LibGuides: Subject Guides for Websites: American Studies

AMERICAN STUDIES Subject Guide

African-American Studies: Web Guide
* http://ecuip.lib.uchicago.edu/diglib/afam/guide/
* eCUIP: Digital Library Project of the Chicago Public School/ University of Chicago Internet Project
* .edu
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Provides an index of links to selected Websites by subject areas Reference, General, Arts, History, Literature, People, African Americans in the Military, Martin Luther King, Jr., Sojourner Truth, and Places.
American Historical Association - AHA
• http://www.historians.org/
• .org
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AHA is devoted to the study and promotion of history and historical thinking. It brings together historians from all specializations and professions, embracing their breadth, variety, and ever-changing activity. Members are employed in a myriad of places: museums, libraries, archives, colleges, universities, government agencies, secondary schools, national parks, etc.
Avalon Project at Yale Law School: Documents in Law, History, & Diplomacy
* http://avalon.law.yale.edu/default.asp
* Yale Law School, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale University
* .edu
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Provides access to digital documents relevant to the fields of Law, History, Economics, Politics, Diplomacy and Government. Includes documents from ancient history to the present. May search by keywords, or browse by time periods or alphabetically by title of document collection.
Bartleby.com: Great Books Online
* https://www.bartleby.com/124/
* Bartleby.com: Great Books Online
* .com
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Provides free access to the full text of the inaugural addresses of the presidents of the United States from George Washington to Barack Obama. Also includes full text of reference works, literary fiction, poetry, and nonfiction classics now available in the public domain.
Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers - African American
A Library of Congress Website.
DOAJ - Directory of Open Access Journals
Provides a comprehensive, subject-organized list of open access journals that are peer reviewed. Defines “open access journal” as any which does not charge readers or institutions for access.
Historical Documents - Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS)
• https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments
• Office of the Historian, Bureau of Public Affairs
United States Department of State
• .gov
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The Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series presents the official documentary historical record of major U.S. foreign policy decisions and significant diplomatic activity.
Library of Congress Digital Collections
* https://loc.gov/collections/
* Library of Congress.
* .gov
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Provides access to primary documents, sound recordings, images, prints, maps, and other materials. Filter by topic to view the different collections, such as American History. Materials compiled from Library of Congress collections and other similar institutions.
Making of America / Cornell Collection
* http://ebooks.library.cornell.edu/m/moa/
* Cornell University Libraries
* .edu
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Provides primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. Subject areas include education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, science and technology. Collection includes 267 monograph volumes and over 100,000 journal articles.
Making of America / UM Collection
* http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moagrp/
* University of Michigan, Humanities Text Initiative
* .edu
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Provides access to digitized primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. Subject areas include education, psychology, history, sociology, religion, science and technology. Contains approximately 10,000 books and 50,000 journal articles.
Moorland-Spingarn Research Center - Virtual Treasures
* http://www.howard.edu/msrc/treasures.html
* Howard University
* .edu
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Virtual Treasures showcases some of MSRC’s most prized possessions. It represents only a sampling of artifacts, rare documents and illustrations from various collections at the Center: suggestive of the breadth and complexity of MSRC’s holdings and just enough to invite you to come in and see more. Since many of our older collections are related to slavery, the abolitionist movement, and the Civil War and Reconstruction, Virtual Treasures begins with a selection of items documenting this period in our history.
NASA History Division
• http://history.nasa.gov/index.html
• National Aeronautics and Space Administration
• .gov
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Provides access to a quarterly NASA history newsletter and annual report, and a new online public database of historical reference materials the: NASA HQ Historical Reference Collection. Also provides links to other historical information sources, Web exhibits, and digitized out-of-print books published by NASA.
Organization of American Historians - OAH
• http://www.oah.org/
• .org
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The mission of OAH is to promote excellence in the scholarship, teaching, and presentation of American history, and to encourage wide discussion of historical questions and the equitable treatment of all practitioners of history.
Project Gutenberg
Provides thousands of full-text online copies of out-of-copyright works (published pre-1923). Classic books from the start of this century and previous centuries. Search by title, author, or subject.
United States Census Bureau Data
* https://data.census.gov/cedsci/
* U.S. Census Bureau
* .gov
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Provides online access to a wide variety of population, economic, geographic, and housing statistical information about the United States.
UVA Library Digital Repository – UVa Text Collection
• http://search.lib.virginia.edu/
• VIRGO Catalog Search, University of Virginia Library
• .edu
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This location provides free access to the online full-text of over 12,000 works of fiction, non-fiction, African-American poetry, drama, etc. as well as digitized primary documents and manuscripts such as letters, diaries, newspaper articles, etc. It includes, for example, such titles as Vietnam Powwow: The Vietnam War as Remembered by Native American Veterans by Robert Sanderson and The Negro Exodus from the Gulf States by Frederick Douglass. Works are searchable by author or keywords.
Virtual Vietnam Archive, The
• http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/
• Texas Tech University
• .edu
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Over 3.2 million pages of scanned materials includes documents, photographs, slides, negatives, oral histories, artifacts, moving images, sound recordings, maps, and collection finding aids. All non-copyrighted and digitized materials are available for users to download.
Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database
• http://www.slavevoyages.org/
• Emory University
• .org
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Provides access to a comprehensive database of statistics, primary source material, essays, maps, and instructional material on the trans-Atlantic slave trade, 1514-1866

Last update: 8/11/2021

Google Scholar

Google Scholar

Google Scholar is a variation of Google. It is designed specifically for scholarly literature searches.

Advantages

It’s free to use.
It has a simple, familiar interface that works much like regular Google.
It finds scholarly books, articles, and conference papers from a wide range of disciplines.

Disadvantages

Coverage is not comprehensive. It is a good first place to start researching a paper, but not comprehensive enough to be the only place you look.
Criteria used for selecting “scholarly” materials is not given. Search results can be a mixture of articles and books as well as unpublished manuscripts, course syllabi, and high school term papers, so you must critically evaluate what you find.
Results are not always full-text or free like regular Google. Often the link for an article will take you to the publishers website where the full article is available only if you buy it.