American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Database Now at Boston College
Boston College researchers now have access to the complete American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Database made available on the EBSCO platform. This vast resource covers more than 6,500 American periodicals published between 1684 and 1912, making it an amazing resource for gaining better understanding of all aspects of American life in the past. Originally produced in five chronological series, the database can be searched within chronological sets or filtered through its fifty thematic series. A very limited sampling of its thematic offerings gives some idea of the breadth of this resource:
Agricultural Periodicals from the Northeastern U.S., 1789-1879
Alternative Faith and Philosophy Periodicals, 1789-1878
American Civil War Periodicals, 1855-1868
Business, Industrial and Professional Periodicals, 1774-1858
Canadian Periodicals, 1790-1877
Catholic, Lutheran, Methodist, and Episcopal Periodicals, 1797-1904
College and Student Periodicals, 1806-1877
Current Events and History Periodicals, 1691-191
Drama, Humor, and Fine Arts Periodicals, 1764-1877
Literary Periodicals of New England, 1789-1878
Periodicals of the British Empire and Its Colonies, 1702-1879,
Popular Educational Periodicals, 1758-1889
Scientific Periodicals, 1771-1901,
Slavery and Abolition, 1789-1887
While some individual periodical titles are available elsewhere (including the HathiTrust), the tools available here for access, discovery, manipulation and viewing make this an invaluable option for Boston College research and curricular needs. All series are indexed, with more complete subject indexing now present for the first three series (and underway for the remaining, later series). The added subject indexing supports searching for topics regardless of the current terminology (a subject search for “feminism”, for example, retrieves “A Second Vindication of the Rights of Women” published in Ladies’ Monitor 1, no. 3 (August 22, 1801), 19 – 20, found in the section theme, Women’s Periodicals of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century, 1733 – 1844). Many of the thematic series also have theme-specific document-type search choices (anecdote, ballad, humorous literature, obituary, recipe, for a few examples). Full-text searching of all text is also an option. Faculty and students can annotate and bookmark pages, then share with others.
All content has been scanned and offered here with remarkable clarity as a result of the high quality optical recognition (OCR) technology used in creation of the database. For older content (first three series), users looking for images in the text can limit searches by type (such as cartoon, caricature, graphic (symbol or logo), musical notation, maps, portrait, etc.). Document and page map tools facilitate navigation through the page hits retrieved.
The purchase of this database was made possible by the generous gifts of a number of Boston College Library endowment funds, including the Cecilia and John Jr. Farrell Fund, the Feng McNiff Fund, the James and Mary Doherty Fund, the Mary B. O’Reilly Fund, the Rubin and Sarah Garber Fund and the Thomas and the Catherine Cox Fund.
For more information about this new resource and other resources in our collection, contact your subject bibliographer.
