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<\/p>\nBoston College researchers now have access to the complete American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Database made available on the EBSCO platform.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Originally produced in five chronological series, the database can be searched within chronological sets or filtered through its fifty thematic series.\u00a0 A very limited sampling of its thematic offerings gives some idea of the breadth of this resource:<\/p>\n
Agricultural Periodicals from the Northeastern U.S., 1789-1879
\nAlternative Faith and Philosophy Periodicals, 1789-1878
\nAmerican Civil War Periodicals, 1855-1868
\nBusiness, Industrial and Professional Periodicals, 1774-1858
\nCanadian Periodicals, 1790-1877
\nCatholic, Lutheran, Methodist, and Episcopal Periodicals, 1797-1904
\nCollege and Student Periodicals, 1806-1877
\nCurrent Events and History Periodicals, 1691-191
\nDrama, Humor, and Fine Arts Periodicals, 1764-1877
\nLiterary Periodicals of New England, 1789-1878
\nPeriodicals of the British Empire and Its Colonies, 1702-1879,
\nPopular Educational Periodicals, 1758-1889
\nScientific Periodicals, 1771-1901,
\nSlavery and Abolition, 1789-1887<\/p>\n
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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.\u00a0 All series are indexed, with more complete subject indexing now present for the first three series (and underway for the remaining, later series).\u00a0 The added subject indexing supports searching for topics regardless of the current terminology (a subject search for \u201cfeminism\u201d, for example, retrieves \u201cA Second Vindication of the Rights of Women\u201d published in Ladies\u2019 Monitor 1, no. 3 (August 22, 1801), 19 \u2013 20, found in the section theme, Women\u2019s Periodicals of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century, 1733 \u2013 1844).\u00a0 Many of the thematic series also have theme-specific document-type search choices (anecdote, ballad, humorous literature, obituary, recipe, for a few examples).\u00a0 Full-text searching of all text is also an option.\u00a0 Faculty and students can annotate and bookmark pages, then share with others.<\/p>\n
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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.\u00a0 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.).\u00a0 Document and page map tools facilitate navigation through the page hits retrieved.<\/p>\n
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\u2019Reilly Fund, the Rubin and Sarah Garber Fund and the Thomas and the Catherine Cox Fund.<\/p>\n