The 19th Century in Print: Periodicals

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Part of the Library of Congress American Memory Project, this site offers full-text transcriptions of 23 popular 19th-century periodicals digitized by the Cornell University Library and the Preservation Reformatting Division of the Library of Congress. Among the periodicals on this site are literary and political magazines, as well as journals like Scientific American, Manufacturer and Builder, Garden and Forest, and the North American Review.

Each periodical is accompanied by very brief (10–15 word) notes on the name and location of the publisher and the years and volumes covered. Each periodical's full text is searchable by keyword and phrase.

A special presentation offers roughly 750-word essay on the historical background of Garden and Forest by Sheila Connor, the Horticultural Research Archivist at the Arnold Arboretum. There are also links to five related American Memory resources. The site's broad sampling of periodicals provides an easily navigated source for articles and editorials on a number of 19th-century political, cultural, and social issues.

Drawing the Western Frontier: The James E. Taylor Album

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This site explores James E. Taylor's legacy as a recorder of western culture. A professional artist, Taylor's newspaper illustrations served to popularize stereotypes of the Western frontier during the post-Civil War years. Like other illustrators and writers of the period, he depicted Indian-White relations in terms of savagery versus civilization and encouraged Americans to visualize the nation's Westward expansion in heroic terms. Taylor made his own illustrations, collected photographs taken by others, and constructed scrapbooks. Following Taylor's lead, the producers of this site use albums to display his work. The site includes about 750 items, taken from the 1,100 items that appeared on Taylor's 118 album pages.

Visitors can search for images by keyword, or can browse by subject or album theme. Each album image is annotated with the date the image was made, the subject, and the creator of the image, and there is an 1,800-word introductory essay for those unfamiliar with Taylor and his work. Visitors should beware that these are high-quality images, and are therefore large files. High-speed connections will make downloading much more manageable. The photographs and images in this collection are a very useful resource for researching westward expansion.

Time Archive, 1923 to Present

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Time magazine published its first edition on March 23, 1923. This website features all 4,428 Time magazine covers published since that time. Covers can be searched by keyword or browsed by year.

Exploring Time covers from the early years shows that individuals (generally men in political leadership positions) were featured up until the late 1960s. Indeed, House of Representatives Speaker Joseph G. Cannon occupies Time's first cover, China's General Chiang Kai-shek appears several times between the late 1920s and 1940s, African leaders surface at decolonization in the late 1950s, and Ralph Nader can be found trumpeting the "consumer revolt" on a cover from December 1969.

Those interested in U.S. foreign policy (search China, Russia, Vietnam, or Latin America), popular culture and entertainment, the environment, religion, and legal history also will find valuable resources. Within each keyword search, suggestions for related topics are helpful.

ProQuest Information and Learning

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This fee-based service provides a range of resources. There are a large number of secondary sources, including more than 2,500 scholarly journals, magazines, newspapers, and trade publications, with full-text access and searching capabilities available for approximately half. "Historical Newspapers" offers an enormous body of primary sources, including access to the following: The New York Times (1851–2001), The Washington Post (1877–1988), The Wall Street Journal (1889–1986), The Christian Science Monitor (1908–1991), and The Los Angeles Times (1881–1984). For recent history, there are articles from more than 500 newspapers worldwide from the 1980s to the present. These include specialized publications from the worlds of business, education, medicine, religion, and sciences and reference resources. ProQuest offers subscribers a variety of product "modules," so materials described above may not be available at all institutions.

Readex Digital Collections

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Hundreds of thousands of documents spanning four centuries of American history are available in this large archive. Broadsides, ephemera, pamphlets, and booklets are available from 1639 to 1900. More than 1,300 newspaper titles, representing all 50 states, range in date from 1690 to 1922. U.S. Senate and House of Representatives reports, journals, and other documents are available from 1817 to 1980. Legislative and executive documents from the Early Republic are also included. The entire body of documents is keyword searchable, and, in addition, each collection can be searched and browsed individually. These documents shed light on many aspects of American social, political, economic, and cultural history, and can provide a valuable window into the daily lives of early Atlantic peoples. The collection of broadsides and ephemera is especially useful for exploring the history of printing in the United States, as all titles can be browsed by bookseller, printer, or publisher.