English and American Studies: Databases

Black Thought and Culture

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

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 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.

Oberon Books Collection – newly expanded coverage

As a result of heavy usage of the material housed in the initial release of the Oberon ebook collection launched in 2021, the Library has now expanded its coverage to incorporate a second release of some 400 further (individually indexed) titles from this key publisher of plays and books on theatre practice and theory. In additional to canonical texts, the portfolio incorporates an unparalleled range of new writing from the contemporary era, including many significant works and writers that have been excluded from major collections to date. Particularly noteworthy in this release are some 39 plays by Howard Barker, whilst new works by Ontroerend Goed, Deborah Pearson, and Hannah Nicklin are also particularly welcome.  Further evidence of the Library’s ongoing collaboration with the drama department to support performance-based arts in the challenging post-COVID environment, the material will also enhance efforts to rebalance our holdings and offer an opportunity to readily study and research a broader range of plays by contemporary Black and Global Majority artists.

First Folios Compared

One of the great treasures of The Rylands, our copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio, has long been available online and open access through the  Library Digitised Collections, but we’re delighted to announce it now features in the recently launched First Folios Compared project which brings together over 50 first folios (just over 20% of all known surviving copies) for researchers to examine and explore. It also of course provides another example of the Library’s active commitment to Open Access scholarship.

This project opens up a host of exciting opportunities for close textual examination and work in the digital humanities on an incontrovertibly seminal work, stretching beyond the 36 plays to encompass the physical journeys undergone by the books themselves through the course of 4 centuries - from the amendments of printers to the annotations of owners. Copies from Skipton to Sydney, together with all their extant metadata, are now readily and freely available for viewing and direct comparison.

For more on the Project see the ‘Summary’ in the Details section on the database entry on Library Search.