Collections
Electronic Resources
Online Databases, Digital Collections, and Indexes
The electronic resources available in the AAS reading room are listed below.
Those resources marked
are freely accessible offsite.
Those resources marked
contain AAS content.
Online journals available at AAS
Illustrated inventories of selected AAS materials have been digitized and made available online.
The CD-ROM collection is cataloged in the online catalog. Make a "basic search" for the call number "cd-rom."
A-Z List
A
C
|
Catalogue of American Engravings
|
|
The Civil War: Antebellum Period to Reconstruction
|
E
|
Early American Imprints, Series I. Evans (1639-1800)
|
|
Early American Imprints, Series II. Shaw-Shoemaker (1801-1819)
|
|
Evans Text Creation Partnership
|
F
|
Farber Gravestone Collection
|
G
| Gale's Literary Index |
|
Grant-Burr Family Papers
|
H
|
HarpWeek
|
|
Heritage Quest Online
|
|
History Cooperative
|
| House and Senate Journals, Series I, 1789-1817 |
L
| Literary Reference Center |
M
|
Manuscript Women's Letters and Diaries from AAS, 1750-1950
Massachusetts Newsstand Massachusetts History Online |
N
S
|
Sabin Americana 1500-1926
|
| Senate Executive Journals, Series I, 1789-1866 |
U
|
U.S. Congressional Serial Set
|
W
|
WorldCat (OCLC)
|
|
Wright American Fiction 1851-1875
|
AAS Historical Periodicals Collection
The AAS Historical Periodicals Collection: 1691-1820, Series 1, presents 550 titles dating from 1693 through 1820. The collection represents over two centuries of print culture, ranging from early works imported by the colonists to later titles published on American soil on the eve of the Revolution and during the early republic. Series 1 is first of the five series created from periodical holdings belonging to one of the premier repositories in the United States, the American Antiquarian Society. The entire AAS collection features about 6,500 titles from the seventeenth through the late nineteenth century. The subject matter covered in Series 1 is broad in scope and covers all aspects of American society during this time period.
The series 1 coverage list gives the place of publication and the year range for each title.
The AAS Historical Periodicals Collection, 1821-1837: Series 2, will make more than 6,500 periodicals available.
For online help, click the help icon found thoughout the database.
Connect to
AAS Historical Periodicals Collection, 1691-1820, Series 1 from any AAS terminal
Connect to
AAS Historical Periodicals Collection, 1821-1837, Series 2 from any AAS terminal
Accessible Archives
Full text databases of early American periodicals and books including:
- The Liberator 1831-1865
- Godey's Lady's Book 1830-1889, 1892, 1893, 1896
- The Pennsylvania Gazette 1728-1800
- The Civil War: A Newspaper Perspective
- African American Newspapers: The 19th Century
- American County Histories to 1900
- The Pennsylvania Genealogical Catalogue: Chester County 1809-1870
- The Pennsylvania Newspaper Record: Delaware County 1819-1870, The Industrial Revolution in Delaware County /w Vital Statistics
- The South Carolina Gazette: 1732 - 1780
Please familiarize your self with the terms of Use of Accessible Archives at AAS before using this resource
Download an Accessible Archives' User Manual (pdf)
Connect to Accessible Archives from any AAS terminal
America: History and Life
Index of articles and reviews relating to U.S. and Canadian history
from
over 1,700 journal titles.
Updated monthly.
For online help, click the help icon found thoughout the database.
Connect to
America: History and
Life from any AAS terminal
America's GenealogyBank
America's GenealogyBank is an online collection created for
genealogists by Readex. It contains historical
newspapers, books, pamphlets, genealogies, and more than 23 million obituaries
For online help, click the "help" button found in the upper right hand corner of the screen.
Connect
to America's
GenealogyBank
America's Historical Newspapers
Cover-to-cover reproductions of hundreds of rare newspapers and
millions of issues, America's Historical Newspapers is
fully text-searchable.
The digital series is based on the microfilm collection currently offered
by Readex.
