By Jutta Seibert

Looking for news from Ireland? We’ve got you covered. Falvey Library has arranged trial access to Irish Newspaper Archives, a collection of over 200 current and historical newspapers covering all Irish counties. The Archives are updated daily and you can expect to read today’s issues of The Belfast Telegraph, The Corkman, The Donegal News, the Irish Independent, the Tipperary Star, and many other newspapers from Ireland and Northern Ireland whenever you log on. Also available are the archives of a long list of since defunct newspapers, such as The Freeman’s Journal (1763-1924), the Nation (1842-1897), and Punch (1844-1925). Those of our readers who have consulted the Irish Radical Newspapers collection in the past will be familiar with the search interface and collection platform.

Trial access to the Irish Newspaper Archives will be available until October 20. We noticed that the Archives’ response times are slow and ask for your patience. Let us know if you would like to recommend the Archives for the Library’s permanent collection.

Related resources in the Falvey collections:

• Irish studies research guide
• The Irish Times (ProQuest Historical Newspapers)
  Presents a complete archive of the Irish Times back to 1859 (except for the most recent two years) and the Weekly Irish Times (1876-1958).
• Irish newspapers in Falvey’s Digital Library
  Available titles include The Free State, The Irish Felon, The Irish People, The Irish Tribune, The Irish Worker and People’s Advocate, The Irishman, The United Irishman, and The Waterford Chronicle.
• Irish newspapers on microfilm in the Falvey collection
  Titles available include: An-Phoblacht/The Republic, Belfast News-letter, Dublin News, Evening Freeman, Evening Telegraph, Freeman’s Journal, Irish Freedom, Irish Times, Irish Tribune, Irishman, Pilot, The Peasant, United Irishman, and The Weekly Nation.
• The Irish Press
  A weekly newspaper dedicated to Irish nationalism for an Irish American audience. It was founded by Joseph McGarrity and published in Philadelphia from 1918 to 1922.
• Radical Newspapers, 1886-1993 (Irish Newspaper Archives)
  Digital archives of more than 100 newspapers, bulletins, and pamphlets covering a broad sweep of nationalist, republican, feminist, and socialist publications.

Jutta Seibert is Director of Research Services & Scholarly Engagement at Falvey Memorial Library.

By Jutta Seibert

Villanova faculty members, students, and staff who are interested in Japanese society, culture, and politics can currently explore the archive of the Japan Times, the longest running Japanese newspaper in English language. Trial access to the archive will be available until Aug. 5.

Motosado Zumoto launched the Japan Times in March of 1897 and served as its founding editor. His goal was to promote Japanese perspectives and values among Westerners and to give Japanese people the opportunity to read and discuss local and international news in English. Japanese business people, students, and foreign residents represented the bulk of the newspaper’s audience. While the Japan Times styled itself as an independent daily, there was always a measure of government influence. Prince Ito Hirobumi, a four-time prime minister of Japan, financed the paper for some time. In 1933, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs appointed Hitoshi Ashida, former ministry official, as chief editor, reducing the Times to an outlet for Imperial Japanese government propaganda.

Also included in this database is The Japan Advertiser, a competing newspaper which eventually merged with the Japan Times. The Advertiser was written by and for missionaries, diplomats, merchants, and journalists who were based in Japan. Search results can be limited by imperial period. The archive includes extras and supplements as well as images and ads. The most recent issues currently available in the archive are from 2021.

A link to the collection will be available on the Databases A-Z list until the trial ends on Aug. 5.

Jutta Seibert is Director of Research Services & Scholarly Engagement at Falvey Memorial Library.

By Jutta Seibert

You asked for it and we delivered: Falvey recently acquired permanent access to the digital archive of UK Parliamentary Papers. The archive comprises documents from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, as well as some earlier papers. The twenty-first century collection is not available to the Villanova community, but some of the papers from this period are freely available through the UK’s Parliamentary Archives.

The House of Parliament, as seen from Lambeth.
Image taken from “The Earth and Its Inhabitants. Europe. Vol. 4, The British Isles” by Élisée Reclus. New York: Appleton and Co., 1881, p. 184. Courtesy of Hathi Trust.

