A Carceral History of the United States
Dey Hernández, Jorge Díaz Ortiz and Sylvia Hernández, "If all Lives Matter ‘Cause We’re All Equal, Why Are Some Lives More Equal Than Others?", September 2020, Agiarte
"This Cantastoria (picture storytelling with song) uses a handmade quilt to trace the history of the Prison Industrial Complex from slavery to mass incarceration and the killing of Black and Brown people by police in the U.S. The project is a collaboration with self-taught quilter Sylvia Hernandez and community-based organization El Puente."
Books
Buried Lives by ISBN: 9780820341194Date: 2012-03-01Buried Lives offers the first critical examination of the experience of imprisonment in early America. These interdisciplinary essays investigate several carceral institutions to show how confinement shaped identity, politics, and the social imaginary both in the colonies and in the new nation.
City of Inmates by ISBN: 9781469631196Date: 2017-02-15Los Angeles incarcerates more people than any other city in the United States, which imprisons more people than any other nation on Earth. This book explains how the City of Angels became the capital city of the world's leading incarcerator.
Liberty's Prisoners by ISBN: 9780812292428Date: 2015-10-07Liberty's Prisoners examines how changing attitudes about work, freedom, property, and family shaped the creation of the penitentiary system in the United States.
The Rise of the Penitentiary by ISBN: 0300042973Date: 1992-06-24Before the nineteenth century, American prisons were used to hold people for trial and not to incarcerate them for wrong-doing. Only after independence did American states begin to reject such public punishment as whipping and pillorying and turn to imprisonment instead. In this legal, social, and political history, Adam J. Hirsch explores the reasons behind this change.
Their Sisters' Keepers by ISBN: 0472100084Date: 1981-06-15This study of prison reform adds a new chapter to the history of women's struggle for justice in America
Chained in Silence by ISBN: 1469622475Date: 2015-04-27LeFlouria argues that African American women's presence within the convict lease and chain-gang systems of Georgia helped to modernize the South by creating a new and dynamic set of skills for black women. At the same time, female inmates struggled to resist physical and sexual exploitation and to preserve their human dignity within a hostile climate of terror.
The Condemnation of Blackness by ISBN: 9780674035973Date: 2010-02-15Chronicling the emergence of deeply embedded notions of black people as a dangerous race of criminals by explicit contrast to working-class whites and European immigrants, this book reveals the influence such ideas have had on urban development and social policies.
Remembering Scottsboro by ISBN: 9780691090801Date: 2009-05-10In 1931, nine black youths were charged with raping two white women in Scottsboro, Alabama. Despite meager and contradictory evidence, all nine were found guilty and eight of the defendants were sentenced to death--making Scottsboro one of the worst travesties of justice to take place in the post-Reconstruction South. Remembering Scottsboro explores how this case has embedded itself into the fabric of American memory and become a lens for perceptions of race, class, sexual politics, and justice.
Slavery by Another Name by ISBN: 9780385722704Date: 2009-01-13This groundbreaking historical expose unearths the lost stories of enslaved persons and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude shortly thereafter in "The Age of Neoslavery."
Slaves of the State by ISBN: 9780816692408Date: 2015-02-27Dennis Childs argues that the incarceration of black people and other historically repressed groups in chain gangs, peon camps, prison plantations, and penitentiaries represents a ghostly perpetuation of chattel slavery. He exposes how the Thirteenth Amendment's exception clause--allowing for enslavement as "punishment for a crime"--has inaugurated forms of racial capitalist misogynist incarceration that serve as haunting returns of conditions Africans endured in the barracoons and slave ship holds of the Middle Passage, on plantations, and in chattel slavery.
Blood in the Water by ISBN: 9781400078240Date: 2017-08-22Historian Heather Ann Thompson offers the first definitive telling of the Attica prison uprising, the state's violent response, and the victims' decades-long quest for justice. Drawing from more than a decade of extensive research, Thompson sheds new light on every aspect of the uprising and its legacy, giving voice to all those who took part in this forty-five-year fight for justice: prisoners, former hostages, families of the victims, lawyers and judges, and state officials and members of law enforcement.
Captive Nation by ISBN: 1469629798Date: 2016-03-15In this pathbreaking book, Dan Berger offers a bold reconsideration of twentieth century black activism, the prison system, and the origins of mass incarceration. Throughout the civil rights era, black activists thrust the prison into public view, turning prisoners into symbols of racial oppression while arguing that confinement was an inescapable part of black life in the United States. Black prisoners became global political icons at a time when notions of race and nation were in flux.