Clarence Brigham's
History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690-1820
provided
the foundation for the original filming project, the core of which
is formed by the AAS collection of colonial and early
national period newspapers.
Numerous other
institutions and historical societies have contributed to the collection
including: the Boston Athenaeum; the Connecticut Historical Society;
the Connecticut State Library;
the
Library Company of Philadelphia; the Library of Congress; the libraries of
universities such as Brown and Harvard; and private collections.
Early American Newspapers, Series 1:
Number of uniform newspaper titles available: 718
Number of issues available: 346,395
Number of pages available: 1,512,979
Number of images available: 564,627
Last update: March 31, 2006
Early American Newspapers, Series 2:
Number of uniform newspaper titles available: 262
Number of issues available: 187,759
Number of pages available: 1,080,349
Last update: Sep. 30, 2009
Early American Newspapers, Series 3:
Number of uniform newspaper titles available: 133
Number of issues available: 336,000
Number of pages available: 3,408,708
Last update: Sep. 30, 2009
Early American Newspapers, Series 4:
Number of uniform newspaper titles available: 128
Number of issues available: 169,796
Number of pages available: 1,344,402
Last update: Sep. 30, 2009
Early American Newspapers, Series 5:
Number of uniform newspaper titles available: 113
Number of issues available: 138,682
Number of pages available: 972,860
Last update: Sep. 30, 2009
Early American Newspapers, Series 6:
Number of uniform newspaper titles available: 104
Number of issues available: 68,652
Number of pages available: 510,869
Last update: Sep. 30, 2009
Early American Newspapers, Series 7:
Number of uniform newspaper titles available: 47
Number of issues available: 55,759
Number of pages available: 491,207
Last update: Sep. 30, 2009
Early American Newspapers: 1801-1900:
Number of uniform newspaper titles available: 462
Number of issues available: 742,916
Number of pages available: 4,008,760
Last update: August 25, 2009
African American Newspapers, 1827-1998:
Number of uniform newspaper titles available: 3
Number of issues available: 2,197
Number of pages available: 19,923
Last update: Sept. 30, 2009
The Civil War: Antebellum Period to Reconstruction, 1840-1877:
Number of uniform newspaper titles available: 156
Number of issues available: 168,968
Number of pages available: 850,397
Last update: Sept. 30, 2009
Hispanic American Newspapers:
Number of uniform newspaper titles available: 328
Number of issues available: 46,684
Number of pages available: 402,769
Last update: June 26, 2009
20th-Century American Newspapers, Series 1:
Number of uniform newspaper titles available: 2
Number of issues available: 15,808
Number of pages available: 657,480
Last update: Sept. 30, 2009
20th-Century American Newspapers, Series 2:
Number of uniform newspaper titles available: 2
Number of issues available: 18,683
Number of pages available: 465,613
Last update: Spet. 30, 2009
20th-Century American Newspapers, Series 3:
Number of uniform newspaper titles available: 2
Number of issues available: 32,239
Number of pages available: 1,236,704
Last update: Sept. 30, 2009
Connect to
America's Historical Newspapers, 1690-1922 from
any AAS terminal
or
Locate a
library subscribing to the Archive of Americana near you
Read more about the series on the Readex website
American Archives: Documents of the American Revolution, 1774-1776
Beginning in 1837 the printer Peter Force, who also served as mayor of
Washington, D.C., devoted sixteen years to collecting thousands of
pamphlets, booklets, and newspaper articles pertaining to the "Origin,
Settlement, and Progress of the Colonies in North America" from the
Revolutionary Era in order to preserve them for future generations. He
published them in a set of nine large volumes that he called the
American Archives. By the late twentieth century Force's collection of
materials from the years 1774-6 had become a valuable scholarly
resource, as it contained the only surviving copies of many important
documents. But while a number of large research libraries around the
world held the American Archives in their collections, it remained an
underused resource. Scholars and students alike struggled with Force's
unwieldy index and complicated organization of the materials. In 2001
Northern Illinois University Libraries and Professor Allan Kulikoff of
the University of Georgia received grant funding from the National
Endowment for the Humanities to support the digitization of the American
Archives and their presentation in a free-use World Wide Web site. This
site will allow its users to use sophisticated search and
indexing software to explore Force's volumes. Professor Kulikoff has also
produced a thematic indexing scheme describing the contents of every
individual text in the American Archives collection. Together, these
tools will offer scholars, students, and lifetime learners with
unprecedented new access to these important primary source materials
from American history.
