Primary Sources: Alexander Street Press

Thousands of essays, images, liner notes and more covering blues, jazz, spirituals, civil rights songs, slave songs, minstrelsy, rhythm and blues, gospel, and other forms of black American musical expression. Includes biographies of 185 African American composers.

American History in Video provides a collection of video available online for the study of American history, with 2,000 hours and more than 5,000 titles on completion. The collection provides access to commercial and governmental newsreels, archival footage, public affairs footage, and documentaries.

Black Drama contains the full text of 1,200 plays written from the mid-1800s to the present by more than 100 playwrights from North America, English-speaking Africa, the Caribbean, and other African Diaspora countries. The plays are accompanied by reference materials, significant ancillary information, a rich performance database, and images. Coverage: 1850-present.

This collection features documentaries, newsreels, interviews, and archival footage surveying the evolution of black culture in the United States. Includes California Newsreel's African American Classics collection that includes films covering history, politics, art and culture, family structure, social and economic pressures, and gender relations. This current release includes 145 videos totaling 141 hours.

Spanning more than 300 years, this collection will bring the personal experiences of more than 1,000 women to researchers, students, and general readers. Represented are all age groups and life stages, all ethnicities, many geographical regions, the famous and not so famous. More than 500 biographies enhance the use of the database. Coverage: 1500-1900.

The Digital Library of Classic Protestant Texts gives researchers immediate, Web-based access to an extensive range of seminal works from the Reformation and post-Reformation eras.The database uses PhiloLogic software, developed at the University of Chicago, to enable in-depth browsing and searching of theological writings, biblical commentaries, confessional documents, sermons, letters, polemical treatises, and other works by hundreds of Protestant authors.

The Digital Library of the Catholic Reformation gives researchers immediate, Web-based access to an extensive range of seminal works from the Reformation and post-Reformation eras. With 845 titles by 277 authors, the collection covers theological writings, biblical commentaries, confessional documents, social and political works, sermons, letters, polemical treatises, and other key documents from this critical epoch in European history.

Assembled from hundreds of primary sources, this database documents the relationships among peoples and with the environment in North America from 1534 to 1850. The collection focuses on personal accounts and provides unique perspectives from all of the protagonists, including traders, slaves, missionaries, explorers, soldiers, native peoples, and officials, both men and women.

This resource brings together a wide range of streaming video, written ethnographies, field notes, seminal texts, memoirs, and contemporary studies, covering human behavior the world over. The database contains more than 1,800 documentary films and over 100,000 pages of full-text material, including tens of thousands of pages of previously unpublished material from major archives. Includes Volumes 1 & 2 Second Edition.

This resource presents points of view and historical and current experiences from diverse cultures and traditions world-wide. This release now provides 1,019 titles, equaling approximately 806 hours.

Primary documents and scholarly commentary covering American history from 1865 to 1902, during the decades between the end of the Civil War and the election of Theodore Roosevelt. Includes songs, letters, photographs, cartoons, government documents, and ephemera. Also video interviews with scholars and topical essays. Covers such themes as race, labor, immigration, commerce, western expansion, and women’s suffrage.

A collection of books, periodicals, and archival materials documenting LGBT political, social and cultural movements throughout the twentieth century and into the present day. Content includes selections from The National Archives in Kew, materials collected by activist and publisher Tracy Baim from the mid-1980s through the mid-2000s, the Magnus Hirschfeld and Harry Benjamin collections from the Kinsey Institute, periodicals such as En la Vida and BLACKlines, select rare works from notable LGBT publishers including Alyson Books and Cleis Press, as well as mainstream trade and university publishers.

This database includes 71 authors and approximately 10,000 pages of information intended to provide a unique and personal view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada between 1800 and 1950. It is composed of contemporaneous letters and diaries, oral histories, interviews, and other personal narratives, and some audio voices of the immigrants.

North American Women's Letters and Diaries (NAWLD) includes the immediate experiences of 632 women, as revealed in approximately 82,000 pages of diaries and letters. When complete, the collection will include more than 150,000 pages of primary materials spanning more than 300 years. The collection also includes biographies and an extensive annotated bibliography of the sources in the database. Coverage: 1675-1950.

This collection contains 60 volumes of Romantic poetry composed by Scottish women, along with extensive contemporary critical reviews and numerous scholarly essays specially commissioned for the project.

The collection brings together the instructional, prescriptive, behavioral, and etiquette literature that defined standards of personal conduct for millions of Americans and reflected the prevailing social mores across the twentieth century. The collection contains 150,000 pages of fully searchable handbooks, manuals, textbooks, etiquette guides, self-help books, instructional pamphlets, and how-to books that illustrate both how Americans actually behaved and how they felt they ought to behave.

Includes books, images, documents, scholarly essays, commentaries, and bibliographies, documenting the multiplicity of women’s reform activities. Resources added in 2008 include more than 72,000 pages from State Commissions on the Status of Women, as well as the first three volumes of Harvard University Press' Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary.