Finding Materials for Music, Dance, and Theater History

Researchers can find a variety of primary and secondary sources documenting music, dance, and theater history through 1900 in North America. The following research guide is intended to serve as a starting point for your research.

Finding Primary Sources

 The General Catalog uses local (i.e., just used at AAS) genre/form terms :

• Ballads
• Concert programs
• Dance cards
• Hymnals *
• Hymns *
• Librettos
• Manuscript music
• Music newspapers

• 

  Music periodicals

• Playbills
• Plays
• Programs
• Sheet music *
• Sheet music covers *
• Songs
  • Blackface minstrel songs
  • Campaign songs
  • National songs
• Songsters
• Theater newspapers
• Theater periodicals
• Tunebooks *
• Works by Black composers
• Works by women composers

* The above collections marked with an asterisk have additional materials (mostly published after 1840) that do not have records in the General Catalog. For help accessing these primary sources, email our staff at reference [at] mwa.org (reference[at]mwa[dot]org).

Information is available on accessing on the following undigitized collections:

• Photographs of Actors and Performers
• Tickets

If you don't find what you are looking for please email our staff at reference [at] mwa.org (reference[at]mwa[dot]org).

Digital Collections and Projects

The following AAS digital collections are freely available from anywhere. 

• Isaiah Thomas Broadside Ballads
• An Invitation to Dance: A History of Social Dance in America
• Shakespeare in the Parlor

The following project websites are freely available from anywhere.

• American Vernacular Music Manuscripts, ca. 1730-1910
• Digital Library of the Caribbean - Cuban Sheet Music from AAS

The following digital collections are available to researchers who are present at AAS and signed on to AAS networks. Publishers provide separate tools for searching their collections.  Some feature materials not held at AAS. 

• American Stage to 1819 (Readex)
• Gale Primary Sources 
  Includes all Gale products available at AAS
• Readex AllSearch 
  Includes all Readex products available at AAS

Fellowship Opportunities

The American Antiquarian Society awards over forty fellowships annually. Fellowships are offered for postdoctoral academics,  advanced graduate students, independent scholars, as well as for creative and performing artists and writers. 

The Kate Van Winkle Keller Fellowship for Research in Early American Music and Dance is funded by an endowment established by Kate’s family and friends and by the Society for American Music (SAM), of which Kate was a founding member and the first Executive Director. The fellowship supports research for scholars at all levels (graduate student to senior scholar) engaged in scholarly research and writing on American music or dance, which must be appropriate to research collections at the AAS. It is open to individuals affiliated with academic institutions as well as independent scholars.

Recorded Programs

Watch past music, dance, and theater history programs  most of which resulted from research completed in the AAS collection.