Connect to American Archives
American History Through the News
|
This digital series has been designed for the use of K-12 educators.
Connect to American History Through the News from any AAS terminal or Locate a library subscribing to the Archive of Americana near you Read more about the series on the Readex website |
American Broadsides and Ephemera, Series I
Upon completion, American Broadsides and Ephemera will offer fully
searchable facsimile
images
of approximately 15,000 broadsides printed between 1820 and 1900 and
15,000 pieces of ephemera printed between 1760 and 1900. The remarkably
diverse subjects of these broadsides range from contemporary accounts of
the Civil War, unusual occurrences and natural disasters to official
government proclamations, tax bills and town meeting reports. Featuring
many rare items, the pieces of ephemera include clipper ship sailing
cards, early trade cards, bill heads, theater and music programs, stock
certificates, menus and invitations documenting civic, political and
private celebrations.
Connect to American Broadsides and Ephemera from any AAS terminal or Locate a library subscribing to the Archive of Americana near you Read more about the series on the Readex website |
American Periodicals Series Online
Full text of over 1,100 American periodicals that first
began publishing between 1740 and 1900.
Connect to American Periodicals Series Online from any AAS
terminal
American State Papers, 1789-1838
The American State Papers constitute rich primary source material on many aspects of early American history from 1789 to 1838. A retrospective republication of approximately 6280 numbered publications, largely Congressional but also containing Executive Department materials, the American State Paper volumes, issued from 1832-1861, were published in ten classes in a total of 38 folio volumes.
The classes into which the publications were assembled and printed and the number of volumes they occupy are: I: Foreign Relations in six volumes; II: Indian Affairs in two volumes; III: Finance in five volumes; IV: Commerce and Navigation in two volumes; V: Military Affairs in seven volumes; VI: Naval Affairs in four volumes; VII: Post-office Department in one volume; VIII: Public Lands in eight volumes; IX: Claims in one volume; and X: Miscellaneous in two volumes.
Unlike the U.S. Congressional Serial Set, the publications in the American
State Papers are not divided into reports and documents and do not include
House and Senate journals. Approximately two-thirds of the publications
cover the first 14 Congresses (1789-1817), whereas the remaining third
chronologically overlap with the Serial Set from 1817-1838.
Connect to
American
State Papers from any AAS terminal
or
Locate a
library subscribing to the Archive of Americana near you
Read more about the series on the Readex website
Americana Exchange
The Americana Exchange is a web-based site intended to help book
collectors understand book collecting generally and the Americana field
specifically. Two databases are available on this site. The first is
the bibliographical database initially exclusively for the Americana
and European-Americana fields. The second database matches categorization
of upcoming auctions with stated collector preferences. Stated
preferences will be matched against more than 40 auction houses
regularly offering material in North America and Europe.
Connect
to Americana Exchange
See Readers' Services for database access.
Ancestry Library Edition
Ancestry Plus provides access to census, military, birth, marriage and
death records.
Connect to Ancestry
Library Edition from any AAS terminal.
Archive of Americana
The Archive of Americana provides unprecedented online access to historical books, broadsides, newspapers, government publications and more. This growing family of fully searchable printed materials puts tens of millions of pages of primary documents at researchers' fingertips.
Connect to
The
Archive of Americana
from any AAS terminal
or
Locate a
library subscribing to the Archive of Americana near you
Read more about the series on the Readex website
The Civil War: Antebellum Period to Reconstruction
Featuring newspapers, government documents and rare printed materials,
this collection from the Readex Archive of Americana covers politics,
society and daily life during the American Civil War period: 1840-1877.