Research applications are endless given the scope of the archive. Its contents hold wide appeal for scholars from a range of disciplines, including political science, history, and Irish studies. They cover a vast sweep of events tracing the political discourse on matters large and small. Expect to find sessional papers, acts, bills, agreements, public petitions, and reports among the archived documents. Among the many issues and events covered figure universal suffrage, the slave trade and its abolition, the poor laws, child labor, mandatory vaccination, a long list of wars, national trade statistics on products such as cotton, coffee, tea, sugar, timber, and rubber, government funded expeditions such as the ill-fated arctic expedition led by Sir John Franklin, British overseas colonies and their struggles for independence, and the Troubles in Northern Ireland to name just a few topics.

The archive offers an advanced search interface and search facets that will narrow results by date, document type, Parliament chamber, and subject. Document features, such as maps, plans, tables, graphs, and illustrations, are indexed and easy to identify. Documents can be downloaded in PDF format.

This archive does not generate document citations, but the Details view includes common and Cockton titles, date, series, document number, and a permalink; in short, all the necessary elements. I am including below a selection of documents that illustrate the broad sweep of archival sources included in this archive.

Let us know if you have any further questions or visit the ProQuest Guide to UK Parliamentary Papers. Access to the archive is provided via the Databases A-Z list and the Library’s catalog.

A Sampling of Documents from the UK Parliamentary Papers Archive

• The Belfast Agreement: An Agreement Reached at the Multi-Party Talks on Northern Ireland. Command Papers 3883, 1997/98.
  Better known as Good Friday Agreement.
• Children’s Employment Commission. First Report of the Commissioners. Mines. London: William Clowes and Sons, 1842.
• Select Committee on State of Children Employed in Manufactories of United Kingdom. Report of the Minutes of Evidence. House of Commons Papers 397, 1816.
• Reports from Protectors of Slaves in Colonies of Demerara, Berbice, Trinidad, St. Lucia, Cape of Good Hope and Mauritius. House of Commons Papers 262, 1830-31.
• Treaties between Great Britain and Portugal, France, Russia, Netherlands, Sardinia, Austria, Prussia, United States of America, and Saxony, 1815, on Territories, Commerce, and Slave Trade (Class B.). House of Commons Papers 2, 1816.
• Bill to prevent Spreading of Infection of Small-Pox (as amended by Committee). Bills and Acts 287, 1808.
• Vaccination Acts (repeal). A Bill to Repeal the Vaccination Acts. Bills and Acts 204, 1911.
• Papers relating to Blockade of Ports of Confederate State. Command Papers 2931, 1862.
• Account of Quantity of Refined Sugar and Sugar Candy imported into United Kingdom, 1848-68 […]. House of Commons Papers 191, 1868-69.
• Bill for Relief of H.M. Roman Catholic Subjects (as amended by Committee). Bills and Acts 104, 1829.
• An Act for making a Railway from London to Southampton. [25th July 1834.] Bills and Acts 3, 1834.

Illustration of the work performed by Margaret Hipps, age seventeen, in a UK coal mine.
Taken from “Children’s Employment Commission. First Report of the Commissioners. Mines,”
published in London by William Clowes and Sons in 1842 (fig. 19, p. 95). UK Parliamentary Papers (ProQuest)

Jutta Seibert is Director of Research Services & Scholarly Engagement at Falvey Memorial Library.

By Jutta Seibert

In prior decades, access to historical news sources has been revolutionized through large-scale digitization projects. Yet many of the newly created digital newspaper archives remain tied to institutional subscriptions that limit the number and types of archives academic communities can access.

Regrettably, the digitization of non-western newspapers has been neglected for many reasons, including language, writing systems, and demand. These important historical sources were collecting dust in remote storage facilities of large research libraries until 2019 when the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), recognizing the unique value of these collections, partnered with East View, a publisher specializing in Russian, Chinese, and Arabic news databases, to develop a series of digital collections that would provide “global access to a wide selection of newspapers from around the world.”

