Databases

The following databases offer a variety of sources for humanities and genealogy research. Most are subscription databases, therefore access is available to registered readers only within the library building.

Databases listed with an asterisk do not require a subscription and are freely available web sources.

Databases in Alphabetical Order by Title:

Academic Search Complete: Provides full text for more than 9,000 journals, and indexing and abstracts for more than 13,780 journals. Offered by EBSCO.

African American Communities: Focusing predominantly on Atlanta, Chicago, St. Louis, New York, and towns and cities in North Carolina this resource presents multiple aspects of the African American community through pamphlets, newspapers and periodicals, correspondence, official records, reports and in-depth oral histories.

Age of Exploration: Explore five centuries of journeys across the globe, scientific discoveries, the expansion of European colonialism, conflict over territories and trade routes, and decades-long search and rescue attempts in this multi-archive collection dedicated to the history of exploration.

American Ancestors: New England Historic Genealogical Society resources.

The American West: Mixture of original manuscripts, maps, ephemeral material and rare printed sources from the Newberry’s Everett D. Graff Collection of Western Americana.

Ancestry.com: The largest collection of family history records on the web.

A-R Online Music Anthology: More than 600 complete pieces of sheet music from antiquity through the romantic era, and articles designed for music history and theory courses.

*ArchiveGrid: Selected Newberry archival finding aids; bibliographic records and digital finding aids for archival and manuscript collections at RLG libraries and other research libraries worldwide.

ARTFL: Research on the French Language: Nearly 2,000 texts, from classic works of literature to various kinds of non-fiction prose and technical writing. Genres include novels, verse, theater, journalism, essays, correspondence, and treatises.

ArticleFirst: OCLC index of articles from contents pages of journals. Some full-text. Offered through First Search.

Black Studies in Video: Includes 500 hours of documentaries, interviews, and archival footage surveying the black experience. Covers African American history, politics, art and culture, family structure, gender relationships, and social and economic issues.

Black Thought and Culture: A full-text database containing the text (and some images) of over 1,300 non-fiction published works of African Americans, ca. 1700-2006.

Chicago Defender: Searchable full-text archive for the years 1909-1975. Offered by ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Chicago Manual of Style Online: Provides full-text for the 16th and 17th editions of the Chicago Manual of Style, as well as access to the Chicago Manual of Style Q&A and Tools pages.

Chicago Tribune: Searchable full-text archive for the years 1849-1998. Offered by ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

ClasePeriodica: Offered through First Search. Index of Latin American journals in the sciences and humanities. Some full-text.

Dance Online: Dance in Video: Focused on videos of performance including modern dance, ballet, tap, jazz, contemporary, experimental, and more. This database includes over 900 hours of material, and also includes some documentaries and interviews.

Early English Books Online (EEBO): Digital facsimiles of English books, 1475-1700, including more than 125,000 titles listed in Pollard & Redgrave’s Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640) and Wing’s Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700) and their revised editions, as well as the Thomason Tracts (1640-1661) collection and the Early English Books Tract Supplement.

ECO: An OCLC collection of scholarly journals. Offered through First Search.

ERIC: ERIC, the Educational Resource Information Center, contains more than 2,200 digests along with references for additional information and citations and abstracts for over 1,000 educational and education-related journals. Also available through First Search service.

Ethnographic Video Online: This collection of videos contains classic and contemporary ethnographies, documentaries and shorts from every continent, focused on introductions and context for hundreds of cultural groups and practices around the world.

*Explore Chicago Collections: Search for thousands of archival collections and digital images at member institutions all over the Chicago area.

*FamilySearch: Free access to images of genealogical records digitized from over 2.4 million microfilm rolls held by the Family History Library. The Newberry participates in FamilySearch’s Family History Library Film program.

First Search/WorldCat: Collection of OCLC databases such as WorldCat, ArticleFirst, ECO, and WorldCatDissertations. Some full-text.

Fold3: Genealogy database that contains records drawn from the National Archives and other sources. Includes a selection of military records, court records, city directories, and letters.

Funk and Wagnalls New World Encyclopedia: Provides over 25,000 encyclopedic entries covering a variety of subject areas. Offered by EBSCO.

GPO: Index of some US government publications, 1976-present. Offered through First Search.

HarpWeek: Search Harper’s Weekly from 1857-1912.

HeritageQuestOnline.com: With over 25,000 books, the entire US Federal Census, PERSI, selected Revolutionary War records, and Freedman’s Bank records, HeritageQuestOnline.com is one of the largest collections of online genealogy materials.

Historical Statistics of the United States: Statistical information from the U.S. Census Bureau, published by Cambridge University Press.

History of Mass Tourism, 1850-1980: A diverse collection of digitized primary sources from the Newberry and other institutions, providing unique insight into the expansion, accessibility, and affordability of tourism for the masses. Materials include guidebooks, brochures, periodicals, travel agency correspondence, photographs, and personal travel journals.

Indigenous Histories and Cultures in North America: A deep and wide ranging selection of visual and textual resources related to Native American culture and history drawn from the Newberry’s rich collections.

Indigenous Newspapers in North America: A diverse and robust collection of print journalism from Indigenous peoples of the U.S. and Canada. Explore over more than 9,000 individual editions from 1828-2016, and discover how events were reported by and for Indigenous communities.

Iter: Middle Ages and Renaissance: Provides access to a bibliography covering literature pertaining to the Middle Ages and Renaissance (400-1700) plus seven or eight additional databases.

JSTOR: Provides full-text access to an archive of major scholarly journals. Contains complete runs from their first volumes up through approximately five years ago.

MLA International Bibliography: Indexes materials on literature, languages, linguistics, and folklore, excluding book reviews. Citations from over 4,000 journals and series published worldwide, as well as books, essays, working papers, proceedings, dissertations, and bibliographies. Also includes citations to books and journal articles having to do with linguistics and language topics.

New York Times: Searchable full-text archive for the years 1851-2003. Offered through ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Newspaper Source: Provides selected full-text for nearly 30 national (US) and international newspapers. Also contain full-text television and radio news transcripts, and selected full-text for more than 200 regional (US) newspapers. Offered by EBSCO.

OAISTER: Union catalog of digital resources. Offered by First Search.

OED Online: Oxford English Dictionary Online.

Professional Development Collection: Designed for professional educators, this database provides a specialized collection of more than 550 education journals, including more than 350 peer-reviewed titles. Also contains more than 200 educational journals. Offered by EBSCO.

ProjectMuse: Provides full-text access to recent volumes of scholarly journals in the arts and humanities published by Johns Hopkins University Press and journals of other university presses.

Sanborn Maps for Illinois: Historic maps of Illinois towns and cities, from the collection of Sanborn maps at the Library of Congress.

Saskia Digital Image Archive: This collection contains 30,000 digital images of paintings, sculpture, and architecture, including images from many important collections: the Prado, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the Uffizi, and the Louvre, as well as archaeological sites in Greece, Italy, Turkey, and Egypt.

Women and Social Movements: A full-text database and teaching resource organized around the history of women in social movements in the U.S. between 1600 and 2000, this collection includes more than 162,000 pages of text, written by 2,500 primary authors. It also includes book, film, and website reviews, and teaching tools.

World’s Fairs: A Global History of Expositions: A diverse range of digitized primary source material to represent the origination and planning of fairs, the experience of visiting them, and the physical, cultural, and political legacies they leave behind, including Newberry collection materials on the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893.

*WorldCat.org: Free-access version of the WorldCat catalog interface for searching the collections of thousands of libraries around the world.