Subject Guides: COMM & HIST 486/686: Producing Historical Documentary Films (Kraut, Stogner): Archives & Databases

Subject Guide

Derrick Jefferson

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(202) 885-3787

Subjects: Communication & Journalism, Film, Media, and Television, News & Newspapers

Core Databases

Archives & databases are excellent resources for collecting information related to U.S. immigration history. Because immigration is an interdisciplinary topic, be sure to consider how each resource might offer a different perspective on course themes and issues (e.g. primary vs. secondary; contemporary vs. historical, etc.).

This page contains links to core resources for U.S. immigration research.

Primary Resources: Catalogs & Archives

Archives Unbound This link opens in a new window
A microfilm collection of historical documents covering a broad range of topics that have been digitized by the company Gale.
ArchiveGrid This link opens in a new window
ArchiveGrid is a database of archival finding aids from libraries, museums, and archives.
AP Images Collection (EBSCO) This link opens in a new window
AP Images: Over 3.5 million news photographs from the 1840s through today. Also includes maps, timelines, logos and graphs. AP Interactives: A collection of multimedia content from the archives of the Associated Press. Interactives are fully-licensed for educational use.
Ancestry Library Edition This link opens in a new window
Coverage: 1300 to present. Updated: Weekly, often daily.
A large collection of census records, vital records, immigration records, family histories, military records, court and legal documents, directories, photos, maps, and more from the U.S., Canada, U.K., Germany, Russia, eastern Europe, and China. From Ancestry.com.

The U.S. collections contain census records; birth, death, and marriage records including the Social Security Death Index; and U.S. border crossing and trans-ocean ship records.

Secondary Sources: History Databases & More

Historical Abstracts (EBSCO) This link opens in a new window
Bibliographic database covering the world's scholarly literature in history, excluding the United States and Canada. Equivalent to the printed version of Historical Abstracts.
International Political Science Abstracts This link opens in a new window
Citations and abstracts from roughly 900 journals and yearbooks in the fields of political science, international relations, and public administration. Covers publications from 1975 to the present. In most cases the abstracts are in English, and in some cases (non-English articles) in French. When the original article is not in English, the title in the record is in its own language, English and French.
Social Sciences Citation Index (Web of Science) This link opens in a new window
Contains bibliographic and citation information for 3,000 international scholarly journals across 50 disciplines.
Sociological Abstracts This link opens in a new window
Sociological Abstracts abstracts and indexes the international literature in sociology and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences. The database provides abstracts of journal articles and citations to book reviews drawn from over 1,800+ serials publications, and also provides abstracts of books, book chapters, dissertations, and conference papers. Coverage is from 1952 to the present.

Secondary Sources: Film, Communication & Culture Databases

Communication Source This link opens in a new window
Developed from a merger of Communication and Mass Media Complete and Communications Abstracts, Communication Source offers worldwide full-text content pertaining to communication, linguistics, rhetoric and discourse, speech-language pathology, media studies and related fields and includes many unique sources previously not available.
Film & Television Literature Index with Full Text This link opens in a new window
Film & Television Literature Index (FLTI) is a bibliographic database that provides cover-to-cover indexing and abstracts for more than 300 publications and selected coverage of 300 more, as well as full text for more than 90 journals. The FLTI is a continuation of the Film Literature Index Online database and covers 1988 to the present.
MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new window
The MLA International Bibliography is a subject index for books and articles published on modern languages, literatures, folklore, and linguistics. It is produced by the Modern Language Association