Thus the Global Press Archive was born. It currently features five open access collections, besides a few more collections that require subscriptions.

Geographic distribution of newspapers in the Global Press Archive.

East View is well known in academic circles as a provider of Russian and Chinese news sources. East View’s experience in digitizing news sources published in non-Roman scripts made them a good fit for CRL who was looking for a partner with expertise in digitizing non-Western newspapers. CRL member institutions hold rich primary source collections from all around the world, and while local interest in these sources can be low, the global communities which produced these newspapers in the first place would be given the unique opportunity to access them freely online.

CRL raised the necessary funds to create a number of open access collections of non-Western news sources and as a result five open access collections were published for the Global Press Archive project since 2019.

Gazetnyĭ mir Rossii XIX – nachala XX veka

The Imperial Russian Newspapers collection features a selection of 32 newspapers published between 1782 and 1917. Most of them are from Moscow and St. Petersburg, but some regional titles are also included. The search interface features a transliteration table and a Cyrillic keyboard to facilitate discovery. Bibliographic indexes of newspapers published in Imperial Russia are part of the collection. Some of the contents of the collection were supplied by the National Library of Russia in collaboration with CRL.

The Southeast Asian Newspapers collection comprises 118 newspapers published in Indonesia, Cambodia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam between 1831 and 1958. Most of these news publications were short lived, and the archive will then only include a few years’ worth of issues. The newspapers were produced in a range of Southeast Asian languages including Filipino, Indonesian, Javanese, Vietnamese, Khmer, and Thai. Those unable to read any of these languages might be interested in the Arabic, French, English, Spanish, and Dutch publications that are part of this collection. A quick search for independence retrieves matches for various forms of the word, such as the Spanish independencia and the French inédependance. Most of the newspapers in the archive can only be browsed as the search interface only permits searches for words using the Roman alphabet.

The Middle Eastern and North African Newspapers collection includes about 80 newspapers, mostly from Syria and Lebanon, but also from Iraq, Egypt, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Palestine. Most newspapers are in Arabic but a few papers published in English and French are also included. The collection spans from the second half of the 19th century to the early 20th century. While most of the content of this collection is freely available, access to five newspapers is limited to CRL member institutions. The search interface includes an Arabic keyboard to enter and retrieve search terms in Arabic.

Newspaper vendors in Beirut, 1956. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

El Debate, June 11, 1910.
Courtesy of Global Press Archive.

The Independent and Revolutionary Mexican Newspapers collection offers by far the greatest number of publications with nearly 1,000 newspapers from Mexico’s pre-independence, independence, and revolutionary periods (1807-1929). The newspapers are predominantly in Spanish but a few French, English, and German language titles are also included. While holdings for many of the newspapers featured in this collection are available only in short runs, the titles are often unique and, in many cases, represent the only existing record of a newspaper’s short-lived publication. The collection was digitized based on archival newspaper holdings of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, a research library at the University of Texas at Austin, considered to be the preeminent Latin American library in the United States.

The Late Qing and Republican-Era Chinese Newspapers collection comprises 292 newspapers spanning the period 1911-1949. All papers are in Chinese. Sadly, the collection lacks a Chinese character keyboard and can hence only be browsed as search results will be limited to ads and names that use the Roman alphabet. Newspapers from more than 20 major cities are included covering most regions of mainland China.

Open access is made possible through the generous support of the Center for Research Libraries and its member institutions. A link to the Global Press Archive collection can be found under “G” on the Library’s Databases A-Z list.

Jutta Seibert is Director of Research Services & Scholarly Engagement at Falvey Memorial Library.

By Jutta Seibert

The Marxists Internet Archive (MIA) may at first glance look like a hold-over from the early internet years, but a closer look quickly reveals its lasting scholarly relevance. This one-of-a-kind library is home to a wealth of sources representative of the width and depth of Marxist thinking worldwide. Scholars can find here the works of most Marxist thinkers and practitioners, selected works of contemporary practitioners, and a range of influential works that predate Marx and Engels.

As should be expected from a library of Marxist thought, all content is freely available as promised in the MIA’s charter. The texts in the archive are either in the public domain or were published with the permission of the current copyright holder. Other texts, including transcriptions and translations, were contributed by volunteers.