Forced Passages by ISBN: 0816645604Date: 2006-01-01With the US having the highest incarceration rate in the world, prisons have become sites of radical political discourse and resistance. Dylan Rodriguez examines the work of a number of imprisoned intellectuals, such as Angela Davis and Leonard Peltier, and looks at how imprisonment has shaped their writing.
Guerrilla USA by ISBN: 9780520946033To burn the American prison system to the ground, the George Jackson Brigade launched a violent three-year campaign in the mid-1970s against corporate and state institutions in the Pacific Northwest. This campaign, conceived by a group of blacks and whites, both straight and gay, claimed fourteen bombings, as many bank robberies, and a jailbreak. Drawing on extensive interviews with surviving members of the George Jackson Brigade, Guerrilla USA provides an inside-out perspective on the social movements of the 1970s, revealing the whole era in a new and more complex light.
Those Who Know Don't Say by ISBN: 9781469653839Date: 2019-11-21In this bold new political and intellectual history of the Nation of Islam, Garrett Felber centers the Nation in the Civil Rights Era and the making of the modern carceral state. In doing so, he reveals a multifaceted freedom struggle that focused as much on policing and prisons as on school desegregation and voting rights.
Are Prisons Obsolete? by ISBN: 1583225811Date: 2003Since the 1980s prison construction and incarceration rates in the U.S. have been rising exponentially, evoking huge public concern about their proliferation, their recent privatisation and their promise of enormous profits. But these prisons house hugely disproportionate numbers of people of colour, betraying the racism embedded in the system, while studies show that increasing prison sentences has had no effect on crime. Here, esteemed civil rights activist Angela Davis lays bare the situation and argues for a radical rethinking of our rehabilitation programmes.
First Civil Right by ISBN: 9781306864138Date: 2014-01-01In The First Civil Right, Naomi Murakawa inverts the conventional wisdom by arguing that the expansion of the federal carceral state-a system that disproportionately imprisons blacks and Latinos-was, in fact, rooted in the civil-rights liberalism of the 1940s and early 1960s, not in the period after.
From Asylum to Prison by ISBN: 9781469640648Date: 2018-09-25To many, asylums are a relic of a bygone era. State governments took steps between 1950 and 1990 to minimize the involuntary confinement of people in psychiatric hospitals, and many mental health facilities closed down. Yet, as Anne Parsons reveals, the asylum did not die during deinstitutionalization. Instead, it returned in the modern prison industrial complex as the government shifted to a more punitive, institutional approach to social deviance.
From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime by ISBN: 9780674737235Date: 2016Challenging the belief that America's prison problem originated with the Reagan administration's War on Drugs, Elizabeth Hinton traces the rise of mass incarceration to an ironic source: the social welfare programs of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society at the height of the civil rights era.
Golden Gulag by ISBN: 9780520938038Date: 2007-01-08Ruth Wilson Gilmore examines how California led the way in the explosion of mass incarceration, with what a state analyst called "the biggest prison building project in the history of the world." She analyzes statewide, rural, and urban perspectives to explain how the expansion developed from surpluses of finance capital, labor, land, and state capacity.
The New Jim Crow: mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness by ISBN: 1595586431Date: 2012-01-16In a bold and innovative argument, a rising legal star shows readers how the mass incarceration of a disproportionate number of black men amounts to a devastating system of racial control. Despite the triumphant dismantling of the Jim Crow laws, the system that once forced African-Americans into a segregated second-class citizenship still haunts and the criminal justice system still unfairly targets black men and deprives an entire segment of the population of their basic rights.
Unequal under Law by ISBN: 9780226684604Date: 2007Unequal under Law lays out how decades of both manifest and latent racism shaped punitive U.S. drug policies.
Colored Amazons by ISBN: 0822337614Date: 2006-07-12Colored Amazons is a groundbreaking historical analysis of the crimes, prosecution, and incarceration of black women in Philadelphia at the turn of the twentieth century. Kali N. Gross reconstructs black women's crimes and their representations in popular press accounts and within the discourses of urban and penal reform. Most importantly, she considers what these crimes signified about the experiences, ambitions, and frustrations of the marginalized women who committed them. Gross argues that the perpetrators and the state jointly constructed black female crime.
Criminal Intimacy by ISBN: 9780226462264Date: 2008-09-01Historically, sex behind bars has evoked radically different responses from professionals and the public alike. In Criminal Intimacy, Regina Kunzel tracks these varying interpretations and reveals their foundational influence on modern thinking about sexuality and identity.
Captive Genders by ISBN: 9781849352345Date: 2015-10-27Since first published in 2011, Captive Genders, a groundbreaking account of trans and genderqueer people within the prison industrial complex, has become a highly regarded resource and valuable touchstone for incarcerated LGBTQ people and their allies. The first book of its kind, it has been highly praised by gender theorists and prison abolitionists alike, including Angela Davis. With highly publicised cases such as that of Chelsea Manning and media interest in the likes of Laverne Cox and Caitlyn Jenner, this new edition could hardly be timelier. Includes four new essays.
Resistance Behind Bars by ISBN: 9781604860184Date: 2009-03-01An expose determind to challenge and change oversights currently prevalent in the incarceration of women. It examines daily struggles against appalling prison conditions and injustices.
At the Dark End of the Street by ISBN: 9780307269065Date: 2010A history of America's civil rights movement traces the pivotal influence of sexual violence that victimized African American women for centuries.
Breaking Women by ISBN: 9780814761489Date: 2013In Breaking Women, Jill A. McCorkel draws upon four years of on-the-ground research in a major US women's prison to uncover why tougher drug policies have so greatly affected those incarcerated there, and how the very nature of punishment in women's detention centers has been deeply altered as a result.
No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity by ISBN: 1469627612Date: 2016In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries imprisoned black women faced wrenching forms of gendered racial terror and heinous structures of economic exploitation. Exposed to violence and rape, subjugated on chain gangs and as convict laborers, and forced to serve additional time as domestic workers before they were allowed their freedom, black women faced a pitiless system of violence, terror, and debasement. Drawing upon black feminist criticism and a diverse array of archival materials, Sarah Haley uncovers imprisoned women's brutalization in local, county, and state convict labor systems, while also illuminating the prisoners' acts of resistance and sabotage, challenging ideologies of racial capitalism and patriarchy and offering alternative conceptions of social and political life.
Beyond Walls and Cages by ISBN: 9780820344928Date: 2012Working at a range of geographic scales and locations, contributors examine concrete and ideological connections among prisons, migration policing and detention, border fortification, and militarization. They challenge the idea that prisons and borders create safety, security, and order, showing that they can be forms of coercive mobility that separate loved ones, disempower communities, and increase shared harms of poverty.
Caging Borders and Carceral States by ISBN: 9781469651255Date: 2019-04-09This volume considers the interconnection of racial oppression in the U.S. South and West, presenting thirteen case studies that explore the ways in which citizens and migrants alike have been caged, detained, deported, and incarcerated, and what these practices tell us about state building, converging and coercive legal powers, and national sovereignty.- City of Inmates by ISBN: 9781469631196Date: 2017-02-15Los Angeles incarcerates more people than any other city in the United States, which imprisons more people than any other nation on Earth. This book explains how the City of Angels became the capital city of the world's leading incarcerator.
Impossible Subjects by ISBN: 0691074712Date: 2014This 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.
Migra! : a history of the U.S. Border Patrol by ISBN: 9780520257696Date: 2010This 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. Migra! reveals how the U.S. Border Patrol translated the mandate for comprehensive migration control into a project of policing immigrants and undocumented "aliens" in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.
States of Delinquency by ISBN: 9780520951556Date: 2012-02-21This unique analysis of the rise of the juvenile justice system from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries uses one of the harshest states--California--as a case study for examining racism in the treatment of incarcerated young people of color. Using rich new untapped archives, States of Delinquency is the first book to explore the experiences of young Mexican Americans, African Americans, and ethnic Euro-Americans in California correctional facilities including Whittier State School for Boys and the Preston School of Industry.
Angela Davis an Autobiography by ISBN: 0394489780Date: 1988Iconic Black revolutionary, feminist scholar, and abolitionist leader Angela Davis tells her life story, reflecting on her childhood, incarceration, and the movement that fought for and freed her.
