Books

Using ebooks

On-Campus Link

For Scholarship, Study, and Personal Research

For academic scholarship, the collection will have broad departmental relevance, showing the personal stories and photos of immigrants, laborers, and newsmakers; documenting the local architecture of homes and businesses; showing images of racism and tolerance; delivering history as observed in real time. The photos are from historical societies, archives, and private collections. The texts are written by local historians—people with deep and personal knowledge of their communities. In many instances, the authors are protagonists in the historical events they describe, with family photographs, primary documents, and other materials that are inaccessible outside of these publications.

Examples of academic disciplines served include:

Sports history, recreation—Major leagues, local teams, and their influences on communities: Metro Detroit Boxing; Gold in the Ozarks; Central Park Zoo; New York City Vaudeville; New York Giants; Hockey in Providence
Architecture and urban studies—How spaces were used in the past: Lost Ann Arbor; Cemeteries Around Lake Winnipesaukee; Railroad Depots of West Central Ohio
Race and gender—Italians in Detroit; Jewish Community of North Minneapolis; The Chinese Community of Stockton; An Oral History of Tahlequah and The Cherokee Nation
Labor and organizational history—Army, Coast Guard, canal workers, nurses, police departments, fire departments, unions, factory conditions: Firefighting in Frederick; Fairchild Aircraft; The Long Island Railroad; Straub Brewery; WNAX 570 Radio
War—New Hampshire in the Civil War; Cincinnati: The World War II years
Religion—The Roman Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh

New Tools for Search and Discovery

Alexander Street has indexed the books using a new thesaurus created specifically for this collection. Places, people, dates, events, architectural features, and ethnicities are some of the index terms, making searches such as these easy:

Find African American schools in DeKalb County, Georgia.
Find pictures of coal miners in Kentucky and Virginia from 1900 to 1950.
Find examples of neocolonial architecture in the Northeast and Southwest.
Find pictures and descriptions of college football games in Nebraska in the 1950s.
Find depictions of the Irish American community in Youngstown, Ohio. In all of the Midwest. Compared to the Italian-American communities in these areas.
Find Jewish butchers in Chicago in the 1920s.

On-Campus Link

The digital Loeb Classical Library extends this mission into the twenty-first century. Harvard University Press is honored to renew James Loeb's vision of accessibility and 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.

Every work is classified by language, form, genre, subject, and date, making both navigation and browsing for unexplored treasures far easier than facing all those volumes on the bookshelf. Are you looking for a person or place, a quotation about love or wealth, or how a particular word has been translated in a work, by an author, or across the entire Library? You will find it quite easily, for every word of the Greek, Latin, and English is fully searchable. And whatever you find in the Library can be saved and organized as you like in your own digital workspace. You can even share your bookmarks and notes with other users, such as colleagues, students, classmates, and friends.

On-Campus Link

On Campus Link

Note: The OpenAthens guest account login will not work for this resource. Please ask the Reference Desk for O'Reilly guest credentials.

Preserved and curated by the American Theological Library Association (ATLA), this collection contains more than 29,000 titles and features over 50 languages, including German, Italian, and Spanish. Topics covered include church life, demographics, doctrinal disputes, higher criticism, Judeo-Christian religions, Non-Western religions, and social movements.

ATLA Historical Monographs Collection: Series 1 contains over five million pages of content, and consists of titles from the late 13th century through the 1893 World Parliament of Religions, with the majority of titles from the 19th century. Because religion was such an integral part of the social, political and economic fabric of life during this time period, historians researching a wide range of areas, not just religion, will find invaluable material relevant to their work.

This collection covers diverse topics such as philosophy, the evolutionary debate, the Reformation, spiritualism, prayer, ancient linguistics, archeology, devotionals, ethics, and more in a variety of languages.

ATLA Historical Monographs Collection: Series 2 consists of over five million pages of content from over 14,880 monographs dating from 1894 through 1922. This collection provides a broad view of the changing landscape of religion in America at the end of a century of dramatic cultural and political change.

It offers material on the significant shifts in the religious identification of Americans and the growing interest and experimentation with non-Western religions. It presents a comprehensive picture of American life at the time with the rise of missionary activity and evangelical Christianity and the emergence of the historical critical method – the foundation for all twentieth century biblical scholarship.

Collection Includes:
Biographies of 19th century theologians, providing perspective on how and why these leaders were valued in the 19th century
Books by and about women and the church
Books about Native Americans and their religion

On-Campus Link

Digitized from one of the most important collections ever produced on microform, Early American Imprints, Series I is based on Charles Evans’ renowned “American Bibliography” and Roger Bristol’s supplement. Including more than 36,000 printed works and 2.3 million pages, Series I also offers new imprints not available in microform editions.

A wide variety of 17th- and 18th-century imprints
Early American Imprints, Series I is comprised of a vast range of publications, including advertisements, almanacs, bibles, broadsides, catalogs, charters and by-laws, contracts, cookbooks, elegies, eulogies, laws, maps, narratives, novels, operas, pamphlets, plays, poems, primers, sermons, songs, speeches, textbooks, tracts, travelogues, treaties and more.