Connect to
The
Civil War: Antebellum Period to Reconstruction
from any AAS terminal
or
Locate a
library subscribing to the Archive of Americana near you
Read more about the series on the Readex website
Early American Imprints, Series I. Evans (1639-1800)
Evans Digital Edition
Containing nearly every book, pamphlet and broadside published
in America from 1639 to 1800, Evans Digital Edition will, upon
completion, consist of more than 36,000 works and 2,400,000 images.
Based on Charles Evans' comprehensive American
Bibliography
and enhanced by
Roger
Bristol's Supplement to Evans' American Bibliography, the
collection was
first published by Readex in cooperation
with AAS as a microform set.
Evans Digital Edition will include every item previously
produced on microform plus more than 1,200 additional works located,
cataloged and digitized since completion of the earlier effort.
Connect to
Evans Digital
Edition from any AAS terminal
or
Locate a
library subscribing to the Archive of Americana near you
Read more about the series on the Readex website
Early American Imprints, Series II. Shaw-Shoemaker
(1801-1819)
Shaw-Shoemaker Digital Edition
The continuation of Evans Digital Edition, containing books,
pamphlets and
broadsides published in American between 1801 and 1819, this collection is
based on the noted American Bibliography, 1801-1819 by Ralph B.
Shaw and
Richard H. Shoemaker. Early American Imprints, Series II.
Shaw-Shoemaker
(1801-1819)
includes many
state
papers and early government materials which chronicle the political and
geographic growth of the developing American nation.
Covering every aspect of American life during the early decades of the
United States, this primary source collection provides full-text
access to over 36,000 American books, pamphlets and broadsides.
As of August 2004, the Shaw-Shoemaker Digital Edition is being
released in monthly segments over a three-year
period.
Connect
to Shaw-Shoemaker Digital Edition
from any AAS terminal
or
Locate a
library subscribing to the Archive of Americana near you
Read more about the series on the Readex website
Evans Text Creation Partnership
The University of Michigan, NewsBank/Readex Co., and the American
Antiquarian Society are cooperating in a Text Creation Partnership to
create 6,000 accurately keyed and fully searchable SGML/XML text
editions from among the 40,000 titles available in the Evans Early
American Imprints Collection. Evans is the most significant collection
of titles relating to the history of seventeenth and eighteenth century
America, and the Text creation partnership seeks to create enduring
digital text editions of the most frequently studied works.
NewsBank/Readex is producing digital page images and searchable OCR
(Optical Character Recognition) for the overall collection. The
standards-based editions created and owned by Text Creation Partnership
will link directly to the corresponding Newsbank/Readex page images and
will provide a research and instructional tool of enduring scholarly and
instructional value. Information on
becoming a partner is available on the Evans TCP website.
Connect
to Evans Text Creation Partnership from any AAS terminal.
Farber Gravestone Collection
The Farber Gravestone Collection is an unusual resource containing over
13,500 images documenting the sculpture on more than 9,000 gravestones,
most of which were made prior to 1800, in the Northeastern part of the
United States. The late Daniel Farber of Worcester, Massachusetts, and his
wife, Jessie Lie Farber, were responsible for the largest portion of the
collection. This online version of the Farber Gravestone Collection is
sponsored by AAS. The website and online
image database have been created by David Rumsey and Cartography
Associates.
Connect to the Farber
Gravestone Collection
Gale's Literary Index
Gale's Literary Index is a master index to Gale's literature series,
including more than 130,000 author names, pseudonyms and variant names.
Connect to Gale's
Literary Index
Grant-Burr Family Papers
The collection of Grant-Burr Family Papers at the American Antiquarian Society contains over five hundred letters written between 1827 and 1892. Central to the collection is the correspondence between and to Daniel Grant (1818-1892) and his wife Caroline Burr Grant (1820-1892). The letters of these articulate and well-educated New England families discuss their experiences in westward expansion, early female seminaries, courtship, marriage, childrearing, missionary activity, the California Gold Rush, and the Civil War.
