Research Databases by Subject
Browse the databases listed below or go back to subjects.
History/Government/Art History
- Ancient and Medieval History — Articles, primary sources, maps/charts, images, timelines, and videos on world history topics from prehistory through the mid-1500s.
- Avalon Project — Open access primary source documents in law, history, and diplomacy from 4000bce to 2000+
- BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) — Search engine for open access academic web resources, journal articles, digital collections, images/videos or research data.
- CIA World Fact Book — Open access information on the history, people and society, government, economy, energy, geography, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues for 267 world entities. Provides a variety of maps, flags of the world and ability to compare countries in 75 fields.
- Credo Reference — Credo’s Academic Core Collection provides full-text background information covering over 80 major subject disciplines and more than 6 million research concepts from encyclopedias, handbooks, guides, companions, and readers. Credo also provides access to more than 1,000 videos and animations, as well as 500,000 contextual visual aids, images, photographs and maps.
- Digital Public Library of America Civil Rights Movement — A digital primary source and secondary source collection focusing on the Civil Rights Movement including women’s leadership, racial equality, nonviolent protest, black power, and civil rights activism.
- Digital Public Library of America DPLA — Open access primary sources, eBooks, exhibitions, images and photographs, maps, news footage, oral histories, personal letters, museum objects, artwork, government documents, videos and much more.
- Digital Public Library of America Women's Suffrage — Primary source collection focusing on the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution ensuring every woman’s right to vote.
- Films on Demand — Streaming video collections offering curriculum-focused content in humanities & social sciences; business & economics; science & mathematics; health & medicine; technical education; family & consumer sciences; careers & job search; guidance & counseling. Thousands of full-length programs and video segments with new titles added monthly.
- Films on Demand - Black History Month — Videos focusing on Black History, African American History, Civil Rights, and notable speakers.
- Gale in Context: Biography — Biographical information on noteworthy individuals from past and present across all disciplines and subject areas.
- Gale in Context: Opposing Viewpoints — Topic overviews and articles on social issues and current event topics, including statistics, government data, primary documents, legislation, and more.
- Gale in Context: U.S. History — Reference, magazine, news, and journal articles, primary source documents, and multimedia covering pre-Colonial times to the present.
- Gale in Context: World History — Reference, magazine, news, and journal articles, primary source documents, multimedia, and more on world history topics.
- Gale OneFile: Diversity Studies — A multi-media collection containing over 2.7 million articles from 150 journals on cultural differences, contributions, and influences in Gender & Women Studies, Black History, African American History, Sociology, Western Civilization, Politics, and Anthropology.
- Getty Search Gateway — Search across several open access Getty repositories that include collections of photographs, paintings, art objects, books/manuscripts and more from many historical time periods.
- Google Arts & Culture — Open access high-resolution images and videos of artworks and cultural artifacts from collections of over 2,000 museums, art galleries, and other cultural institutions worldwide. Over 10,000 famous sites and landmarks in Street View.
- Google Scholar — Open access scholarly literature, articles, journals and conference papers, theses and dissertations, academic books, pre-prints, abstracts, technical reports, court opinions and patents. All broad areas of research, from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, university repositories, and websites.
- Guggenheim Museum — Guggenheim’s permanent open access digital collections of approximately 8,000 artworks. Searchable by artist, date, medium, movement, and venue, or by several of the major groups of acquisitions.
- Hathi Trust — The largest set of open access ebooks, with millions of titles, covering a broad set of scholarly interests.
- JSTOR (also OPEN ACCESS from JSTOR's Open Content) — Archives of core journals in the Arts & Sciences I collection (economics, history, political science, sociology) and the Arts & Sciences III collection (languages and literature, music, folklore, religion, and the history and study of art and architecture); does not contain content from the past 3-5 years. Includes multidisciplinary book and journal open access content from JSTOR's Open Content.
- JSTOR's Art Images — Contains almost one million images in collections classified as paintings, drawings and water colors, photographs, prints, sculpture and installations, humanities and social sciences, film, audio, video, and digital art, architecture and city planning, manuscripts, graphic design and illustration, fashion, costume, and jewelry, technology science, and industry, interior design, performing arts, maps, charts, and graphs from all over the world.
- Library of Congress — The most extensive multidisciplinary, primary and secondary source collections in the world that include over 171 million resources in various formats.
- LibriVox (Audio books) — Download open access audiobooks in a wide range of genres and subjects.
