Sociology: Databases

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newly acquired, “Community and Identity in North America” archive comprises over a million pages of mainly unique or unpublished material, detailing how identities developed in different social conditions across the Americas.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 will feature prominently in the forthcoming ‘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 

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. 

EBSCO Magazines Archive

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 Atlantic Magazine (1857 - 2014): Researchers can access primary source material on alternative journalism, addressing activism, the arts, economy, environment and politics. 
• Ebony (1945 - 2014): The most influential African American general interest magazine, articles cover African American culture, business, Civil rights, and entertainment.
• Esquire (1933 - 2014): Valuable to researchers looking at 20th-Century current events, gender issues, politics and advertising, Esquire also published work by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, fostered the development of the ‘New Journalism’ in the 1960s, and provided early support for the ‘dirty realism’ literary movement of the 1980s. 
• Life (1936 - 2000): This iconic US magazine chronicled the major events of the 20th century and largely defined photojournalism. 
• Sports Illustrated (1954 - 2000): These archives chronicle the evolving role of sports in US culture, from polo and boating to American football and basketball.
• The Nation (1865 - 2020): America’s oldest weekly magazine was sponsored by Emerson, Longfellow, and Beecher Stowe, its roots stretching back to the Abolitionist movement.
• Vanity Fair (1919-1936; 1983-2000): Access has been extended to the publication's literary interwar years. The magazine’s later years are valuable to researchers in fashion and marketing, as well as complementing our existing Women’s Wear Daily and Harper’s Bazaar archives on the ProQuest platform.  

Mass Observation Project: Series II and III (1990s/2000s) now available

Our Mass Observation Project online archive has been extended providing further material covering the 1990s and 2000s.

The Mass Observation archive is a pioneering project documenting the social history of Britain. It gathers valuable primary source materials, including survey responses, diaries, letters, lists, maps and photographs, offering a comprehensive insight into the everyday lives, experiences and opinions of ordinary people. These rich records, generated in response to a series of questionnaires (‘directives’), cover diverse themes such as current events, friends and family, the home, leisure, politics, society, culture, work, finance and the economy and new technology.

Material in Mass Observation Project, (1981-2009), addresses, in depth, a range of topics including attitudes to the USA, reading and television habits, morality and religion, Britain's relations with Europe, UK elections, and pivotal events such as the Falklands War, fall of the Berlin Wall, the Miners’ Strike, the death of Diana, Princess of Wales and 9/11.

The collection stands as an invaluable resource for studying social trends in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In particular, it holds significant value for the University's interdisciplinary research groups in the Humanities, such as the Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives, the Cathie Marsh Institute (CMI) and the Centre On the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CODE).

Use alongside our Mass Observation Online archive (1937-1967), providing primary material from the original Mass Observation study, for access to some of the most comprehensive sources for qualitative social data in the UK.

Object Lessons Archive 2015-2018

As a result of conversations with academic colleagues across the humanities, the Library has purchased a collection of monographs published as an archival collection from Bloomsbury. The ‘Object Lessons’ series emerged out of The Atlantic Monthly’s heralded short essays and looks in depth at ‘the hidden lives of ordinary things’ from a variety of perspectives and theoretical approaches. Averaging at c.25,000 words, each text focuses on a single topic to offer a fresh and often surprising focus on the materials of the everyday and question the quotidian in a manner that complements the fundamental critical practice of taking nothing for granted.

In addition to being of general interest to anyone involved in cultural studies, and intra-disciplinary research groupings as diverse as the Morgan Centre, the Sustainable Consumption Institute and The Bodies, Emotions and Material Culture Collective, the archive offers a virtual complement to the object-focused scholarship and collection-centred teaching activities undertaken at the Rylands. As usual in addition to the provision of a general link to the collection, all titles owned in the series are also individually indexed on Library search.

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.

SAGE Research Methods Foundations

In response to academic requests and in-house analysis of demand, the library has added SAGE Research Methods Foundations to its holdings. Forming part of the popular Sage Research Methods database collection - which also includes Books and Reference; Video and Cases (Pt. 1) - this integrated collection offers an invaluable introductory overview for first-time researchers of the major methods topics. In addition to comprehensive coverage of themes and approaches, including their history, development and current critical debates around them, there are also biographical entries for both notable researchers and previously neglected pioneers together with pointers for further reading. Incorporating contributions from the University’s own researchers, the Foundations collection is an excellent starting point for both new PGs embarking on methods courses and those seeking to refresh and revaluate their perspective on an ever-evolving field of practice. To further facilitate discovery all entries in the Foundations collection are also individually indexed on Library Search.

Gender: Identity & Social Change

As a result of consultation with academics from the Faculty of Humanities and colleagues at the Rylands, the Library has arranged for electronic access to the Gender: Identity and Social Change database. Hosted by AM, the collection serves as a valuable reserve of digitised primary materialsdocumenting the changing representations and lived experiences of gender roles and relations, and in particular the struggle for women’s rights, from the nineteenth century to the present. Sourced from institutions from across the United States, Canada, Australia and the UK - including, as a guarantor of worth, the Rylands - contents are grouped under 13 key themes: Women’s Suffrage; Feminism; The Men’s Movement; Education and Training; Employment and Labour; The Body; Conduct and Politeness; Domesticity and the Family; Government and Politics; Legislation and Legal Cases; Leisure and Entertainment: Organisations, Associations and Societies; Sex and Sexuality.

As such the material not only aligns with academic activity undertaken within traditional disciplines such as sociology and history, but also ongoing interdisciplinary research undertaken by research hubs clustered around the social sciences (such as the Morgan Centre and Movements@Manchester) and within SALC, CIDRAL and CSSC, whose work informs the long-running MA in Gender, Sexuality and Culture. The collection also contributes further to the library’s extensive reserves in a fertile area of study – complementing both other large-scale digital archival collections (most notably, the Archives of Sexuality and Gender and Defining Gender, 1450-1910) and the deep repository of physical materials offered at the Rylands, which are of course considerably more extensive than the selection digitised for inclusion in the database.

A variety of secondary features further facilitate study and offer a useful starting point for first-time researchers. These include scholarly essays, highlighted biographies, featured organisations, video interviews and an interactive chronology to provide context to support printed resources and the wealth of visual material offered.