Some core texts are missing because current copyright holders do not permit to share them freely online. Foremost among these is the authoritative English translation of the collected works of Marx and Engels. This 50-volume set was produced through the collaborative efforts of three left-leaning publishing houses: Lawrence & Wishart (London), International Publishers (New York), and Progressive Publishers (Moscow). Initially Lawrence & Wishart permitted the digital publication of the collected works through MIA but later withdrew its permission fearing a loss of revenue. Today, Lawrence & Wishart only grants free online access to the collected works on its own website. The Villanova community has access to this set through the Past Masters collection, and the Library’s print collection. The German edition of the collected works is freely available online.

The New Masses, Nov. 1930 issue.

Despite the gaping hole left by the absence of the authoritative English translation of the collected works of Marx and Engels, there remains a wealth of Marxist thought to be explored. The Beginner’s Guide to Marxism introduces the subject with a carefully curated selection of fundamental Marxist ideas. The works of major Marxist thinkers, such as Marx & Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg, and Mao Zedong, are organized in special sub-archives. MIA can also be explored by browsing through its many subject collections, including archives about branches of Marxism, such as Anarchists and Bolsheviks; key historical events, such as the French Revolution and the Comintern; and related movements, such as the Black Liberation and African Liberation movements. The works of Marxist thinkers who are still alive and politically active are out of scope. The same goes for works that are copyright protected, such as important English translations of the works of Marx & Engels. However, because of the global impact of Marxist thought a wide range of languages and geographical regions are represented in the archive.

The MIA periodicals collection brings together an impressive lineup of socialist and communist newspapers and magazines. They can be accessed through a separate drop-down menu on the archive’s homepage. Most of the periodicals are in English, German, and French. Among the titles are the Black Panther (1967–1976), the Camden Voice of Labor (1912–1920), the Irish Marxist Review (2012–present), the Masses (1911–1917), the Liberator (1918–1924), and the New Masses (1926–1948).

In some cases, only selected articles, as opposed to complete issues, have been digitized. The Rheinische Zeitung is one case in point. Only the articles contributed by Marx are available. The Beijing Review (formerly the Peking Review), an English language news magazine published by the Chinese Communist Party, is not listed on the periodicals menu, but rather the Chinese Communism Archive links to the extensive archive which goes back to the first issue published in 1958 and includes over a thousand issues up to 2006. Besides the works of Marxist thinkers and the extensive collection of periodicals, MIA also offers a small selection of recorded speeches as well as images and short videos.

Each new visit to the MIA promises serendipitous discoveries. On my last visit I found two pamphlet collections from the 1920s: the Little Red Library and a collection of Trade Union Educational League Pamphlets. These pamphlets were published by the Communist Party USA and various trade unions and intended for the education of party and union members. For example, one of the volumes in the Little Red Library was written by Max Shachtman about the Paris Commune, and another one presents Engels’ Principles of Communism in English translation. Make some time and stop by the Marxists Internet Archive! The MIA is linked from the Library’s Databases A-Z list.

Related resources:

• Short biography of Karl Marx from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography written by the indomitable Eric Hobsbawm.
• Short biography of Friedrich Engels from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography written by Gareth Stedman Jones.
• Marx: A Very Short Introduction, 2nd ed., by Peter Singer.
• Engels: A Very Short Introduction, by Terrell Carver.
• Past Masters (InteLex)
  Features the English language edition of the collected works of Marx & Engels published by Lawrence & Wishart, International Publishers, and Progressive Publishers.
• Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA)
  Launched in 1975 as a collaborative project of the SED (GDR) and CPSU (USSR) and published by the East German Dietz Verlag. The project was transferred to the International Marx-Engels Stiftung in Amsterdam and new volumes are published by de Gruyter since 2013.
• Marx-Engels Werke (MEW)
  Published between 1956 and 1968 in East Germany. Lacks some important works and was replaced by MEGA. Freely available online.
• The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism
• The Cambridge History of Communism (3 vols.)