Extensive indexing and easy browsing
The imprints in Series I are expertly indexed and may be browsed by genre, subjects, author, history of printing, place of publication and language. Topics covered include agriculture, astronomy, auctions, capital punishment, child rearing, commerce, constitution, diseases, education, foreign affairs, French & Indian wars, geography, Indians, Latin, lotteries, masonry, medicine, military operations, missionaries, operas, religious thought, revolutionary war, slavery, suffrage, temperance, trials, witchcraft, women, work, yellow fever and thousands more.

Two dramatic expansions of Evans, 1639-1800
Readex now offers a broad range of recently uncovered imprints, most of which were not included in either Charles Evans’ monumental work or Roger Bristol’s supplement. From the acclaimed holdings of the Library Company of Philadelphia and the American Antiquarian Society come two individually available supplements to Evans, 1639-1800. Together these collections offer approximately 1,750 rare and unique items printed during a 150-year period spanning the colonial era and the formation of the new nation. Fully integrated with Evans, these two supplements enable students and scholars to locate relevant material from all three collections simultaneously.

On-campus link

It is based on the noted “American Bibliography, 1801-1819” by Ralph R. Shaw and Richard H. Shoemaker. With more than four million pages from over 36,000 items—including 1,000 catalogued new items unavailable in previous microform editions—this digital edition from Readex is an essential complement to Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans, 1639-1800, the definitive resource for researching 17th- and 18th-century America.

Explore the early 1800s in unprecedented depth and detail
Through Early American Imprints, Series II, students and scholars can extensively research westward expansion, the development of American arts (literature, music, painting, etc.), the progression of American political thought and much more. In addition to books, broadsides and pamphlets, the collection includes published reports and the works of many European authors reprinted for the American public. Additionally, a large number of state papers and early government materials—including presidential letters and congressional, state and territorial resolutions—chronicle the political and geographic growth of the developing American nation.

Extensive indexing by subject
The imprints in Series II are expertly indexed and grouped by genre, subject, author, history of printing, place of publication and language. Subjects include the following: 12th Amendment, abolitionism, Adams-Onis Treaty, Bible societies, canals, Embargo Act, fur trade, Hartford Convention, Lewis & Clark Expedition, Louisiana Purchase, nationalism, Panic of 1819, Romanticism, Seminole War, Tippecanoe, Treaty of Ghent, U.S. Military Academy, War of 1812 and hundreds more. In addition to searchable, OCR-generated ASCII text that is associated with each image, Early American Imprints, Series II features bibliographic records from the American Antiquarian Society, which is also upgrading the MARC records for the Readex digital edition.

On-campus link

This incomparable collection now contains more than 125,000 titles listed in Pollard & Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640) and Wing's Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700) and their revised editions, as well as the Thomason Tracts (1640-1661) collection and the Early English Books Tract Supplement. Libraries possessing this collection find they are able to fulfill the most exhaustive research requirements of graduate scholars - from their desktop - in many subject areas, including English literature, history, philosophy, linguistics, theology, music, fine arts, education, mathematics, and science.

On Campus Link

The value of this collection is that it makes available online hard-to-find material in every academic discipline, including:

History and Geography: Ancient and contemporary history, accounts of voyages and discoveries, historical biographies and memoirs, genealogical collections, gazetteers, works on church antiquities and tourist guides of Britain. Topics include chronologies, recreation (travel, sports, parlor games), military history, maps, local history and topography. It should also be noted that this collection presents a comprehensive picture of the American Revolution from the British perspective.

Social Science: Materials on manufacturers and merchants, artisans and skilled workers, and international business, banking, taxation and lotteries. Topics include current events, social reform, business/economics/finance (general advertising, lotteries, trade bills and more), political science (parliamentary papers, political satire, political essays, speech/addresses, handbills, parish registers, poll books and more).

Fine Arts, Music, Art and Architecture: Treatises on music, painting, theater and architecture as well as books on building and carpentry, catalogs pertaining to vocal and instrumental music, paintings, prints, drawings, coins and metals and other collectibles, and material about private art collections.

Medicine, Science and Technology: Many branches of science, works on applied science and technology, and works and treatises on the treatment of diseases and conditions. Topics include agriculture, cookbooks, military technology, natural philosophy, scientific education and more.

Literature and Language: Celebrated eighteenth-century essayists, novelists, poets and playwrights, as well as Shakespeare's plays, poems and collected works. Topics include drama, poetry, ballads, religious poems, grammar, dictionaries, songs from plays, satire, book catalogues and more.

Religion and Philosophy: From sermons, Bibles and prayer books to moral and ethical debates and prescriptions for proper conduct.

Law: Development of law in the British Empire between 1701 and 1800. Topics include acts, criminal and international law, appellants' cases and more.

Reference: Ephemeral material on the whole of life in the eighteenth century. Topics include almanacs, catalogues and more.

Included are books, pamphlets, serials and other documents that provide original accounts of exploration, trade, colonialism, slavery and abolition, the western movement, Native Americans, military actions and much more.

With over 6 million pages from 29,000 works, this collection is a cornerstone in the study of the western hemisphere.