Literature and Arts in Historical Context - Updated: Databases

Indexes any print product that includes biographical information on multiple persons.

Biography In Context is built on a foundation of more than 650,000 biographical entries covering more than 400,000 international figures from all time periods and areas of study. Providing coverage of the most-searched and studied people, Biography In Context includes more than 4,500 portal pages on the world’s most remarkable contemporary and historical names.

An essential resource for literature students and scholars, Dictionary of Literary Biography Complete Online provides authoritative information while placing writers in the larger perspective of literary history.

Early English Books Online (EEBO) is the definitive online collection of early printed works in English, and works printed in England, making digital copies of over 125,000 titles from before 1700 discoverable through an interface tailored for early modern scholars.

Shakespeare’s plays, sonnets, and poems for free from the Folger Shakespeare Library! While you’re here, you can also read more about Shakespeare’s language, life, and the world he knew.

Through June 2020, the Folger Shakespeare Library and Simon & Schuster Audio, are making available the audio recordings of seven of Shakespeare's plays.

A wide range of literary criticism and analysis from a variety of Gale Company databases, including Literature Resource Center, Literature Criticism Online, Twayne's Authors Series, and more.

Literary Reference Center, a comprehensive, full-text database, provides a broad spectrum of information on thousands of authors and their works across literary disciplines and timeframes—to give students, professors, and researchers a foundation of literary reference works to meet their research needs.

Full-text articles from scholarly journals and literary magazines are combined with critical essays, work and topic overviews, full-text works, biographies, and more to provide a wealth of information on authors, their works, and literary movements. Researchers at all levels will find the information they need, with content covering all genres and disciplines, all time periods and all parts of the world.

LitFinder provides access to literary works and authors throughout history and includes more than 150,000 full-text poems and 800,000+ poetry citations, as well as short stories, speeches, and plays. The database also includes secondary materials like biographies, images, and more.

In keeping with James Loeb's vision of making Greek and Latin literature accessible to the broadest range of readers, Harvard University Press presents an interconnected, fully searchable, perpetually growing, virtual library of all that is important in Greek and Latin literature. Epic and lyric poetry; tragedy and comedy; history, travel, philosophy, and oratory; the great medical writers and mathematicians; those Church Fathers who made particular use of pagan culture — in short, our entire Greek and Latin Classical heritage is represented here with up-to-date texts and accurate English translations. More than 520 volumes of Latin, Greek, and English texts are available in a modern and elegant interface, allowing readers to browse, search, bookmark, annotate, and share content with ease.

The Oxford University Press Literature list has enormous range, from Medieval (Blamires, Cooper, Gaunt, O'Donoghue) to Twentieth Century and all-but Contemporary (Corcoran, Gillis, Eaglestone, Robinson), with a powerful grouping in the Renaissance/Early Modern (Hughes, Lockwood, Pollard, Rhodes, Rosenblatt, Stevenson, Walker).

This full-text database provides a historical collection of hundreds of thousands of classic and contemporary poems, as well as short stories, biographies, and authoritative essays on such topics as poetic forms, movements, and techniques—including contemporary content.

Project Gutenberg is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks". It was founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital library.

Music Online is the broadest and most comprehensive online music resource that cross-searches all 13 music databases from Alexander Street Press. Individual products can be accessed via the go to menu at the top of the page. Included: Classical Music Library; Smithsonian Global Sound; American Song; Contemporary World Music Online; Jazz Music Library; African American Music Reference; Classical Music Reference Library; Garland Encyclopedia of World Music Online; Classical Scores Library: Volumes I & II; Classical Music in Video, Opera in Video; and, Dance in Video.

Fine Arts and Music Collection provides access to scholarly journals and magazines that support research in areas including drama, music, art history, and film-making. The database emphasizes full-text content for publications included in the Wilson Art Index and RILM bibliography.

Naxos Music Library [NML] is the world´s largest online classical music library. Along with classical music, jazz, world, and pop/rock are also represented.
Currently, NML offers streaming access to more than 124,770 CDs with more than 1,909,900 tracks of both standard and rare repertoire. Over 800 new CDs are added to the library every month.

The Oxford History of Western Music online offers an unmatched account of the evolution of Western classical music by one of the most prominent and provocative musicologists of our time, Richard Taruskin. Since its original publication in print Taruskin’s landmark study has received universal acclaim and numerous awards.

Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains the Oxford Companion to Music (revised 2011), the Oxford Dictionary of Music, 2nd edition (revised 2006), and Colin Larkin's landmark Encyclopedia of Popular Music, 4th edition (2006).

