1963, as well as a directory for identifying newspapers published from 1690-present.
Hispanic American Newspapers, 1808-1980
Newspapers published between 1808 and 1980 that chronicle the daily life, cultural heritage and world views of Hispanic communities in the U.S.
Features Spanish-language newspapers and titles published bilingually in Spanish and English.
Los Angeles Times (1881-1997)
Historical analysis of the development of California and the Pacific Rim with a focus on immigration issues, coverage of the early days of the film industry, and coverage of Native American culture and society.
New York times (digital reproduction, 1851-2015)
Digital reproduction of the NY Times, with full page and article images as well as searchable full text back to the first issue.
Nineteenth century U.S. newspapers
General newspapers as well as those published by African Americans, Native Americans, women's rights groups, labor groups, the Confederacy, and others.
Oregon Digital
Oregon Digital provides discovery of and access to unique digitized and born-digital materials, including photographs, articles, sheet music, manuscripts, ephemera, and more.
Seventeenth and eighteenth century Burney newspapers collection
A comprehensive collection of early English newspapers, primarily from London, ranging from 1603 to the early 1800s.
The Burney Newspapers are predominantly London newspapers of the 17th and 18th centuries. The titles range in date from 1603 to the early 1800s.
Vogue Archive
Digitized, full-color images of every issue of Vogue magazine from 1892 to the present.

PRIMARY TEXTS (Periodicals -- Indexes)

American Periodicals
Special interest and general magazines, literary and professional journals, children's and women's magazines, and historically significant periodicals, covering 1740-1900.
Readers' Guide retrospective: 1890-1982 (H.W. Wilson)
General-interest, news, and opinion magazines published primarily in the United States. Dates of coverage are from 1890 - 1982.
Eight centuries
Eight Centuries is a database covering source material dating from 1106 until 1960, aggregating indexes, catalogs, collections, and other finding aids. It provides access to articles, newspapers, books, U.S. patents, government documents, and images, with links to full-text where available.

PRIMARY TEXTS (Archival Collections & Guides)

ArchiveGrid
Database of archival collection descriptions, including historical documents, personal papers, and family histories around the world
Archives West
Descriptions of primary sources in the Northwestern United States, including correspondence, diaries, or photographs. Digital reproductions of primary sources are available in some cases.
Dublin Castle records 1798-1926
Contains records of the British administration in Ireland prior to 1922.

SECONDARY TEXTS (Article Collections & Guides)

Cambridge Companions to Literature and Classics
Scholarly overviews of authors, movements, genres, periods, and national literatures.
Lives of Literature Collection
A JSTOR collection of journals centered around single authors or texts.
Masterplots
Includes synopses and critical evaluations of a comprehensive selection of English-language and world literature that has been translated into English. With annotated bibliographies to aid readers in further study.
Open Research Library
Open Access books from various University Press publishers and providers, currently including all books belonging to the Knowledge Unlatched collection.
Project Muse
Searches the full text of electronic journals and books in the humanities and social sciences.

SECONDARY LITERATURE (Thematic)

American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals
A full-text database providing digital access to the most comprehensive collection of American periodicals published between 1684 and 1912.
Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index
Covers journal articles, book reviews, and essays books about women, sexuality, and gender during the Middle Ages.
Orlando: Women's Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Provides entries on authors' lives and writing careers, contextual material, timelines, sets of internal links, and bibliographies.
Oxford bibliographies. American literature
Oxford Bibliographies in American Literature provides “reliable, up-to-date, and authoritative” guidance to the secondary literature on a wide range of authors, genres, topics, and movements in the field.
Oxford bibliographies. British and Irish literature
Oxford Bibliographies in British and Irish Literature provides “reliable, up-to-date, and authoritative” guidance to the secondary literature on a wide range of authors, genres, topics, and movements in the field.
Oxford bibliographies. Victorian literature
Oxford Bibliographies in Victorian Literature provides “reliable, up-to-date, and authoritative” guidance to the secondary literature on a wide range of authors, genres, topics, and movements in the field.
RAMBI: the index of articles on Jewish studies
Selective bibliography of articles in the various fields of Jewish studies and in the study of Eretz Israel.

REFERENCE WORKS

Bibliography of Indigenous peoples in North America
Citations to literature about native peoples of North America published from the sixteenth century to the present, including books, journal articles, essays, conference papers, and US and Canadian government documents.
LEME Lexicons of Early Modern English
LEME searches and displays word-entries from monolingual English dictionaries, bilingual lexicons, technical vocabularies, and other encyclopedic-lexical works, 1480-1755.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
National record of men and women who have shaped British history and culture, worldwide, from the Romans to the 21st century. Concise, up-to-date biographies written by named, specialist authors.
Oxford English Dictionary
Traces the usage of words through 2.5 million quotations from a wide range of international English language sources.