The online collection is growing to include 5,000 individual volumes, with 650,000 pages and more than a million images. Each book tells a small piece of American history. But when researched together with Alexander Street's Semantic Indexing, the collection becomes a massive and powerful primary-source research tool, a tapestry of the places and people that have made America.
For Scholarship, Study, and Personal Research
For academic scholarship, the collection will have broad departmental relevance, showing the personal stories and photos of immigrants, laborers, and newsmakers; documenting the local architecture of homes and businesses; showing images of racism and tolerance; delivering history as observed in real time. The photos are from historical societies, archives, and private collections. The texts are written by local historians—people with deep and personal knowledge of their communities. In many instances, the authors are protagonists in the historical events they describe, with family photographs, primary documents, and other materials that are inaccessible outside of these publications.
Examples of academic disciplines served include:
Sports history, recreation—Major leagues, local teams, and their influences on communities: Metro Detroit Boxing; Gold in the Ozarks; Central Park Zoo; New York City Vaudeville; New York Giants; Hockey in Providence
Architecture and urban studies—How spaces were used in the past: Lost Ann Arbor; Cemeteries Around Lake Winnipesaukee; Railroad Depots of West Central Ohio
Race and gender—Italians in Detroit; Jewish Community of North Minneapolis; The Chinese Community of Stockton; An Oral History of Tahlequah and The Cherokee Nation
Labor and organizational history—Army, Coast Guard, canal workers, nurses, police departments, fire departments, unions, factory conditions: Firefighting in Frederick; Fairchild Aircraft; The Long Island Railroad; Straub Brewery; WNAX 570 Radio
War—New Hampshire in the Civil War; Cincinnati: The World War II years
Religion—The Roman Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh
New Tools for Search and Discovery
Alexander Street has indexed the books using a new thesaurus created specifically for this collection. Places, people, dates, events, architectural features, and ethnicities are some of the index terms, making searches such as these easy:
Find African American schools in DeKalb County, Georgia.
Find pictures of coal miners in Kentucky and Virginia from 1900 to 1950.
Find examples of neocolonial architecture in the Northeast and Southwest.
Find pictures and descriptions of college football games in Nebraska in the 1950s.
Find depictions of the Irish American community in Youngstown, Ohio. In all of the Midwest. Compared to the Italian-American communities in these areas.
Find Jewish butchers in Chicago in the 1920s.
On-Campus Link
An annotated bibliography of the best scholarship in the discipline.
An annotated bibliography of the best scholarship in the discipline.
The online collection is growing to include 5,000 individual volumes, with 650,000 pages and more than a million images. Each book tells a small piece of American history. But when researched together with Alexander Street's Semantic Indexing, the collection becomes a massive and powerful primary-source research tool, a tapestry of the places and people that have made America.
CQ Researcher provides award winning in-depth coverage of the most important issues of the day. Our reports are written by experienced journalists, footnoted and professionally fact-checked.
Each year, Annual Reviews critically reviews the most significant primary research literature to guide researchers to the principal contributions of their field and help them keep up to date in their area of research. Each article is its own search engine, providing a gateway to the essential primary research literature referenced within each topic.
A great place to begin your research, Gale eBooks offers thousands of authoritative articles published in academic encyclopedias, and written by subject experts. Gale eBooks provides information you can not only trust, but cite in a paper as well. Formerly called GVRL: Gale Virtual Reference Library.
Encyclopedia of Urban StudiesCall Number: EbookPublication Date: 2009-11-13These two volumes address the specific theories, key studies, and important figures that have influenced not just the individual discipline but also the field of urban studies more generally. The Encyclopedia of Urban Studies is intended to present an overview of current work in the field and to serve as a guide for further reading in the field.
Encyclopedia of American Urban HistoryCall Number: EbookPublication Date: 2006-12-07After a generation of pathbreaking scholarship that has reoriented and enlightened our perception of the American city, the two volumes of the Encyclopedia of American Urban History offer both a summary and an interpretation of the field. With contributions from leading academics in their fields, this authoritative resource offers an interdisciplinary approach by covering topics from economics, geography, anthropology, politics, and sociology.
Handbook of Urban StudiesCall Number: EbookPublication Date: 2001-03-22Taking a holistic viewpoint, the Handbook of Urban Studies provides a comprehensive appreciation of urban structure and change, and of the theories by which we understand the structure, development, and changing character of cities.
The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political MovementsCall Number: EbookPublication Date: 2013-02-25
Encyclopedia of Activism and Social JusticeCall Number: EbookPublication Date: 2007-04-13This edited work is designed to give understanding to the topics, concepts and ideas that have motivated and shaped the fields of activism, civil engagement and social justice, as well as offering short biographies of all the major thinkers and leaders who have influenced, and continue to influence, the study of activism.
Encyclopedia of Social Movement MediaCall Number: EbookPublication Date: 2010-10-28This one-volume encyclopedia features around 250 essays on the varied experiences of social movement media over the planet in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Encyclopedia of PowerCall Number: EbookPublication Date: 2011-02-01Covers of the use of power in the social sciences and the complex ways in which power has been used. Provides a reference for debates central to the issues of power in different contexts and for related topics, showing how these disparate topics are related to power.
The Princeton Encyclopedia of American Political HistoryCall Number: EbookPublication Date: 2009-11-29An essential resource for anyone interested in U.S. history and politics, this two-volume encyclopedia covers the major forces that have shaped American politics from the founding to today. Broad in scope, the book addresses both the traditional topics of political history--such as eras, institutions, political parties, presidents, and founding documents--and the wider subjects of current scholarship, including military, electoral, and economic events, as well as social movements, popular culture, religion, education, race, gender, and more. Each article, specially commissioned for this book.
