Oral Histories
- Off-Center: The Primary Stages Off-Broadway Oral History ProjectOral histories from the Off-Broadway theatre company Primary Stages.
- Oral History Online This link opens in a new window
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Indexes more than 2,700 collections of oral history in English from around the world. Provides keyword searching of full-text transcripts when available, plus links to audio and video files.
- UCLA Center for Oral History ResearchContains available online transcripts of oral histories conducted at UCLA.
- Conversations with William M. HoffmanOnline interviews with the playwright and theater practitioners, via CUNY television (2004-2013).
Online Primary Source Databases
See also tabs listed on this guide for newspapers, image resources, fashion and costume.
- AM Search This link opens in a new window
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UCLA subscribes to selected AM (formerly Adam Matthew) databases comprised of digitized archival material and primary sources. You can use AM Search to search across all of them. UCLA has access to licensed AM content published through 2023. Formerly known as Adam Matthew Archive Explorer.
- Alexander Street Press This link opens in a new window
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UCLA subscribes to several dozen distinct databases hosted by Alexander Street Press. This interface allows you to search across most of them. Click on "My Collections" to see the list of subscribed databases. - American Periodicals This link opens in a new window
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Published between 1741 and 1900, these periodicals include special interest and general magazines, literary and professional journals, children and women magazines, and many other historically significant periodicals. - Archives of Sexuality and Gender (Gale Primary Sources) This link opens in a new window
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Digitized 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). - British Periodicals This link opens in a new window
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Facsimile page images and searchable full text for nearly 500 British periodicals published from the 17th through the early 20th centuries. - C19: Nineteenth Century Index This link opens in a new window
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19th century books, journals, magazines, official documents, newspapers, and archives. Includes The Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue, The Wellesley Index, Poole's Index, Palmer's Index to the Times, and Periodicals Index Online. - Dance Online: Dance Studies Collection This link opens in a new window
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Collection of curated primary and secondary full-text materials from the 20th and 21st century, including photographs, correspondence, magazines, dance notation, and reference material. Includes the full run of Dance Magazine from 1927-present. - Early English Books Online (EEBO) This link opens in a new window
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Citations from early English texts from 1475 to 1700, presented as digital images. Includes works by Malory, Bacon, More, Erasmus, Boyle, Newton, Galileo; musical exercises by Henry Purcell and novels by Aphra Behn; prayer books, pamphlets, and proclamations; almanacs, calendars, and many other primary sources. - Early English Books Online — Text Creation Partnership This link opens in a new windowSearchable SGML/XML text editions of image files contained in Early English Books Online.
- Eighteenth Century Collections Online (Gale Primary Sources) This link opens in a new window
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Thousands of books, pamphlets, essays, broadsides and more, based on the English Short Title Catalogue. A comprehensive digital edition of The Eighteenth Century microfilm set, which aimed to include every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom, along with major works from the Americas, between 1701 and 1800.
- Eighteenth Century Drama: Censorship, Society and the Stage This link opens in a new window
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Features the John Larpent Collection from the Huntington Library, an archive of almost every play submitted for license in Britain between 1737 and 1824, as well as hundreds of documents that provide social context for the plays. Also includes searchable database of The London Stage, 1660-1800. - Eighteenth Century Journals, 1685-1835 This link opens in a new window
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A collection of rare newspapers and journals printed between 1685 and 1835 in the UK and colonies, including India, the Caribbean, and Canada, illuminating all aspects of eighteenth-century social, political and literary life. Includes an index to The Lady's Magazine, 1770-1818. - Empire Online This link opens in a new window
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Primary source manuscripts and secondary essays relevant to Empire Studies. The sections cover Cultural Contacts, 1492-1969; Empire Writing and the Literature of Empire; The Visible Empire; Religion & Empire; and Race, Class & Colonialism, 1783-1969. - Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive (EIMA) This link opens in a new window
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EIMA is an historical archive of major trade and consumer magazines in film, television, music, radio, and theater, from their inception to 2000. Includes weekly Variety, Hollywood Reporter, American Cinematographer, Back Stage, Billboard, Broadcasting, Picturegoer, Screen International, Spin, and more. UCLA has access to parts I, II and III of this database.
- London Low Life This link opens in a new window
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Contains primary source materials on Victorian street culture, including ephemera, penny fiction, cartoons, chapbooks, reform literature, and guides to prostitution.
- Royal Shakespeare Company Archives This link opens in a new window
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Royal Shakespeare Company Archives provides a comprehensive record of the performance history of the Royal Shakespeare Company and its predecessor, the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. Browse and compare almost 1,400 prompt books to uncover how productions took shape, and explore the creative process behind the company's most important presentations in extensive additional documentation including production records, costume designs, music files and photographs. - Shakespeare in Performance This link opens in a new window
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Annotated prompt books from the Folger Shakespeare Library, chronicling Shakespeare’s plays as performed in British, US, and international theaters between the 17th and 20th centuries. - Travel Writing, Spectacle and World History This link opens in a new window
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Hundreds of accounts by women of their travels across the globe from the early 19th century to the late 20th century. Sources cover topics including the arts, the British Empire, exploration, race, and more. Contents also include manuscripts, diaries and correspondence, drawings, guidebooks and photographs.
- Victorian Popular Culture: Circuses, Sideshows and Freaks
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Research portal for the study of popular entertainment in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This segment focuses on the world of travelling entertainment across Britain, American and Europe, and includes posters, postcards, photographs, cabinet cards and illustrations. - Victorian Popular Culture: Music Hall, Theatre and Popular Entertainment
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Research portal for the study of popular entertainment in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This segment focuses on the variety stage, vaudeville and theatre, and also includes magic lantern shows, early cinema and dioramas.
- World's Fairs This link opens in a new window
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"A global history of expositions." Official records, monographs, publicity, artwork, and artifacts from world's fairs, from the Crystal Palace in 1851 to twenty-first century expos.
Digital Collection Portals
These digitization projects are freely available online to researchers.
- EuropeanaIncludes digitized books, paintings, photographs, recordings and films from over 2,200 contributing cultural heritage organisations across Europe.
- Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)"The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. It strives to contain the full breadth of human expression, from the written word, to works of art and culture, to records of America’s heritage, to the efforts and data of science."
- Getty Research PortalOnline search platform with access to digitized art history texts in the public domain (including art, architecture, material culture, and related fields).
- 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.
- Internet Archive"A non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more."
- Gallica (Bibliotheque nationale de France)More than one million digitized documents (books, periodicals, manuscripts, maps, images, scores, sound recordings, etc.) at the French National Library.