Guides: American Studies: Home

Getting Started

For an overview of topics, consult the Encyclopedia of American Studies .

These library databases are good places to start your research.

Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
Provides full text coverage to peer-reviewed titles in the social sciences, humanities, general science, multi-cultural studies, education and more.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
Archive of interdisciplinary journals and books, covering the Arts, Business & Economics, History, Humanities, Law, Science & Mathematics, Social Sciences, and Religion.
Project MUSE This link opens in a new window
Full-text current and archival articles from scholarly journals covering literature and criticism, history, performing arts, cultural studies, education, philosophy, political science, gender studies, and more.
Literature Resource Center This link opens in a new window
Provides up-to-date biographical information, overviews, full-text literary criticism and reviews on writers in all disciplines, from all time periods and around the world.

Databases Specific To the Topic

America: History and Life This link opens in a new window
Access to scholarly journals, dissertations and book and media reviews about U.S. and Canadian history and culture. Coverage for some titles back to the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Strong English-language journal coverage is balanced by an international perspective on topics and events, including abstracts in English of articles published in more than 40 languages.
Accessible Archives This link opens in a new window
Primary source material from 18th and 19th century including historical periodicals and books; eyewitness accounts of historical events, descriptions of daily life, business advertisements, and genealogical records.
MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new window
Coverage is international and includes literature, language and linguistics, folklore, literary theory and criticism, dramatic arts, as well as the historical aspects of printing and publishing.
In addition, the MLA Directory of Periodicals and their proprietary thesaurus used to assign descriptors within the Bibliography are included.
Biography in Context This link opens in a new window
Biographical information on more than 528,000 people throughout history, around the world, and across all disciplines and subject areas.
Some 50,000 new and/or updated biographies are added each year, as well as daily status updates of existing subjects

British Periodicals
British Periodicals offers facsimile page images and searchable full text for approximately 500 British periodicals published from the 17th through the early 20th centuries (1681-1920). Topics covered include literature, philosophy, history, science, the social sciences and the fine arts: music, art, drama, archaeology and architecture. The collection includes over 5 million pages.

American Studies in Artstor

ARTstor This link opens in a new window
The ARTstor Digital Library provides more than 1.8 million digital images in the arts, architecture, humanities, and science. Content includes art, photographs, cultural objects, and architecture, ranging from pre-colonial to the present day.

Artstor’s American Studies content is sourced from museums, archives, and scholars such as the following (you must be on campus for these links to work; otherwise, login to ArtStor and search by these phrases):

Browse by geography, select United States, and then choose a classification to help you narrow your results.

American Studies

American Antiquarian Society

Librarian

Getting Started

Databases Specific To the Topic

American Studies in Artstor