Assata by ISBN: 1556520743Date: 2001On May 2, 1973, Black Panther Assata Shakur (aka JoAnne Chesimard) lay in a hospital, close to death, handcuffed to her bed, while local, state, and federal police attempted to question her about the shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike that had claimed the life of a white state trooper. Long a target of J. Edgar Hoover's campaign to defame, infiltrate, and criminalize Black nationalist organizations and their leaders, Shakur was incarcerated for four years prior to her conviction on flimsy evidence in 1977 as an accomplice to murder. This intensely personal and political autobiography belies the fearsome image of JoAnne Chesimard long projected by the media and the state. With wit and candor, Assata Shakur recounts the experiences that led her to a life of activism and portrays the strengths, weaknesses, and eventual demise of Black and White revolutionary groups at the hand of government officials. The result is a signal contribution to the literature about growing up Black in America that has already taken its place alongside The Autobiography of Malcolm X and the works of Maya Angelou. Two years after her conviction, Assata Shakur escaped from prison. She was given political asylum by Cuba, where she now resides.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X by ISBN: 0345379756Date: 1992-09-29In the searing pages of this classic autobiography, originally published in 1964, Malcolm X, the Muslim leader, firebrand, and anti-integrationist, tells the extraordinary story of his life and the growth of the Black Muslim movement.
Death Blossoms by ISBN: 0874860865Date: 1997Black Panther, acclaimed journalist, and political prisoner Mumia Abu recounts his life and struggle for freedom.
Soledad Brother by ISBN: 1556522304Date: 1994A collection of Jackson's letters from prison, Soledad Brother is an outspoken condemnation of the racism of white America and a powerful appraisal of the prison system that failed to break his spirit but eventually took his life. Jackson's letters make palpable the intense feelings of anger and rebellion that filled black men in America's prisons in the 1960s.
Becoming Ms. Burton by ISBN: 9781620972120Date: 2017One woman's remarkable odyssey from tragedy to prison to recovery--and recognition as a leading figure in the national justice reform movement.
Community-based Archives
These archives are open-source scholar activist initiatives that stem from organizations fighting mass incarceration. They may provide specific insight into the perspectives of incarcerated people and their allies.
- The Fire Inside ArchivesThe Fire Inside is the newsletter of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, which includes writings by people incarcerated in women's prisons dating back to the early 1990s.
- The Freedom Archives Prisons CollectionsThe Freedom Archives contains over 12,000 hours of audio and video recordings as well as print materials dating primarily from the late-1960s to the mid-90s, focusing on social justice movements in the Bay Area and internationally. Their collections are an invaluable source for first hand accounts from incarcerated people documenting conditions and resistance from California to Attica and beyond. They include sources from the underground press and radio and numerous pieces of activist ephemera.
- Hamilton College American Prison Writing Archive"The American Prison Writing Archive evolved from a book project completed in 2014 with the publication of Fourth City: Essays from the Prison in America, the largest collection to date of non-fiction writing by currently incarcerated Americans writing about their experience inside."
- It's About Time: Black Panther Party ArchivesThis is a rich community based archive created by former Panther Billy X with photographs, newspapers, and essays, and ephemera which provide insight into the inner workings of the party and the state repression members faced.
- Texas After Violence Project"The Texas After Violence Project is a community-based archive and documentary project cultivating deeper understandings of the impacts of state-sanctioned violence on individuals, families, and communities. Our mission is to conduct responsible, inclusive, and ethical research, and to build an archive of stories and other materials that shift narrative power to marginalized and oppressed communities and promote restorative and transformative justice."
- UCLA Asian American Studies Center's Suyama ProjectThe UCLA Asian American Studies Center’s Suyama Project aims to preserve the history of Japanese American resistance during World War II, including, but not limited to the 100th/442nd Regimental Combat Team draftees, Army and draft resisters, No-Nos, renunciants, and other Nikkei dissidents of World War II.
- Washington Prison History Project"The Washington Prison History Project is a multimedia effort to document the history of prisoner activism and policy in our state. The site features a robust collection of prisoner-produced newspapers from the late 20th century; oral histories and testimonials about the Washington state prison system; research on local histories of punishment; and a text-adventure computer game designed inside a maximum security prison."
- Testif-i | Storytelling for Change"Testif-i | Storytelling for Change is a multimedia initiative from A New Way of Life Re-Entry Project that aims to transform the public dialogue on mass incarceration through storytelling and the lived experiences of formerly incarcerated women. Although women are the fastest-growing segment of the prison population, the national conversation on mass incarceration focuses primarily on the experiences of men. Testif-i will broaden the conversation to include perspectives and insights through the unique lens of gender, race and justice."