Readers can browse transcribed and pdf versions of the original papers by box and folder as they would in a traditional manuscript collection.
Connect to
Grant-Burr Family Papers
HarpWeek
Harper's Weekly, scanned as images, together with a series of
controlled-vocabulary indexes
Connect to HarpWeek from any
AAS terminal
Heritage Quest Online
Heritage Quest Online includes all of the images, and extensive
indexing, from the 1790 - 1930 U.S. federal censuses. It offers more
than 20,000 book titles, including nearly 8,000 family histories and
over 12,000 local histories. Additionally, there are more than 250
primary-source documents such as tax lists, city directories, and
probate
records.
Connect to Heritage Quest Online from
any AAS
terminal.
History Cooperative
Includes full text of scholarly journals, including the Journal
of American History and the William and Mary
Quarterly.
Connect to History
Cooperative from any
AAS terminal
House and Senate Journals, Series I, 1789-1817
The original Journals of the Congress for the first 14 Congresses were printed in small numbers by non-government printers on contract. In the years after the burning of the Capitol by the British in the War of 1812, copies of those House and Senate Journals gradually became increasingly rare. So Congress authorized Gales & Seaton to reprint the Senate Journals for the first 14 Congresses in five volumes in 1820 and the House Journals in nine volumes in 1826.
The Readex digital House and Senate Journals, Series I of the first fourteen Congresses reproduces the original texts of these important works, not the reprints containing some textual differences, deliberate or inadvertent, from the originals.
In answer to the question of why these journals are not in the U.S.
Congressional Serial Set or the American State Papers, it need only be
pointed out that they antedate the Serial Set, which begins in 1817, and
that they were not again reprinted in the American State Papers because
Congress had only relatively recently authorized their reprinting as
stated above.
Connect to
House and
Senate Journals, Series I, 1789-1817 from any AAS terminal
or
Locate a
library subscribing to the Archive of Americana near you
Read more about the series on the Readex website
Literary Reference Center
Literary Reference Center on EBSCOhost is a comprehensive database that
provides users with a broad spectrum of information on thousands of
authors and their works across literary disciplines and timeframes.
Literary Reference Center (LRC) is a full text database that combines
content from major respected reference works, mongraphs, classic books
and anthologies, literary journals as well as original content from
EBSCO Publishing.
Connect to Literary
Reference Center from any
AAS terminal
Manuscript Women's Letters and Diaries from AAS, 1750-1950
Manuscript Women's Letters and Diaries from the American Antiquarian Society, 1750-1950
brings together 100,000 pages of the personal writings of women of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, displayed as high-quality images of the original manuscripts, semantically indexed and online for the first time. The collection is drawn entirely from the extensive holdings of the American Antiquarian Society. It currently contains over 24,000 pages.
Connect to Manuscript Women's Letters and Diaries from the American Antiquarian Society, 1750-1950 from any AAS terminal.
Connect to
Massachusetts
Newsstand from any AAS terminal
Massachusetts History Online contains articles that directly relate to Massachusetts - historical events, people, places, and more. The articles are drawn from other Gale Group products and include a mix of scholarly journal, magazine and newspaper articles.
It has full text articles from September 1992 to the present.
Connect to
Massachusetts History Online from any AAS terminal
Massachusetts Newsstand
Massachusetts History Online
NEBib: The online version of the Bibliographies of New England History
This database is an electronic version of Connecticut: A
Bibliography of Its History, volume 6 of the
Bibliographies
of
New England History (Hanover: University Press of New England,
1986). The Connecticut Bibliography contains approximately 10,000
citations to books and journal articles that discuss Connecticut history
and identity. These citations reference material published from the early
18th century until the early 1980s. They offer access to material relevant
to the study of the sciences and social sciences as well as to research in
history, women's studies, Native American studies, African-American
studies, fine arts, literature, religious history, local history, urban
studies, and geography.
Connect to
Connecticut Bibliography from any
terminal
NEBib volume 9 is no longer available online.
