Discover biographies of more than 19,000 men and women — from all eras and walks of life — whose lives have shaped American history and culture. Biography matters. From missionaries to musicians, social workers to statisticians, cowboys to chemists, and Vikings to astronauts, the portraits in the American National Biography Online (the ANB) reflect the rich diversity of American life from pre-colonial times to the present day. Featuring thousands of illustrations, and tens of thousands of hyperlinked cross-references and links to other (select) websites, the ANB is a powerful research tool for all levels of study. Published in 24 volumes in 1999 and then online in 2000, the ANB won instant acclaim as the new authority in American biographies. Winner of the American Library Association's Dartmouth Medal as the best reference work of the year, the ANB now serves readers in thousands of school, public, and academic libraries around the world.
A UoM-curated collection from British Online Archives
As a consequence of ongoing mapping activity relating to our position as National Research Library in the North the Library has significantly boosted its holdings from British Online Archives.
A number of the 21 new primary source collections acquired therefore align directly not only with existing online digital reserves, but with particular strengths at Rylands - so our extensive women’s suffrage collections have now been strengthened by a specifically Scottish archive of further material to assist researchers in compiling a more expansive picture of the movement. Reinforcing our holdings on the business of mass media, material from the BBC now complements the Granada corporate archive. Similarly, a digital archive addressing Walt Whitman builds on physical collections of manuscripts and books that have been described as the “largest and most important Whitman collection outside of the United States.”
Complementary digital additions to our extensive collections of economic and industrial history - trade, commerce and shipping records - have been sourced to further ongoing research and teaching. In accordance with the University’s civic commitment, records allowing researchers to more fully address hidden issues and uncomfortable truths – from slavery and colonialism to investigative journalism archives – have also been purchased.
A significant section of the expanded portfolio has been consciously collated from institutions outside the capital, and where relevant, from the North, exemplified by The Industrial Revolution: Technological Innovation in the Textile Industry, 1672–1929.
A comprehensive index of all our individual collections on the BOA platform is listed under ‘Related Titles’ on the Library Search entry and the platform can be cross-searched thematically, with contextual essays also offered to assist users.
The Cambridge Histories series is one of the most respected reference collections in academia. Now extending to over 400 volumes, titles nominally encompass 10 subject areas: American History; Ancient History & Classical Studies; Asian History; British & European History; Global History; Literature; Middle East & African Studies; Music & Theatre; Philosophy & Political Thought and Religion. However, it is worth noting that the topics addressed extend across the full range of the humanities, encompassing longstanding series, such as those documenting the history of the major global religions, but also recent innovations such as the World History series, which traces the development and chronology of fields as diverse as Food, Medical Ethics, Sexualities and Slavery.
Often incorporating contributions by University of Manchester academics, the collections offer invaluable contextual introductions for first-time researchers as well as regular monthly updates on developing areas of scholarship. The library has recently undertaken a review exercise to ensure online access to all available electronic titles and instituted a subscription for the addition of annual releases to ensure consistent and comprehensive access to this flagship reference series.
The Cambridge Histories also complement other recent state-of-the art and regularly updated reference material recently added to the Library’s holdings – most notably Oxford Bibliographies and Oxford Research Encyclopedias.
Oxford Bibliographies Online is a comprehensive, multidisciplinary resource encompassing material from 43 diverse discipline areas across the humanities, social sciences and sciences.
Developed in collaboration with scholars worldwide, this database offers authoritative and updated research guides that blend the features of an annotated bibliography with those of a high-level encyclopaedia. Each article serves as an up-to-date, reliable guide to current scholarship across a wide array of disciplines, complete with original commentary and detailed annotations.
The platform's advanced discoverability tools help users locate the content they need—be it chapters, books, journal articles, websites, blogs, or data sets. Users can sign in to save searches, create personalised lists of citations, and access links to full-text content in print and online.
Additionally, email alerts notify users of updates to articles and bibliographies.
With its multidisciplinary scope, Oxford Bibliographies Online is an invaluable resource for teaching and research across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences and complements our access to Oxford Research Encyclopaedias in providing accurate, peer reviewed and regularly updated summaries.
Archives of Sexuality and Gender
This database, currently the largest portfolio of digital primary source material to address this complex area of cultural studies, encompasses social history, social and political science, psychology, health, and policy studies.
The Library offers access to three diversely sourced collections. The broad expanse of LGBTQ History and Culture since 1940 and sex and sexuality from the sixteenth century to the twentieth allow scholars to trace how sexual norms have changed over time, the evolution of public health, changing gender roles, and the ebb and flow of social movements and activism. Researchers can also draw upon a wider pool of material to uncover hidden histories, such as the full text of the landmark Wolfenden report (1957), and the testimonies that underpinned its findings.
