LibGuides: ENTH 3145: Early American Drama & Performance: Primary Sources

Digital Collections

American Memory (Library of Congress)
A gateway to the Library of Congress’s vast resources of digitized American historical materials, with over 9 million items documenting U.S. history and culture. American Memory is organized into more than 100 thematic collections based on their original format, their subject matter, or who first created, assembled, or donated them to the Library.

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Original formats include manuscripts, prints, photographs, posters, maps, sound recordings, motion pictures, books, pamphlets, and sheet music. Collections may be browsed individually, searched individually (including full-text searching for many written items), or searched across multiple collections.

Black Studies Center
"A fully cross-searchable gateway to Black Studies including scholarly essays, recent periodicals, historical newspaper articles, reference books, and much more. It combines essential resources for research and teaching in Black Studies, including The Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience, Index to Black Periodicals Full Text, Black Literature Index, and the Chicago Defender historical newspaper from 1912-1975."

Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) Digital Archive
Contains over 70,000 items representing 40,000 artists are now digitally available, dating back to BAM's opening in the 1860s. The archives contain items such a playbills, posters, audio recordings, photographs, and other ephemera.
Digital Public Library of America
Contains millions of items - photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more—from libraries, archives, and museums around the United States. Users can browse and search the DPLA’s collections by timeline, map, format, and topic; save items to customized lists; and share their lists with others.
Digital Public Library of America: Black Women’s Suffrage Digital Collection
The Black Women’s Suffrage Digital Collection is a collaborative project to provide digital access to materials documenting the roles and experiences of Black Women in the Women’s Suffrage Movement and, more broadly, women’s rights, voting rights, and civic activism between the 1850s and 1960. The materials in this collection include photographs, correspondence, speeches, event programs, publications, oral histories, and other artifacts.

North American Indian Thought and Culture
North American Indian thought and culture contains biographies, auto-biographies, personal narratives, speeches, diaries, letters, and oral histories. Biographies include works on Quanah Parker, Dennis Banks, Susan La Flesche Picotte, Cochise, Jim Thorpe, Crowfoot, Peter Pitchlynn, Sacajawea, Geronimo, Hosteen Klah, Black Elk, Pocahontas, George Washington Grayson, Standing Buffalo, and many more.
North American Women's Letters and Diaries
North American Women's Letters and Diaries (NAWLD) includes the immediate experiences of 107 women, as revealed in more than 9,000 pages of iaries and letters. Particular care has been taken to index this material so that it can be searched more thoroughly than ever before. When complete, the collection will include more than 150,000 pages of primary material spanning more than 300 years.

NYPL Digital Collections
A living database of items digitized from the New York Public Library’s collections. New materials are added every day, among them prints, photographs, maps, manuscripts, and streaming video. You can search images (with filters for date, genre, and other key features), or browse by collection.
OldNYC
Allows you to explore historical photos from the NYPL’s Photographic Views of New York City, 1870s-1970s collection. Photographs are attached, by location, to points on a map of all five boroughs of New York City.

Popular Medicine in America, 1800-1900
Contains books, trade cards, pamphlets, posters, and advertisements for medical information and self treatments marketed toward laypersons in the United States in the 19th century.

Umbra Search
is a growing, searchable digital collection of over 400,000 sources related to African American history, from US cultural heritage institutions, museums, and archives. Umbra is developed by the Givens Collection of African American Literature at the University of Minnesota in partnership with the Penumbra Theatre Company.
Utah American Indian Digital Archive
The Utah American Indian Digital Archive (UAIDA) is a gateway to resources from and about Indigenous people in Utah. With articles, books, government documents, tribal documents, oral histories, photographs, and maps pertaining to the Northwestern Shoshone, Goshute, Paiute, Utah Navajo, White Mesa, and Ute Indians. UAIDA is a joint venture between the American West Center and Marriott Library at the University of Utah, supported by the State of Utah’s Division of Indian Affairs and Department of Heritage and Arts; and tribal partners including the Navajo Nation, Paiute Tribe of Utah, and White Mesa/Ute Mountain Utes.

Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000
A resource for students and scholars of U.S. history and U.S. women's history. Organized around the history of women in social movements in the U.S. between 1600 and 2000, this collection seeks to advance scholarly debates and understanding about U.S. women’s history generally. The collection currently 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.

