Primary Sources: American Popular Entertainment

The American Popular Entertainment collection from the University of Illinois contains digital facsimiles of historic newspapers and trade journals published for the entertainment industry in the US between 1853 and 1929. These works include trade perspectives, features, and travel information on vaudeville, music performance, burlesque, and other popular forms of entertainment of the period.

The collection currently includes:

New York Clipper 7 May 1853 – 12 July 1924 (3605 issues)
Player 8 December 1911 – 21 November 1913 (102 issues)
Vaudeville News 16 April 1920 – 8 June 1929 (286 issues)


Primary Sources: Law and Society Since the Civil War

One last resource recently required through by the Law Library is ProQuest History Vault: Law and Society Since the Civil War

This module consists of 11 collections from the Harvard Law School Library. These are the papers of Albert Levitt, Felix Frankfurter, Livingston Hall, Louis D. Brandeis, Richard H. Field, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Roscoe Pound, the Sacco-Vanzetti Case, Sheldon Glueck, William H. Hastie, and Zechariah Chafee. Taken together, Frankfurter’s and Brandeis’s papers provide a behind-the-scenes view of the Supreme Court between 1919 and 1961. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Papers include Holmes’s correspondence from 1861 through 1935. Holmes was a prolific and brilliant correspondent and his letters have been acknowledged as an extraordinary record of a wide-ranging and imaginative intellect. The Sacco-Vanzetti case papers offer researchers an inside view of the legal strategy in this controversial case.


Primary Sources: Women’s Studies Manuscript Collections

Another recent purchase of the Law Library was ProQuest History Vault: Women’s Studies Manuscript Collections

This valuable collection of materials from the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College tells the story of the fight for voting rights for women at the national, regional, and local levels. The papers of key national leaders like Julia Ward Howe, Anna Howard Shaw, and Matilda Gage are included. Equally important are the papers of lesser known state and local leaders like Catharine Waugh McCulloch of Illinois, Olympia Brown of Wisconsin, and Nellie Nugent Somerville of Mississippi. In addition to the Voting Rights papers, this module also includes records on women involved in national politics, like Mary Dewson and Jeannette B. Rankin.


Primary Sources: Freely available digitized newspapers

A librarian at Bowling Green State University has created some truly excellent portals to digitized historical newspapers freely available on the web.

Historical U.S. Newspapers Online
The home page includes links to sites that provide access to newspapers from multiple states, the remaining links are organized by state.

Historical Canadian Newspapers Online
The home page includes links to National and multi-province papers, the rest are organized by province.

Historical Newspapers Online
The guide provides links to digitized newspapers from countries around the world.


Primary Sources: Historical U.S. Newspapers Online

This guide to Historical U.S. Newspapers Online, created by a librarian at Bowling Green University, attempts to provide links to every publicly accessible digitized historical newspaper in the United States. It is organized by state, and then city — click on a letter to go to the state. There are also links to some resources, like Chronicling America, that allow you to search across many newspapers at once.


Primary Sources: Historic Mexican & Mexican American Press

The University of Arizona Library has made available 20 historic publications published in Tucson, El Paso, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Sonora, Mexico from the mid-1800s to the 1970s. The Historic Mexican and Mexican American Press collection covers important periods in Mexican-American history, from the Mexican Revolution to the Bracero Program to the Chicano Movement. The home page for the collection provides a basic search and allows you to search all of the publications or to limit to a single publication.
SEARCH TIP: You can enter more than one search term in the basic search, but if you want to do a more sophisticated search, an advanced search option is available. However, this will take you to the Library’s complete collection of their own digitized items and you cannot limit your search to the entire Historic Mexican and Mexican American Press collection, you will have to choose the publications you want to search from a list.
One handy tool offered by the site is a timeline of the available publication dates for each title represented in the collection.