The newly acquired, “Community and Identity in North America” archive comprises over a million pages of mainly unique or unpublished material, detailing how identities developed in different social conditions across the Americas. This collection also widens our offer to interdisciplinary groupings such as the Morgan Centre, CIDRAL and CSSC, whose work informs the University’s pioneering MA in Gender, Sexuality and Culture.
These collections have been selected to complement our growing reserves in the area – both digital (Gender: identity and social change and Defining Gender) and physical (LGBQT+ holdings in our Special Collections) - with the latter recently boosted by the acquisition of the archive which featured prominently in the ‘Secret Public’ exhibition at the Rylands.
The database incorporates multiple filtering options, including a term frequency tool, which enables mapping of the usage of a word or phrase by content type or popularity over a period of years. Researchers can also cross-search the entirety of the Library’s content hosted on the Gale Primary Sources platform.
The Harper’s Bazaar Archive significantly enhances the University’s existing holdings of one of the world’s most influential fashion and lifestyle magazines. Providing access to over 500,000 pages of content, coverage extends back to the first issues of both the US (1867-present, with subsequent issues added on an ongoing basis), and UK (1930-2015) editions, both of which are seamlessly cross-searchable.
The resource is fully indexed, and content is discoverable to either article level or, in the case of advertisements, by brand or company name. The highly visual content is presented in the original magazine layout, providing both context and opportunity for comparative studies of both the US and UK editions. The database also complements the University’s recent acquisitions in general interest magazines, notably those available on EBSCOhost Reseach Databases.
This powerful lens into American, British and International fashion is essential to students and researchers in Fashion, Business and Technology, with cross-searching facilitated between both Women's Wear Daily and The Vogue Archive by their shared ProQuest platform. However, whilst synonymous with designers and illustrators, Harper’s also showcased the work of acclaimed authors such as John Steinbeck and Virginia Woolf and photographers including Diane Arbus and Man Ray. Its diverse cultural range offers rich primary source material for the Departments of American Studies, English Literature and Creative Writing, Film Studies, History, and Sociology, as well as interdisciplinary research groupings across the Humanities including CIDRAL and the Institute for Cultural Practices.
The Library has recently secured online access to a significant archival collection of American-based general magazines.
Renowned for their high-quality photography, impeccable production, and trend-setting design and editorial styles, these collections will hold significant historical value to social and cultural historians, as well as interdisciplinary research groupings across the Humanities. The Centre for the Study of Sexuality and Culture and the Centre for the Cultural History of War will also benefit.
Accessible on Library Search, the archives are hosted by EBSCO, through which researchers already have access to the Time magazine archives.
The seven new collections comprise:
The Chicago Defender (1909 - 2010)
Founded in 1905, the Defender was one of America's longest-running African American newspapers and the first to have a circulation exceed 100,000 - with more than half of this coming from outside of its home base in Chicago. The newspaper played a key role in promoting ‘The Great Migration’ of African Americans from the segregated Southern United States to the nation's urban centres in the north - especially Chicago - during the first decades of the 20th century.
As a result of consultation with staff in American Studies, the Library has now improved access to its digital archive to incorporate previously unavailable issues from 1976-2007 to benefit teaching and research in American Studies and History. This boosts a significant primary source for UG and PGR students carrying out independent research, including work for long essays and dissertations.
More particularly, the addition of these 30+ years also ‘map’ directly to the Library’s primary source materials on US Civil rights housed within the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre. These include a recently opened collection of around 100 oral histories made by the American sociologist Lou Kushnick, who founded the RACE Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Research Centre and of the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Education Trust in 1999. Undertaken between the early 1980s and late 1990s, these oral histories offer a gallery of America’s “Rainbow Coalition” - a constellation of figures engaged in civil rights activism, labour organizing, community building, social justice movements, political campaigning, and legal reform. Moreover, around a third of these interviews were done with figures directly connected to the city of Chicago or the state of Illinois, including long-time Defender journalist Lu Palmer, so more comprehensive access to the newspaper archive will facilitate ongoing staff and student research to fathom and contextualise these records.
The archive comprises full-page images and article images from the Chicago Defender under all its title variants and offers researchers the opportunity to study many significant events in American history that received only cursory attention from other newspapers. Its location on the ProQuest platform, which also hosts a number of other significant US newspapers - including the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and The Washington Post - means that cross-searching to address the comparative treatment of an issue or incident is also a largely seamless process.
