American Literature: Historical Sources

American Periodicals Series Online, 1740-1900: Full text of over 1,100 American magazines and journals.

American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection, 1691-1877: Full text of over 6,500 American journals.

Reader's Guide Retrospective, 1890-1982: The major index to mainsteam magazines in the U.S. during the 20th century.

Eight Centuries (formerly know as Poole's Plus or 19th-Century Masterfile), 1800-1930: Another index to British and American periodicals with a focus on popular magazines through 1930. Since you're searching the tables of contents as they originally appeared, keep your searches simple and use the language of the time period.

Periodicals Index Online: An index to literary and scholarly British and American periodicals from the 18th-21st centuries. As with the 19th-Century Masterfile, keep your searches simple.

New York Times HIstorical Full Text, 1856-2009: Searchable full scans of the newspaper; excellent for book reviews, interviews with authors, and primary accounts of historical events. UGA also has similar databases for the Atlanta Constitution (1868-1984), Christian Science Monitor (1908-99), Wall Street Journal (1889-1995), and Washington Post (1877-1996). Other historic Georgia newspapers have been digitized by the Digital Library of Georgia.

America's Historical Newspapers, 1690-1928: Digitized copies of hundreds of American newspapers.

Accessible Archives: Full text of selected U.S. newspapers in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Use these indexes to trace the critical reception of a work. The databases above also include book reviews.

Gale Literature Criticism: Reprints of reviews and critical essays in chronological order. Look for the set covering the time period that your book was published:

• Literature Criticism from 1400-1800 (Main Reference PN86 .L53)
• Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism (Main Reference PN761 .N5)
• Twentieth-Century Literature Criticism (Main Reference PN94 .T93)
• Contemporary Literary Criticism (Main Reference PN771 .C59)

Combined Retrospective Index to Book Reviews in Humanities Journals, 1802-1974 (Main Reference Z1035.A1B640): Author and title access to about 500,000 book reviews that appeared in humanities journals.

Combined Retrospective Index to Book Reviews in Scholarly Journals, 1886-1974 (Main Reference Z1035.A1C60): Author and title access to over one million book reviews which appeared in journals in the social sciences.

Book Review Digest, 1905-2008 (Main Reference Z1219 .B724): An index to reviews of fiction and nonfiction works published in U.S. and U.K. periodicals. To be included, a book must have been published or distributed in the U.S.

Book Review Index, 1965-2008 (Main Reference Z1219 .B725): An index to reviews in the mainstream press of fiction and nonfiction books.