Subject and Course Guides: U.S. History After 1865: The New Era

Online Resources

Clash of Cultures in the 1910s and 1920s
Information related to prohibition, Immigration, the Ku Klux Klan, Women's independence, and the Scopes Trial
The Great Gatsby: Primary Sources from the Roaring Twenties
Lesson plans and primary source materials of the 1920s
Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1940
This collection of life histories consists of approximately 2,900 documents, compiled and transcribed by more than 300 writers from 24 states, working on the Folklore Project of the Federal Writers’ Project, a New Deal jobs program that was part of the U.S. Works Progress (later Work Projects) Administration (WPA) from 1936 to 1940.
New Deal Network
The New Deal Network, an educational guide to the Great Depression of the 1930s, is sponsored by the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute. Development of the NDN was funded in part through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Oral Histories of the American South
Oral Histories of the American South" is a three-year project to select, digitize and make available 500 oral history interviews gathered by the Southern Oral History Program (SOHP).
Prosperity and Thrift: The Coolidge Era and the Consumer Economy, 1921-1929
Assembles a wide array of Library of Congress source materials from the 1920s that document the widespread prosperity of the Coolidge years, the nation's transition to a mass consumer economy, and the role of government in this transition.
Voices from the Dust Bowl
Voices from the Dust Bowl: The Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection is an online presentation of selections from a multi-format ethnographic field collection documenting the everyday life of residents of Farm Security Administration (FSA) migrant work camps in central California in 1940 and 1941.

Databases

America: History and Life (Full-Text) This link opens in a new window
Provides indexing, abstracts, and full-text for U.S. and Canadian historical and cultural literature, from prehistory to present. NOTE: Only 6 simultaneous users allowed.
America: History and Life is a comprehensive source for U.S. and Canadian history and culture, from prehistoric times to the present. The database contains indexing, abstracts, and full-text for over 1,700 journals as well as books, book reviews, theses/dissertations, and film project reviews. A strong English-language journal coverage is balanced by an international perspective on topics and events, including English abstracts of articles published in more than 40 languages. This database is an excellent bibliographic reference tool for students and scholars of American history, Canadian history, popular culture, American studies, literature/folklore, genealogy, women's studies/gender studies, multicultural studies, anthropology, sociology, and the history of science. The database corresponds to the print America: History and Life, which is produced by ABC-CLIO. Updated regularly.

NOTE: Only 6 simultaneous users allowed.
American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collections This link opens in a new window
The American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collections include digitized images of the pages of American magazines and journals from the American Antiquarian Society, the premier library documenting the life of America's people from the Colonial Era through the Civil War and Reconstruction. This content is not available for acquisition in digital form from any source other than EBSCO Publishing, and keyword searching is available on all titles.
The American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collections exists as a series of five databases created from a comprehensive collection of American periodicals published between 1691 and 1876. These databases include 6,500 titles featuring more than 10 million pages of content from the seventeenth century through the late nineteenth century. The collection also contains titles in more than
two dozen languages including French, German, Norwegian, Spanish, and more.
C19: The Nineteenth Century Index This link opens in a new window
A super-index to nineteenth century books, periodical, official documents, newspapers and archives.
C19: The Nineteenth Century is a source for discovering nineteenth-century books, periodicals, official documents, newspapers and archives. It's a super-index to more than 16 million documents that includes the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, Poole's Index to Periodical Literature, the Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue, and the British Periodicals. It links to other 19th century full-text sources in the UTA Library's collection such as American Periodical Series Online, Periodicals Archive Online and Palmer's Full-Text Online.
JSTOR: The Scholarly Journal Archive This link opens in a new window
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.
NINES: Nineteenth-century Scholarship Online This link opens in a new window
NINES contains peer-reviewed scholarly and educational materials dealing with the all aspects of British and American culture during the long nineteenth century (1770-1920).
NINES vets freely-available digital objects in nineteenth-century studies for scholarly integrity and aggregates metadata (or descriptive information) about them in a faceted search-and-browsing interface. The objects themselves are accessible via links to the federated websites that have contributed them.
Included are traditional texts and documents as well as “born-digital” materials. Also there are software tools that aid collation and comparative analysis and enable pedagogical applications.
North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral Histories This link opens in a new window
This collection includes 2,162 authors and approximately 100,000 pages of information, so providing a unique and personal view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada between 1800 and 1950.
Composed of contemporaneous letters and diaries, oral histories, interviews, and other personal narratives, the series provides a rich source for scholars in a wide range of disciplines. In selected cases, users will be able to hear the actual audio voices of the immigrants. The collection will be particularly useful to researchers, because much of the original material is difficult to find, poorly indexed, and unpublished; most bibliographies of the immigrant focus on secondary research; and few oral histories have been published.
This work in progress is composed of the personal narratives of immigrants to North America, including Canada
North American Women's Letters and Diaries This link opens in a new window
This database includes diaries, journals, and letters written by women visiting or living in North America between the years 1700 and 1950.
This work in progress, when completed, will be the largest collection of women's diaries and correspondence ever assembled and include the personal experiences of 1,500 women from all social classes.
ProQuest Recent Newspapers: The New York Times This link opens in a new window
Full-page images of the New York Times from 2008 to recent (1 month embargo). This digitized newspaper provides genealogists, researchers and scholars with cover-to-cover access to recent newspaper content. Every page is full-text searchable.

