Welcome to the UTA Library resource guide for topics in American history before 1865. The sections here may help you with work for American and Transatlantic history courses
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American Revolution
This page includes resources related to the American Revolution. You will find library resources such as books and journal through our library databases and our library catalog, as well as other internet resources to help with your research.
Covers a large variety of topics and is recommended for most research projects. It contains articles from many academic journals, magazines, newspapers, and other credible sources.
Academic Search Complete is the world's largest scholarly, multidisciplinary full-text database designed specifically for academic institutions. It provides access to more than 8,500 full-text journals, including more than 7,300 peer-reviewed journals, as well as indexing and abstracts of more than 12,500 journals and more than 13,200 books, reports, conference proceedings, etc. Subjects covered include: anthropology, arts and literature, computer sciences, education, engineering, ethnic studies, humanities, language and linguistics, law, medical sciences, social sciences, etc. Most content is available in printer-friendly, searchable PDFs. Updated daily.
Contains primary and secondary sources on North and Central American Indian history and culture from the Newberry Library's Edward E. Ayer Collection. Includes manuscripts, maps, artwork, photographs, newspapers, and rare books.
American Indian Histories and Cultures presents a unique insight into interactions between American Indians and Europeans, from the early colonial period to the civil rights movement of the twentieth century. This database contains materials from the Newberry Library’s extensive Edward E. Ayer Collection, one of the strongest archival collections on American Indian history in the world. Materials in this database span from the early 16th century to the mid-20th century and include: manuscripts, artwork, speeches, petitions, diaries and travel journals, correspondences, linguistic and ethnographic studies, photographs, maps and atlases, rare printed books, and American Indian newspapers.
NOTE: Users can register for a personal account to store searches, create image slideshows, and create a document library.
Provides access to full-text periodicals covering the American experience from the colonial era to the beginning of World War II.
American Periodical Series Online (APS Online) contains over 1,000 full-text periodicals published between 1740 and 1940, including special interest and general magazines, literary and professional journals, children's and women's magazines, and many other historically-significant periodicals. Titles in this database include: Benjamin Franklin's General Magazine; the first American professional journals; America's first scientific journal, Medical Repository; popular consumer magazines still in publication, such as Vanity Fair, Harper's Magazine, and Ladies' Home Journal; regional and niche publications; and groundbreaking journals like The Dial, Puck, and McClure's. Users are able to search the complete text, including tables of contents, by boolean and keyword operators. Articles are linked to the corresponding page images, downloadable in PDF format. Updated daily.
Provides access to hundreds of journals covering literature, philosophy, history, science, the fine arts, and the social sciences from the late 17th century to the early 20th century.
British Periodicals Collection I and II trace the development and growth of the periodical press in Britain from its origins in the 17th century through to the Victorian "age of periodicals" and beyond. British Periodicals Collection I consists of more than 160 journals that comprise the UMI microfilm collection Early British Periodicals, the equivalent of 5,238 printed volumes containing approximately 3.1 million pages. Topics covered in Collection I include literature, philosophy, history, science, the fine arts, and the social sciences. British Periodicals Collection II consists of more than 300 journals from the UMI microfilm collections English Literary Periodicals and British Periodicals in the Creative Arts together with additional titles, amounting to almost 3 million pages. Topics covered in Collection II include literature, music, art, drama, archaeology, and architecture. Together containing more than six million keyword-searchable pages, these two collections form an unrivaled resource beneficial to researchers interested in British history, literature, philosophy, science, fine arts, social sciences, humanities, and numerous other fields.
An online collection of English-language titles and editions published in the U.K. and the Americas between 1701 and 1800
An online collection of English and foreign language books, pamphlets, broadsides and other ephemera published in the U.K. and the Americas. Content is presented as full text page images which can be viewed online or downloaded as PDF documents. When completed there will be more than 33 million pages of material. The collection is an ongoing project based on The English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), a machine-readable union list of the holdings of the British Library, in addition to those from more than 1,500 university, private, and public libraries worldwide. The seven subject-specific areas of study are History and Geography; Social Sciences and Fine Arts; Medicine, Science, and Technology; Literature and Language; Religion and Philosophy; Law; and Reference.
Bibliograhic guide to works printed in Europe relating to the Americas, 1493-1750. A wide range of subject areas are covered; from natural disasters to slavery.
European Americana: A Chronological Guide to Works Printed in Europe Relating to the Americas, 1493-1750, is an authoritative bibliography. The database contains more than 32,000 entries and is a comprehensive guide to printed records about the Americas written in Europe before 1750. It covers the history of European exploration as well as portrayals of Native American peoples. A wide range of subject areas are covered; from natural disasters to disease outbreaks and slavery. The original bibliography was co-developed by John Alden and Dennis Landis, Curator of European Books at The John Carter Brown Library. The John Carter Brown Library, founded in 1846 is a foremost repository of rare books and materials.
Provides access to scholarly journals and magazines useful to both novice historians as well as advanced academic researchers. Updated daily, this library resource offers balanced coverage of events in U.S. history and scholarly work established in the field.
JSTOR provides access to more than 12 million academic journal articles, books, and primary sources in 75 disciplines.
JSTOR (Journal Storage) is an archive collection of over 620 full-text scholarly journals primarily from university presses and professional society publishers. Additional titles are added to the collection as back files are digitized. Subject areas include: African American Studies, Anthropology, Asian Studies, Botany, Ecology, Economics, Education, Finance, Folklore, History, History of Science Technology, Language Literature, Mathematics, Philosophy, Political Science, Population Studies, Public Policy Administration, Science, Slavic Studies, Sociology, Statistics.