Jutta Seibert is Director of Research Services & Scholarly Engagement at Falvey Memorial Library.

By Jutta Seibert

Proceedings of the 1st National Negro
Congress, Feb. 14-16, 1936, Chicago.
Courtesy of Washington Area Spark.

Labor rights were an important facet of the civil rights movement and figured prominently on the program of the National Negro Congress (NNC). Some union excluded African Americans while others limited their rights in one way or another. The Communist Party of the United States of America, which promoted worker solidarity across racial and national boundaries, supported the work of the NNC. Although the NNC did not expressly favor any political party some of its members were affiliated with the Communist Party. James W. Ford, one of the co-founders of the NNC, was three times selected to run as the Communist Party’s vice presidential candidate. The novelist, poet, and activist Richard Wright was likewise affiliated with both organizations. Other prominent members of the NNC included the singer, actor, and activist Paul Robeson and Asa Philip Randolph, the founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. African America, Communists, and the National Negro Congress (AACNNC), a collection of primary sources documenting the work of the NNC is available at Falvey Memorial Library. The papers in the collection outline the history of the NNC from its inception to its dissolution.

John P. Davis, a lawyer, journalist, and activist, who was the driving force behind the NNC, envisioned it as an umbrella organization that would unite and focus existing efforts in the struggle for equal rights and thus increase national impact. He already had an extensive network of connections among African American organizations, such as the NAACP and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters from his prior work with the Joint Committee on National Recovery.

The NNC convened for its first national convention in Chicago on February 14, 1936. Richard Wright attended the convention and wrote about it in an essay entitled “Two Million Black Voices,” which appeared in the communist magazine The New Masses (Feb. 25, 1936, p. 15). In it he vividly evoked a sense of shared purpose and hope.  African American newspapers likewise reported on the Chicago convention. Throughout the month of February The Chicago Defender informed its readers about the activities at the Convention in great detail. It also published the resolutions adopted by the NNC.

“Resolutions Adopted by the National Congress.” Chicago Defender, February 22, 1936, p. 10.

The oldest documents in the AACNNC collection date back to 1933, predating the formation of the NNC by a few years. The papers from those early years document the efforts to get the new organization off the ground. The range of documents in the collection includes print materials as well as typed and hand-written manuscripts from the papers of John P. Davis, Edward Strong, and Revels Cayton, who served as executive secretaries from 1935 to 1947, as well as Davis’ files from the Negro Industrial League and from his work on the Joint Committee on National Recovery along with records of the Negro Labor Victory Committee. The original documents are preserved at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, which provides a detailed description of the collection on its website.

Villanova students, faculty, and staff may access the collection on Gale’s Archives Unbound platform via the Library’s Databases A-Z list under “A”.

Related Resources

• Wittner, Lawrence S. “The National Negro Congress: A Reassessment.” American Quarterly 22, no. 4 (1970): 883–901. https://doi.org/10.2307/2711875.
• Davis, John P. Let Us Build a National Negro Congress. Washington: National Sponsoring Committee, National Negro Congress, 1935. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uiug.30112063345828.
• Black Historical Newspapers (ProQuest)
  Offers access to the major African American newspapers of the 20th century: the Atlanta Daily World (1931-2003), the Baltimore Afro-American (1893-1988), the Cleveland Call & Post (1934-1991), the Chicago Defender (1910-1975), the Los Angeles Sentinel (1934-2005), the New York Amsterdam News (1922-1993), the Norfolk Journal & Guide (1921-2003), the Philadelphia Tribune (1912-2001), and the Pittsburgh Courier (1911-2002).
• The New Masses Digital Archive (Marxist Internet Archive)
• The Daily Worker Online, 1922-1968 (Brill)
  Offers the complete archive of the Daily Worker, which was the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) between 1924 and 1958.
• African American Studies Center (Oxford University Press)
  Contains a selection of information sources ranging from the authoritative Encyclopedia of African American History to the African American National Biography project. Selected primary sources, maps, images, charts, and tables round out the collection.
• Race Relations in America (Adam Matthew Digital)
  Documents the fight for civil rights with digital copies of the reports, surveys, analyses, and speeches produced by staff and participants of the Annual Race Relations Institute based at Fisk University from 1943 to 1970. Sourced from the records of the Race Relations Department of the United Church Board for Homeland Ministries, housed at the Amistad Research Center in New Orleans.