The music list in Oxford Scholarship Online represents outstanding work across this diversity of music scholarship, covering significant titles in musicology and music history, ethnomusicology, and music theory. Contributions of bright young academics and eminent scholars, classic works and major recent titles, award-winners and fundamental texts, all stand together in this essential collection.

Full Text is now available in RILM! Produced by Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale, this comprehensive music bibliography now includes approximately one million pages of full-text content from more than 200 periodicals (many of which are not available anywhere else online) from 50 countries in 40 languages, published from the early 20th century to the present. It continues to feature citations, abstracts and subject indexing. It provides broad yet detailed coverage, and facilitates both focused research and browsing for readers of all levels. From hip hop to Händel, from ethnomusicology to music therapy, from elementary music education to advanced music theory, RILM is the first stop for the researcher who wants clear, verified bibliographic information that is fully cited, abstracted, and indexed.

A rare view of what rush hour in London looked like in 1897. The dramatic and suspenseful newsreel announcing the crash of the Hindenburg zeppelin. President Ronald Reagan’s challenging speech at the Brandenburg Gate. Throughout modern history, cameras have recorded public events, wars, cultural phenomena, and government programs. The Archival Films and Newsreels Video Collection is a treasure trove of archival and historical films from multiple sources.

British History Online is a not-for-profit digital library based at the Institute of Historical Research. It brings together material for British history from the collections of libraries, archives, museums and academics. These primary and secondary sources, which range from medieval to twentieth century, are easily searchable and browsable online.

The Civil War features more than 180 newspapers as well as approximately 50,000 government documents and 3,500 broadsides and pieces of ephemera. Newspapers include the Baltimore Sun, Charleston Mercury, Dallas Weekly Herald, Milwaukee Sentinel, National Intelligencer, New Orleans Times Picayune, New York Herald, New York Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer and San Francisco Bulletin.

Over 25 collections including: Theodore Roosevelt: His Life and Times on Film; The Spanish-American War in Motion Pictures; Origins of American Animation; Civil Rights History Project; and, Great Conversations in Music.

Current Collections include: Asia and the West: Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange; British Politics and Society; British Theatre, Music, and Literature; European Literature, 1790-1840: The Corvey Collection; Europe and Africe: Christianity, Civilization and Conquest; Photography: The World Through the Lens; Science, Technology and Medicine, 1780-1925; and, Women: Transnational Networks.

Oxford Scholarship Online's History collection reflects the unparalleled breadth and depth of the Oxford list, encompassing work at the cusp of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages right through to the latter decades of the twentieth century, and ranging from the most focused regional histories to the broadest transnational studies. From David d'Avray on medieval marriage to Selina Todd on young women and work in the early 1900s, from John Davis on Napoleonic Italy to David French's prize-winning work on the British army, subscribers will have access to a wide range of classic titles.

U.S. History Collection provides access to scholarly journals and magazines useful to both novice historians as well as advanced academic researchers. The database offers balanced coverage of events in U.S. history and scholarly work being established in the field.

U.S. History in Context provides a complete overview of U.S. history. Covering the most-studied events, issues and current information, it combines documents from Primary Source Microfilm’s™ digital archives; articles from classic Macmillan Reference USA™ and Charles Scribner’s Sons® references; as well as other Gale proprietary content such as country and era overview information, and full-text periodicals and journals.

World History Collection provides access to scholarly journals and magazines useful to both novice historians as well as advanced academic researchers. The database offers balanced coverage of events in world history and scholarly work being established in the field.

World History in Context is an online database for those seeking contextual information on hundreds of the most significant people, events and topics in World History. This resource merges Gale's authoritative reference content with full-text magazines, academic journals, news articles, primary source documents, images, videos, audio files and links to vetted websites organized into a user-friendly portal experience.

Through AM Explorer, search millions of pages of primary sources spanning the 15th – 21st centuries. Includes resources spanning the social sciences and humanities, developed in collaboration with leading libraries and archives.

This cross-search interface brings together the power of Gale's topic finder with millions of pages of content spanning many centuries and geographic regions. Explore a wide range of content including monographs, manuscripts, newspapers, photographs, maps, and more through Cairn's perpetual access to the following individual collections: American Historical Periodicals from the American Antiquarian Society, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, and Nineteenth Century Collections Online.

This historical newspaper provides genealogists, researchers and scholars with online, easily-searchable first-hand accounts and unparalleled coverage of the politics, society and events of the time.

This historical newspaper provides genealogists, researchers and scholars with online, easily-searchable first-hand accounts and unparalleled coverage of the politics, society and events of the time.