This digital collection contains primary works about the Americas published throughout the world from 1500 to the early 1900's.
Sabin Americana, 1500-1926 offers full-text access to more than 29,000 titles about the Americas including accounts of exploration, trade, colonialism, Native Americans, etc. Primary sources include books, pamphlets, serials, broadsides, and other historical documentation that describe the society, politics, religious beliefs, customs, and momentous events that characterized life in the Americas.
This collection brings together a multitude of legal materials on slavery in the United States and the English-speaking world. It includes every statute passed by every colony and state on slavery, every federal statute dealing with slavery, and all reported state and federal cases on slavery.
Contains records of 27,233 trans-Atlantic slave ship voyages made between 1595 and 1866
Contains records of 27,233 trans-Atlantic slave ship voyages made between 1595 and 1866. Format allows users to track information by time period and geographic region, and includes interactive maps that allow viewers to chart the trans-Atlantic connections. The accompanying data contains materials about people on board, owners and captains, ships' characteristics, and the geographic trajectory of each voyage.
Brings together books, images, primary sources, biographical information and statistics for in-depth access to research on women's studies.
This database is a repository of primary and secondary documents in the field of U.S. Women's History. Included are a dictionary of social movements and organizations, a chronology of U.S. Women's History, advertisements, book chapters, diaries, images, legal documents, letters, organizational notes, transcripts of speeches, along with scholarly interpretations.
Originally published in 1986, this book discusses the various meanings which historians have given to the term 'American Revolution'. It can be seen as a revolutionary war of independence from Britain, but also a constitutional and ideological revolution within America. This survey firstly examines the view from Britain and the consequences of the policy of exerting closer financial control over its colonies. It then discusses the colonists' perception of British actions and their responses which were to culminate in the Declaration of Independence. It concludes by examining the continuing revolution within America after the break with England.
Included are essays (ranging from 250 to 25,000 words) on major and minor battles, and biographies of military men, partisan leaders, loyalist figures and war heroes, as well as strong coverage of political and diplomatic themes.
In 1783, the Peace of Paris treaties famously concluded the American Revolution. However, the Revolution could have come to an end two years earlier had diplomats from the Habsburg realms--the largest continental European power--succeeded in their attempts to convene a Congress of Vienna in 1781. Bringing together materials from nearly fifty American, Austrian, Belgian, British, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Slovak, and Swedish archives, Jonathan Singerton reconstructs the full sweep of relations between the nascent United States and one of the oldest European dynasties during and after the American Revolution.
First published in 2007, this collection presents a selection of British pamphlets, which represent the multi-faceted debate on both sides of the political divide in Britain. The pamphlets in this work are organised chronologically in two parts, taking the start of American armed resistance in 1775 as the dividing point. Volume 5 covers the period of 1776 to 1778.
The Continental Dollar is a sweeping, revelatory new history of how the fledgling United States paid for its first war. Economist Farley Grubb upends the folk telling of this story, in which the US printed cross-colony money, called Continentals, to serve as an early fiat currency-a currency that is not tied to a commodity like gold, but rather to the viability and legal authority of the issuer.
"Disunion Among Ourselves tells the story of the deep political divisions that almost tore the Union apart in the 1770s and 1780s. So fractious were the founders' political fights that they feared the War of Independence might end in disunion and civil war. Instead of disbanding into separate regional confederacies, however, the founders united through self-sacrifice and compromise.
The essays gathered in The Early Imperial Republic move beyond the question of whether the new republic was an empire, investigating instead where, how, and why it was one.
The Gaelic and Indian Origins of the American Revolution offers a new way of understanding the American Revolution and the relationship between diversity and revolution in the British empire. Drawing on little-used sources in Irish and Scottish Gaelic, the book shows how people experiencing colonization in the eighteenth-century British empire-Irish-speaking Catholics, Scottish Highlanders, and Indigenous nations of North America-fought back by building relationships with the king and imperial officials. In the process, they created a more inclusive empire and triggered conflict between the imperial state and formerly privileged provincial Britons: Irish Protestants, Scottish Whigs, and American colonists.
The second volume in this distinguished series provides a comprehensive picture of the Franco-American alliance and of the day-to-day problems of conducting the War of Independence as reported by Lafayette and his correspondents on both sides of the Atlantic.
Originally published in 1979, this was the first biography of Jonathan Potts, a prominent Pennsylvania Quaker and physician who served in the Continental army during the Revolutionary War. It was also the first study to be published since 1931 of the role of medical doctors in the northern campaigns.
For most of the eighteenth century, British Protestantism was driven neither by the primacy of denominations nor by fundamental discord between them. Instead, it thrived as part of a complex transatlantic system that bound religious institutions to imperial politics. As Katherine Carte argues, British imperial Protestantism proved remarkably effective in advancing both the interests of empire and the cause of religion until the war for American independence disrupted it. That Revolution forced a reassessment of the role of religion in public life on both sides of the Atlantic.
Explores the life and work of political publicist and strategist Esther DeBerdt Reed, who, in a life highly structured by conflict, national identity, religion, and the overall importance of being a wife and mother, gave eloquent expression to the political aspirations of female patriots in Revolutionary America