This database was an electronic version of volume 9 of the
Bibliographies
of
New England History (Hanover and London: University Press of New England,
1995). It contained 4,231 citations to books, dissertations, pamphlets, and
magazine and journal articles, most of which were published between 1989
and 1994, on the history of New England as a region or on any aspect of
New England state and local history.
New England Historical and Genealogical Society databases
The New England Historical and Genealogical Society databases include:
- Massachusetts Vital Records, 1841-1910
- Social Security Death Index
- Massachusetts Vital Records to 1850
- Cemetery Transcriptions
Connect to The New England Historical and Genealogical Society databases from any AAS terminal.
New England Historical and Genealogical Register, vols. 1-150
Text of vol. 1-150 of the New England Historical and Genealogical
Register and a name index to these volumes.
Includes all issues
published
from 1847 to 1996.
Connect to
The New England Historical and Genealogical Register from any AAS terminal.
A New Nation Votes
A New Nation Votes is a searchable collection of election returns from
the earliest years of American democracy. The data were compiled by
Philip Lampi. The American Antiquarian Society and Tufts University
Digital Collections and Archives have mounted it online for you with
funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Connect to A New Nation Votes
Northern Visions of Race, Region & Reform
Northern Visions of Race, Region & Reform in the Press and Letters of Freedmen and Freedmen's Teachers in the Civil War Era is an online resource documenting conflicting representations of African-Americans, white Southerners, and reformers during and and immediately after the Civil War. In particular, it looks at the stereotypes popularized in the northern press, and the ways that these depictions were countered--or in some cases, reinforced--in the letters written for northern readers by freedmen's teachers and freedmen themselves.
This resource was created by Professor Lucia Knoles of Assumption College working from primary resources at the American Antiquarian Society.
Connect to
Northern Visions of Race, Region & Reform
Sabin Americana 1500-1926
Joseph Sabin's Bibliotheca Americana: A Dictionary of Books
Relating to America from Its Discovery to the Present Time has been
heralded as a cornerstone in the study of the history of the Western Hemisphere.
Gale's Sabin Americana, 1500-1926 takes the works currently
captured from that bibliography and makes them available online.
Connect to Sabin
Americana 1500-1926
from any AAS terminal
Senate Executive Journals, Series I, 1789-1866
The Executive Session Journal of the Senate is a record of its closed session deliberations, mostly on two principal topics: treaties and nominations. The journals were transcribed and kept in manuscript form and published many years after their creation.
The Executive Session Journals for the 1st through the 20th session, covering May 25, 1789 through February 12, 1829, were published in three volumes erroneously dated 1828. The next set of the Executive Session Journals was published in 1887 and covers 4-14 for the date range 1829 - 1866.
Readex's digital collection Senate Executive Journals, Series I covers
the time period of 1789 - 1866. Subsequent series, parallel to the
material found in the full Congressional Serial Set, are to be issued
throughout the remaining course of our digitization of the Serial Set.
The original publications were printed in limited numbers. From 1948
onward, for example, only 50 copies were printed. The Readex collection
of the Senate Executive Journals is being digitized from the holdings of
the United States Senate Library.
Connect to
Senate
Executive Journals, Series I, 1789-1866
from any AAS terminal
or
Locate a
library subscribing to the Archive of Americana near you
Read more about the series on the Readex website
U.S. Congressional Serial Set
The bound, sequentially numbered volumes of all the Reports, Documents,
and Journals of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives constitutes a
rich source of primary source material on all aspects of American history.
Upon completion, the digital version of the Serial Set will consist of
approximately 13,800 volumes and over 12 million pages.
Connect
to the U.S. Congressional
Serial Set from any
AAS terminal
or
Locate a
library subscribing to the Archive of Americana near you
Read more about the series on the Readex website
WorldCat
WorldCat is the OCLC database
Wright American Fiction
This is a collection of 19th century American fiction, as listed in
Lyle
Wright's bibliography American Fiction, 1851-1875. There are currently
2,340 texts included (2,040 unedited, 300 fully edited and encoded) by
1,128 authors.
Connect to Wright American
Fiction 1851-1875
from any terminal
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