Jutta Seibert is Director of Research Services & Scholarly Engagement at Falvey Memorial Library.

By Jutta Seibert

Newspaper section of
Emily McPherson College Library,
Russell Street, circa 1960s.
Courtesy of Museums Victoria.

Newspapers and magazines are popular primary sources for good reasons: many of them have been digitized, they cover most topics and events, and they are continuously published over many years.

Compared to other primary sources, which are preserved in brick and mortar archives and which may only exist in their fragile original format, newspaper and magazine archives are widely available with few hurdles to access. By their very nature they were mass-produced when they were first published, and in many cases have since been converted to microfilm and digital formats.

Identifying suitable newspapers and magazines for a project among the plethora of serial publications would be daunting where it not for specific research tools designed to help with this task.

Newspaper and magazine archives present some unique research challenges, such as locating existing archives or issues and finding access to them through library portals. Falvey’s new research guide Newspapers & Magazines addresses most of these challenges. It offers guidance on how to find a specific newspaper or magazine, how to find a cited article, how to identify newspapers and magazines for a project, and gives advice on how to work with digital and microfilm archives. It also covers Chicago-style citations for news articles. One of the most exciting features of the new guide is an A-Z list of available newspaper and magazine archives.

Microfilm reader, Haifa University Library, ca. 1980.
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The Newspapers & Magazines research guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, which encourages interested readers to reuse all or part of its contents. Falvey also offers a workshop on research with newspaper and magazine archives, which can be requested through the Library’s website.

We invite you to take a closer look and revisit the guide the next time you are looking for newspaper and magazine archives. The Newspapers & Magazines research guide can be found on the history subject guide on the Library’s website.

Let us know what you think and send us your questions.

Jutta Seibert is Director of Research Services & Scholarly Engagement at Falvey Memorial Library.

By Sarah Hughes

Gender: Identity and Social Change is a new resource from Adam Matthew Digital containing both primary and secondary resources from the 19th century up to the present. As the name suggests, the collection covers the interdisciplinary area of gender history. Pivotal historical moments related to activism, which lead to equality and women’s rights are found through international primary resources from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

Official program, Woman Suffrage Procession, 1909-1919, © Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America

Some of the themes in the collection include women’s suffrage, feminism, employment and labor, organizations, education, legal cases, and domesticity and the family.

Speeches, pamphlets, newspaper clippings, correspondence, and diaries are just a few of the primary sources that detail the historical development gender identity, roles, and relations. Also featured is an array of visuals, including photographs, illustrations, posters, scrapbooks, and objects. Some of the secondary resources are supplemental essays from leading scholars in the field and video interviews with leading academics.

Access to the collections is available via the link above or on the Library’s Database A-Z list and its catalog.

Sarah Hughes is Nursing & Life Sciences Librarian at Falvey Memorial Library.

By Jutta Seibert

Some of the largest book sets on the shelves of Falvey Memorial Library are letterpress editions of the papers of the nation’s founding fathers and other influential political figures. Their sheer size and the outsized scholarly effort that it takes to bring together in one place historical documents that are widely dispersed over hundreds of archives, libraries, and private collections are awe-inspiring.

Some of these editorial projects took decades to publish while others have yet to be completed. Among the latter are the papers of Thomas Jefferson. The planning for a comprehensive edition of Jefferson’s papers began in 1944 and the first of sixty originally projected volumes was published in 1950 by Princeton University Press. Over 50 volumes have been completed under the direction of five consecutive general editors at this point.

Many of these letterpress editions have been transformed into digital editions in recent years. Editions published by Rotunda, the electronic imprint of The University of Virginia Press, combine “the originality, intellectual rigor, and scholarly value of traditional peer-reviewed university press publishing with thoughtful technological innovation designed for scholars and students.”