Secondary Research - In our Collection

Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan by Nancy MacLean
ISBN: 0585327866
Publication Date: 1994-01-01
This study offers a major new interpretation of the Ku Klux Klan in the USA, placing the organization in its context of class and gender as well as race and religion.
The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in it's First Age of Terror by Gage, Beverly
ISBN: 9786611930875
Publication Date: 2009
In The Day Wall Street Exploded, Beverly Gage tells the story of that once infamous but now largely forgotten event. Based on thousands of pages of Bureau of Investigation reports, this historical detective saga traces the four-year hunt for the perpetrators, a worldwide effort that spread as far as Italy and the new Soviet nation.
Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America by Mae M. Ngai
ISBN: 0691124299
Publication Date: 2005-08-28
This book traces the origins of the "illegal alien" in American law and society, explaining why and how illegal migration became the central problem in U.S. immigration policy--a process that profoundly shaped ideas and practices about citizenship, race, and state authority in the twentieth century.
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent
ISBN: 9780743277020
Publication Date: 2010-05-11
Okrent explores the origins, implementation, and failure of that great American delusion known as Prohibition. "Last Call" explains how Prohibition happened, what life under it was like, and what it did to the country.
Migra!: A History of the U.S. Border Patrol by Kelly Lytle Hernandez
ISBN: 9780520266414
Publication Date: 2010-05-03
This is the untold history of the United States Border Patrol from its beginnings in 1924 as a small peripheral outfit to its emergence as a large professional police force that continuously draws intense scrutiny and denunciations from political activism groups.
Negro with a Hat by Colin Grant
ISBN: 9780195367942
Publication Date: 2008-03-17
This groundbreaking biography captures the full sweep and epic dimensions of Marcus Garvey's life, the dazzling triumphs and the dreary exile. As Grant shows, Garvey was a man of contradictions: a self-educated, poetry-writing aesthete and unabashed propagandist, an admirer of Lenin, and a dandy given to elaborate public displays.
Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885-1940 by Chad Heap
ISBN: 0226322432
Publication Date: 2009-05-15
During Prohibition, "Harlem was the 'in' place to go for music and booze," recalled the African American chanteuse Bricktop. "Every night the limousines pulled up to the corner," and out spilled affluent whites, looking for a good time, great jazz, and the unmatchable thrill of doing something disreputable. That is the indelible public image of slumming, but as Chad Heap reveals in this fascinating history, the reality is that slumming was far more widespread--and important--than such nostalgia-tinged recollections would lead us to believe.
Summer for the Gods by Edward J. Larson
ISBN: 9780465075102
Publication Date: 2006-10-03
The Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the Scopes Trial and the battle over evolution and creation in America's schools.
The Taming of Free Speech by Laura Weinrib
ISBN: 9780674545717
Publication Date: 2016-10-10
In this strikingly original history, Laura Weinrib illustrates how a surprising coalition of lawyers and activists made judicial enforcement of the Bill of Rights a defining feature of American democracy. The Taming of Free Speech traces our understanding of civil liberties to conflict between 1910 and 1940 over workers’ right to strike.
The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
ISBN: 9780679444329
Publication Date: 2010-09-07
In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America.
The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State by Lisa McGirr
ISBN: 9780393066951
Publication Date: 2015-11-30
Prohibition has long been portrayed as a "noble experiment" that failed, a newsreel story of glamorous gangsters, flappers and speakeasies. Now Lisa McGirr dismantles this myth to reveal a much more significant history.