Digital Archives
- Eastern State Penitentiary Research ResourcesEastern State Penitentiary’s collections include documents and artifacts relating to the administrators and people incarcerated at Eastern State Penitentiary, a prison which pioneered the "Pennsylvania system" of solitary confinement. This guide includes links to numerous digital archives including their collections.
- Making of Modern Law: The American Civil Liberties Union Papers (Gale Primary Sources) This link opens in a new windowThe records of the ACLU on free speech, citizenship, race, discrimination, immigration, labor, radicalism, and related topics support the study of American legal history and complement the modules in the Making of Modern Law series. Documents include newspaper clippings, scrapbooks, court files, memorandums, telegrams, minutes, and legal case records. UCLA provides access to Parts I and II: 1912-1990, and Southern Regional Office,
- Archives of Sexuality and Gender (Gale Primary Sources) This link opens in a new windowDigitized primary sources on social, political, health, and legal issues concerning gender and sexuality, and impacting LGBTQ communities around the world. Includes newsletters and newspapers, government documents, manuscripts, pamphlets, and more. Contributing repositories include: Kinsey Institute, British Library, Lesbian Herstory, Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, National Library of Medicine, and more. UCLA provides access to Parts I and II (LGBTQ History and Culture since 1940), Part III (Sex and Sexuality, Sixteenth to Twentieth Century), Part IV (International Perspectives on LGBTQ Activism and Culture), and Part VI (Community and Identity in North America).
- Archives Unbound (Gale Primary Sources) This link opens in a new windowThis broad collection of primary sources includes archives on Japanese American interment, the policies of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Ralph J. Bunche Oral Histories Collection on the Civil Rights Movement.
- Black Freedom Struggle in the United States: A Selection of Primary Sources This link opens in a new windowOpen access selection of primary source documents including historical newspaper articles, pamphlets, diaries, correspondence and more that highlight the triumphs and resiliency of African Americans in the pursuit of equality through six periods of history.
- Calisphere This link opens in a new windowCalisphere contains photographs, documents, and ephemera from archives and museums around the state. UC Berkeley's collections on the Black Panther Party and many more relevant collections are included.
- Indigenous Peoples of North America (Gale Primary Sources) This link opens in a new windowCross-searches collections from the U.S. and Canada, including manuscripts, book collections, newspapers from various tribe and Indian-related organizations, materials such as Bibles, dictionaries and primers in Indigenous languages. Covers 17th-20th centuries. UCLA provides access to Indigenous Peoples of North America, Part I and Indigenous Peoples of North America, Part II: The Indian Rights Association, 1882-1986.
- LGBT Thought and Culture This link opens in a new window
Online portal with full text books, periodicals, and archival materials documenting LGBT political, social and cultural movements from the 20th century to the present. The purchase of LGBT Thought and Culture was made possible through a generous gift from the David Bohnett Foundation.
- Making of Modern Law: Legal Treatises, 1800-1926 (Gale Primary Sources) This link opens in a new window
Full-text collection of 19th and early 20th century Anglo-American legal treatises, derived from two essential reference collections for historical legal studies: the 19th Century Legal Treatises and 20th Century Legal Treatises microfilm collections.
- Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice, 1490-2007 This link opens in a new windowCollection of digitized documents, maps, and essays concerning the Atlantic slave trade, primarily from British and North American libraries. Includes 18th and 19th-century court records from Georgia, Louisiana, Missouri, and North Carolina.
- Making of Modern Law: U.S. Supreme Court Records and Briefs, 1832-1978 (Gale Primary Sources) This link opens in a new window
This database contains nearly 11 million pages of records and briefs brought before the US Supreme Court in the period 1832-1978. For the period 1832 (when printed Court records began) through 1915, the documents are based primarily on the holdings of the Jenkins Memorial Law Library, America's first law library, located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. For 1915-1978 the source is the Library of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York.
- UCLA Film & Television Archive: Watch & Listen Online This link opens in a new windowA selection of digitized films, television and radio programs preserved by UCLA Film & Television Archive, including the KTLA News Project, In the Life, The Goldbergs on the Radio, U.S. Steel Hour, Insight, L.A. Rebellion, Restored Silent Animation, Hearst Metrotone News, UCLA Student Films, and more.
