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Michigan State University

Theatre Research Guide: Selected Primary Resources in English and American Literature and History

This is a general guide to research in the scholarship of the History of Theatre. For a guide to Period Resources (for images and scholarship in material culture) please see: http://blog.lib.msu.edu/libdata_pos/page.phtml?page_id=1373 .

Selected Primary Resources in English and American Literature and History

Much of this is repeated in Period Resources guide.

  • Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO)

    Contains digital versions of 150,000 works published or printed from 1701-1800 in England, and other English-speaking places around the world (including the rest of the British Isles, the American colonies, and the early United States). Look here to find full texts of primary source materials in history, geography, literature, language, religion, philosophy, social science, fine arts, music, architecture, medicine, science, technology, and law, as well as general reference works from the 18th century. MSU owns some of the microfilm set from which the database has been made, called The Eighteenth Century (call number 14735).

  • Early English Books Online (EEBO)

    EEBO, Early English Books Online, provides digital access to the citations, texts, and illustrations of 106,639 works from approximately 1475-1700.

  • Early American Imprints

    Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans, 1639-1800 is the definitive resource for information about every aspect of life in 17th- and 18th-century America, from agriculture and auctions through foreign affairs, diplomacy, literature, music, religion, the Revolutionary War, temperance, witchcraft, and just about any other topic imaginable. This resource consists of more than 37,000 books, pamphlets, and broadsides. Includes Images.

  • C19: The Nineteenth Century

    C19: The Nineteenth Century Index is a gateway, or portal, into a variety of primary sources for 19th Century studies, especially of the British Isles. Each resource or database may also be accessed/searched individually.

  • Periodicals Archive Online

    Periodicals Archive Online is the new name for PCI Full Text - an archive of hundreds of digitised journals published in the arts, humanities and social sciences.

    It provides researchers with access to more than 200 years of scholarship, spread across a wide variety of subject areas.

  • Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000

    "(Women and Social Movements) is intended to serve as 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 1700 and 2000, the website seeks to advance scholarly debates and understanding at the same time that it makes the insights of women's history accessible to teachers and students at universities, colleges, and high schools. The database includes more than 25,000 pages of documents pertaining to Women and Social Movements, a dictionary of social movements and organizations, a chronology of U.S. women's history, and teaching tools with lesson ideas and document-based questions related to the website's document projects."

  • Black Thought and Culture

    Approximately 100,000 pages of monographs, essays, articles, speeches, and interviews written by leaders within the black community from the earliest times to 1975. The collection is intended for research in black studies, political science, American history, music, literature, and art. The collection begins with the works of Frederick Douglass and is targeted to include the works of W.E.B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, Alain Locke, Mary McLeod Bethune, Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Ralph Bunche, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Angela Davis, Houston Baker, Jesse Jackson, Ida B. Wells, Bobby Seale, and many others.

  • ARTstor

    ARTstor is a digital image database containing approximately 400,000 images. Images are grouped into collections and represent the canon of art history (as defined by major art history survey texts) as well as specialized collections such as the MoMA Architecture and Design Collection and the Huntington Archive of Asian Art.