Historical Newspaper, Magazine, and Journal Collections

Alt-PressWatch
Full text database of selected newspapers, magazines, journals of the alternative and independent press. Includes titles such as Anarcho-Syndicalist Review, Chicago Reader, Dissent, Off Our Backs, Poverty and Race.
American Indian Newspapers
Presents the publications of a range of communities, with an extensive list of periodicals produced in the United States and British Columbia, including Alaska, Arizona, California, Nevada and Oklahoma, from 1828 to 2016.
Black Newspapers
Full text and full-image articles from African American newspapers: Atlanta daily world, Los Angeles sentinel, New York Amsterdam news, Pittsburgh courier, The Chicago defender and more..
Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers
Search America's historic newspaper pages from 1789-1963 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present.
Independent Voices
An ongoing project to digitize over 1 million pages from the magazines, journals, and newspapers of the alternative press archives of participating libraries. Includes feminist journals, the GI press, small literary magazines, underground newspapers, LGBT periodicals, the minority press (Latino, Black and Native American), and the extreme right-wing press. Coverage spans the decades of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.
Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers
Searchable database containing digital facsimile images of newspapers; presented as full page layout as well as single articles; advertisements and illustrations included. This collection includes numerous newspapers from a range of urban and rural regions throughout the U.S.; and it encompasses the entire 19th century.
ProQuest Historical Newspapers
Full-text and full-image articles from major American newspapers: Atlanta Constitution, Baltimore Sun (1837-1985), Boston Globe, Call and Post (1934-1991), Chicago Tribune, Christian Science Monitor (1908-1997), Irish Times (1859-2009), Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Norfolk Journal and Guide (1921-2003), Philadelphia Tribune (1912-2001), San Francisco Chronicle (1865-1922), Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Scotsman (1817-1950). Every page in PDF files.
Readex AllSearch
Offers access to comprehensive, full-text collections of newspapers, broadsides, government documents, pamphlets, and more, from 1639 to as recent as 1980. Includes multiple databases that can be cross searched or searched individually
Variety Archives
Contains digitized articles of the Variety entertainment magazine, allowing archive users to trace the history of the entertainment business and its players. Weekly Variety, starting from 1906, and Daily Variety, starting from 1933, are both available up to the prior week. The database has a search function with date ranges in addition to terms and keywords which helps archive users find articles, advertisements and images.
Vogue Archive
A complete searchable archive of American Vogue, from the first issue in 1892 to the current month. Every article, cover, photo shoot, illustration and advertisement has been digitized to the highest standard, with rich indexing enabling you to find images by designer and brand names
Women's Magazine Archive
A searchable archive of leading women's interest magazines, dating from the 19th century through to the 21st. Subject coverage includes consumer culture, economics/marketing, family life, fashion, gender studies, health and fitness, home/interior design, popular culture, and social history. Publications covered include Essence, Cosmopolitan, Ladies Home Journal, and Seventeen.

Individual Readex databases include:

African American Newspapers, 1827-1998
African American Periodicals, 1825-1995
Afro-Americana Imprints, 1535-1922
America's historical imprints

Includes: Afro-American imprints, 1535-1922; American Broadsides and Ephemera, Series 1; Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans, 1639-1800; Early American Imprints, Series I: Supplement from the Library Company of Philadelphia, 1670-1800; Early American Imprints, Series II: Shaw-Shoemaker, 1801-1819; Early American Imprints, Series II: Supplement from the Library Company of Philadelphia, 1801-1819.
America's Historical Newspapers with Early American Newspapers
Ethnic American newspapers, 1799-1971
Hispanic American Newspapers, 1808-1980

New York Area Archives and Special Collections

This is a very short list of archival repositories that are close to Barnard's campus. For more help locating archival collections, navigating finding aids and scheduling research appointments with other archivists, or for an introduction to archival research, schedule a consultation with Barnard Archives Director Martha Tenney. You can also use the ArchiveGrid to search across finding aids in over 1,000 archival repositories.

Barnard Archives and digitalcollections.barnard.edu - We collect the history of Barnard College and special collections relating to Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies as well as Dance. Our Digital Collections feature a small fraction of our collections, including the yearbook, the Barnard Bulletin, student publications, and some photographs, with more added daily.
Archives at the Columbia libraries - Search in CLIO over the finding aids of six different archival repositories.
Brooklyn Historical Society - BHS’s Othmer Library and Archives houses the most comprehensive collection of materials related to Brooklyn’s history and culture in the world.
Interference Archive - An Archives in Brooklyn that explores the relationship between cultural production and social movements.
Lesbian Herstory Archives - An Archives in Brooklyn that is home to the world's largest collection of materials by and about lesbians and their communities.
New York Historical Society - A library, museum, and archives dedicated to fostering research, presenting history and art exhibitions, and public programs that reveal the dynamism of history and its influence on the world of today.
NYPL Archives & Manuscripts - Search over the NYPL's many different repositories, including the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the general Manuscripts and Archives Division.
NYU Archival Collections + Brooklyn Historical Society + New-York Historical Society - Search across the finding aids of the various archival repositories at NYU (including the Fales Library and its Downtown Collection and the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives) as well as archival holdings at Brooklyn Historical and New-York Historical.
The National Archives at New York City - Holds records of federal courts and agencies in New Jersey, New York, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The Municipal Archives holds the historical records of the New York City government and agencies.

ENTH 3145: Early American Drama & Performance

Archival research guide

Ask a Librarian

Digital Collections

Historical Newspaper, Magazine, and Journal Collections

New York Area Archives and Special Collections