- UCLA Library Digital Collections This link opens in a new windowRare and unique digital materials developed by the UCLA Library to support education, research, service, and creative expression, including the AIDS Poster Collection, the Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive and more.
- Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 This link opens in a new windowA collection of books, images, documents, scholarly essays, commentaries, and bibliographies, documenting the multiplicity of women's reform activities.
Databases
- Left Index This link opens in a new windowIndexes the literature of the left, with an emphasis on political, economic, social and culturally engaged scholarship inside and outside academia. Topics covered include the labor movement, ecology and environment, race and ethnicity, social and cultural theory, sociology, art and aesthetics, philosophy, history, education, law, and globalization.
- National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS) This link opens in a new windowIndex of articles and government documents on criminal justice, juvenile justice, and substance abuse. Based on the NCJRS Virtual Library collection. When available, full text is included.
- Nexis Uni This link opens in a new window
Full-text news (including broadcast transcripts), business, legal, and reference information. Useful for finding full-text of current performing arts and media industry news in major newspapers. Includes biographical information from Who's Who titles. Formerly LexisNexis Academic.
- Legal Source This link opens in a new windowIndex to over 870 full text journals and 300 law reviews. Includes the Index to Legal Periodicals.
- JSTOR This link opens in a new window
Full text back issues of core scholarly journals, browsable and searchable across multiple disciplines. Coverage starts with first issue, with moving wall for most recent 3-5 years. UCLA has access to selected JSTOR e-books only. JSTOR also includes primary source collections, including images from Artstor.
- Historical Abstracts This link opens in a new window
Index and abstracts for articles on the history of the world from 1450 to the present (excluding the United States and Canada, which are covered in America: History and Life) published since 1955.
Periodicals
- African American Periodicals, 1825-1995 This link opens in a new window
Features more than 170 wide-ranging periodicals by and about African Americans published between 1825-1995.
- Alternative Press Index This link opens in a new windowAlternative, radical, and left periodicals, newspapers, and magazines. The index is international and interdisciplinary, spanning the social sciences and humanities, with its central focus on the practice and theory of socialism, national liberation, labor, indigenous peoples, gays/lesbians, feminism, ecology, democracy, and anarchism. Link searches both Alternative Press Index (1991-present) and Alternative Press Index Archive (1969-1990).
- Ethnic NewsWatch This link opens in a new window
Complete text of articles from 1959 to the present from publications of the ethnic, minority, and native press. Covers news, culture, and history, and is searchable in both English and Spanish.
- LGBT Magazine Archive This link opens in a new window
Searchable archive of major periodicals devoted to LGBT+ interests, dating from the 1950s to more recent years. Includes many of the most influential, long-running 20th/21st-century magazines in this field, including The Advocate. UCLA subscribes to Collection 1 of this database.
- ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times This link opens in a new window
Full page and article images with searchable full text from the first issue in 1851 to 2020. For access to current issues, see The New York Times [1980-present]. Contains the former Historical Index to the New York Times (1851-1923) from the database Historical Newspapers Online.
- ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Los Angeles Sentinel This link opens in a new window
Major Black newspaper in Los Angeles, covering May 17, 1934 - 2010. For access to current issues see Ethnic NewsWatch.
- ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Los Angeles Times This link opens in a new window
Full page and article images with searchable full text from the first issue in 1881 to 1995. For full text access to current issues, see Los Angeles Times [1985-present].
Digital Humanities Projects and Datasets
- Digital Scholar Lab This link opens in a new windowThe Gale Digital Scholar Lab is designed to access and analyze Gale’s primary source content by integrating digital primary source content with popular digital humanities tools. Analysis options include clustering word analysis, named entity recognition, Ngram, topic modelling, and more. It is excellent for analyzing periodicals in particular.
- The Knotted LineThe Knotted Line is an interactive, tactile laboratory for exploring the historical relationship between freedom and confinement in the geographic area of the United States. With miniature paintings of over 50 historical moments from 1495-2025, The Knotted Line asks: how is freedom measured? Just as importantly, The Knotted Line imagines a new world through the work of grassroots movements for self-determination.
- Incarceration Trends Dataset County- and jurisdiction-level jail data (1970-2018) and prison data (1983-2016)This work employed two Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) data collections: the Census of Jails (COJ), which covers all jails and is conducted every five to eight years since 1970, and the Annual Survey of Jails (ASJ), which covers about one-third of jails-and includes nearly all of the largest jails-that has been conducted in non-census years since 1982.