Black Thought & Culture: African Americans from Colonial Times to the Present
A key digital resource for research in black studies, political science, American history, music, literature, and art, Black Thought and Culture covers some 250 years of history centred on the non-fiction writings of major American black figures and leaders. Hosted by Alexander Street Press, the database has sought to provide as comprehensive a collection as possible of the principals involved, which has led to the digitisation of much previously inaccessible and scarce material - in formats as diverse as letters, speeches, essays, leaflets, periodicals, interviews, and court transcripts. Beginning with the works of Frederick Douglass, contributors include W.E.B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, Alain Locke, Mary McLeod Bethune, Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, Langston Hughes,, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Amira Baraka, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Angela Davis, Houston Baker, Jesse Jackson, Ida B. Wells, Bobby Seale, and many others.
These new holdings complement other extant Library resources which incorporate material on and the legacies of the Black experience in the USA, in particular the post-1960 resources on anti-racist activism and social justice campaigning housed at the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE (Race Archives and Community Engagement) Centre. In addition to free text searching, a range of topic and themed searches - from sharecropping to segregation and from Négritude to the NAACP - are offered through a comprehensive index, whilst a number of full text survey works are also hosted. The collection also includes biographical essays by leading scholars and an extensive annotated bibliography of the sources in the database.
The New York Review of Books Archive – newly expanded coverage
At the request of colleagues in SALC, the Library has recently arranged for electronic access to the New York Review of Books archive (ISSN: 0028-7504). Founded in 1963 and more familiarly known as the NYRB, the semi-monthly magazine and its articles on literature, culture, economics, science and current affairs has from its outset punched with significant cultural weight. Aptly summarised in the 2017 obituary of its legendary editor, Bob Silvers, as “the standard bearer for American intellectual life: a unique repository of thoughtful discourse, unrepentantly highbrow, in a culture increasingly given to dumbing down.” Indeed, the “lively literary disputes” conducted in the 'letters to the editor' column of the NYRB have been flagged by The Washington Post as "the closest thing the intellectual world has to bare-knuckle boxing.“
Whether this played a part in the periodical being almost certainly the only one documented on celluloid by Martin Scorsese is moot (2013’s The Fifty Year Argument), but the NYRB remains an independent inter-disciplinary journal of interest and provocation across and beyond the arts and social sciences. Ready electronic access includes current issues and the wealth of its backfiles will be of particular benefit to researchers in History, English and American Studies, Politics, Sociology, Art History, Music and the culturally engaged.
Rolling Stone Archive and Magazine
In collaboration with academics from the School of Arts, Languages & Cultures, the Library has arranged for electronic access to the complete archive of Rolling Stone, one of the most influential consumer magazines of the 20th–21st centuries. Launched in 1967 to express the cultural, social, and political outlook of a new post-war generation, it rapidly became a leading vehicle for rock and popular music journalism, shaping and chronicling new trends and movements. Reports on controversial topics that were largely absent from mainstream media led to the magazine being closely identified with the beginnings of the so-called ‘counterculture’ and notably it served as a crucible for the development of the ‘new journalism’ pioneered by figures such as Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe. Coverage became more broad-stream and expanded in the 1980s to encompass more entertainment topics, such as film and television, making Rolling Stone a leading resource for contemporary reporting and reviews pertaining to wider popular culture. The magazine continues to act as a locus for contemporary ‘state of the (US) nation’ concerns with influential investigative works such as Eric Schlosser’s Fast-Food Nation (2001) originating in a commission from the paper in 1998.
Encompassing some 150,000 pages, the archive incorporates cover-to-cover colour scanning of its images, advertisements, photographs, illustrations, fiction and reviews for the first time together with article-level indexing and searchable text. In addition to being of particular value to researchers across the humanities and complementing the Popular culture in Britain and America, 1950-1975 collection, the database also offers a valuable ‘transatlantic take’ on the resources housed within the Library’s recently launched British Pop Archive.
The following are important databases for this subject area, however if you don't see what you're looking for, please go to the Database Directory for American Studies to browse a wider selection.
Follow the links below to browse databases for specific types of resources.
You can use our Database Directory to browse a broader range of databases that are relevant to American Studies as well as other subjects. The directory also allows you to identify databases that provide access to specific types of resources (e.g. Full Text Articles, Streaming Video, Patents, Theses and Dissertations, and much more).
The University of Manchester's research is internationally recognised. Go to Research Explorer, Manchester's research database, to discover the breadth of research produced by staff across the University.
Browse research publications from American Studies (please note: whilst many of the publications listed are available to access/Open Access, some records are for forthcoming titles awaiting publication).