- Making of America — Cornell University’s cultivated open access collection of primary sources and 1.5 million images including scanned images of 19th century texts in books and journal articles throughout the Antebellum Period to Reconstruction.
- Maryland State Archives — Maryland’s central depository for government records and special collections from 1634 to the present. Select Visit the Archives to view Research Guides containing historical records and special collections.
- Metropolitan Museum of Art — Open access art collections and exhibitions of over 5,000 years of art from around the world including impressionism, art deco, masks, musical instruments, animals, and architecture.
- Military and Government Collection — Periodical and academic journal articles pertaining to all branches of the military and government; also contains primary source and government documents.
- Modern World History — Articles, primary sources, maps/charts, images, timelines, and videos on world history topics from the mid-15th century to the present.
- Museum of the World — Open access interactive WebGL timeline of famous art objects from the British Museum of Art from prehistory to the present; it is a partnership between the British Museum and Google Cultural Institute.
- NASA Ebooks — Links to many open access NASA ebooks and publications.
- National Archives — Contains the nation’s important and preserved documents and federal records such as military, naturalization, The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, The Bill of Rights, African American history, women’s rights and suffrage and much more, and owned by the citizens of the United States of America.
- National Gallery of Art — Open access Western art digital collections of over 150,000 paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, photographs, prints, and drawings.
- National Jukebox — Contains open access historical sound recordings. Choose categories that include Instrumental, Instrumental with vocal refrain, spoken, and vocal from artists A to Z.
- National Women’s History Museum — Open access online American women's history exhibits, primary sources, oral histories, biographies, autobiographies, archives (1996-2018), Study Collection (19th century to present), and more.
- NYPL Digital Gallery — Over 800,000 open access digital materials including prints, photographs, maps, manuscripts, streaming video, and more.
- Points of View Reference Source — Overviews and arguments presenting multiple sides of current issues; includes essays, articles from magazines and newspapers, radio and TV news manuscripts, primary source documents, reference books, and images.
- Primary Source Sets (Digital Public Library of America) — Open access primary source collections are from 1492 to 1970s, covering topics in history, literature, and culture
- Project MUSE — Open access academic books and journals in health, history, art history, humanities, literature, culture and diversity, education, music, math, philosophy, sciences, and technology.
- ProQuest - Black Freedom Struggle in the United States — A collection of primary and secondary sources that focus on Black Freedom and African American History from American Periodicals, Black Abolitionist Papers, ProQuest History Vault, ProQuest Congressional, Supreme Court Insight and Alexander Street’s Black Thought and Culture databases.
- ProQuest Central — Periodical articles from 39 specialized databases in all major subject areas, including thousands of newspapers from around the world. Options for limiting to peer reviewed and scholarly journals are on the basic search screen.
- SmartHistory.org Art History — Open access nationally and internationally curated art collections and cultural objects and heritage from leading institutions and museums that include 3,000 scholarly videos and essays from paleolithic to the present.
- Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian — NMAI is a division of the Smithsonian Institute which houses one of the largest primary and secondary source collections of Native artifacts worldwide.
- Smithsonian Open Access — Three million 2D and 3D open access digital images and data from Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.
- State Hermitage Museum (St. Petersburg) — The State Hermitage open access online collections include over three million works of art and artifacts in Russia, Italy, and the Netherlands.
- Sumner Hall Museum (African American Veteran History of Kent Co. MD) — Focuses on collections of African American veterans and their families from the Revolutionary War to the present with a database list of African American veterans from Kent County, Maryland. It also includes initiatives, programs, exhibits, news and publications, historical images, and videos.
- The Long 19th Amendment Project — Primary source collections from over 40 contributing repositories including materials from the Schlesinger Library highlighting women’s suffrage in the United States and managed by Harvard University.
- Wellcome Collection — Thousands of freely licensed open access digital books, artworks, photos and images of historical library materials and museum objects.
- Western Maryland's Historical Library (WHILBR) — Primary and secondary source digital collections containing historical images, photographs, prints, newspaper articles, rare books, genealogy resources, lynchings, women’s suffrage and more from Allegheny, Garrett, and Washington counties and from the Civil War in Maryland, managed by The Western Maryland Regional Library.
- World Digital Library — A project of the Library of Congress providing open access primary materials, timelines, and interactive maps from all countries and cultures from 8000 BCE to 2000