For example, all Rotunda projects follow text encoding initiative (TEI) guidelines, thus opening up the individual and collective text corpora to text mining and text analysis projects. Over the years, Falvey Memorial Library acquired many of the Rotunda editions to facilitate new modes of scholarship. For example, scholars need no longer work with a corpus in isolation, but can now query all the Rotunda editions simultaneously.

The University of Virginia Press grants temporarily free access to all collections available through its Rotunda imprint in response to the COVID-19 crisis, which has closed many library buildings and made the letterpress print editions of presidential papers inaccessible. Collections that are only temporarily available are highlighted below.

Note the recently added collection of The Papers of Woodrow Wilson. Links to the collections owned by the Library can be found in the Library’s catalog. The Library’s Databases A-Z list includes a link to the American History Collection on the Rotunda platform.

American Founding Era

• The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution. Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 1976. 29 volumes.
• Documentary History of the First Federal Congress of the United States of America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972. 22 volumes.
  Falvey owns print only. Rotunda grants temporary access to the digital edition until June 30, 2020.
• The Adams Papers – Digital Edition.
  Brings together the papers of John Adams published by Belknap Press, his legal papers, autobiographies, and diaries, the correspondence of the Adams family, and the diaries of John Quincy Adams in one collection. 41 volumes.
• The Papers of Alexander Hamilton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961. 27 volumes.
• The Selected Papers of John Jay. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010. 5 volumes.
• The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950-. 59 volumes.
• The Dolley Madison Digital Edition. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004.
• The Papers of James Madison. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1984. 41 volumes.
• The Papers of John Marshall. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1974. 12 volumes.
• The Diaries of Gouverneur Morris. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011. 4 vols.
• The Papers of Eliza Lucas Pinckney and Harriott Pinckney Horry Digital Edition. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012.
• The Papers of the Revolutionary Era Pinckney Statesmen Digital Edition. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016. 2 volumes.
  This collection is not part of the Falvey collection. Rotunda grants temporary access to the digital edition until June 30, 2020.
• The Papers of George Washington. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1987. 71 volumes.

Antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction

• The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967. 32 volumes.
• The Papers of Andrew Jackson. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1980. 10 volumes.
• The Papers of Daniel Webster. Hanover, N.H.: Published for Dartmouth College by the University Press of New England, 1974. 15 volumes.
  Falvey owns print only. Rotunda grants temporary access to the digital edition until June 30, 2020.

American Century

• New at Falvey: The Papers of Woodrow Wilson. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966. 69 volumes.
• Presidential Recordings Digital Edition.
  Features annotated transcripts of the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon White House tapes.
  This collection is not part of the Falvey collection. Rotunda grants temporary access to the digital edition until June 30, 2020.

Jutta Seibert is Director of Research Services & Scholarly Engagement at Falvey Memorial Library.

Linotype operators of the Chicago Defender newspaper, 1941.

By Darren G. Poley

Newspapers are primary sources for facts and opinion concerning people and events. They can also tell us a lot about society and culture in a historical time and place. For these reasons, one of the newest databases now available to the Villanova community is one of Gale’s primary sources collections: Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers. It provides full-text access to an array of major 19th-century American newspapers, regional newspapers, illustrated papers, and those published by groups and interests, such as African Americans, Native Americans, women’s rights groups, labor groups, and the Confederacy.

Some of the other historical newspaper collections Falvey also provides access to online by means of its Databases A-Z list and guides on its website:

• African American Newspapers: The 19th Century (Accessible Archives)
• American Indian Newspapers (Adam Matthew Digital)
• America’s Historical Newspapers (Readex)
• Black Abolitionist Papers (ProQuest)
• Black Historical Newspapers (ProQuest)
• Catholic News Archive (Catholic Research Resources Alliance)
• Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers (Library of Congress)
• Historical Newspapers (ProQuest)
• LGBT Magazine Archive (ProQuest)
• New York Times: 1851- (ProQuest Historical Newspapers)
• Pennsylvania Gazette: 1728-1800 (Accessible Archives)
• Pennsylvania Newspaper Record: Delaware County (Accessible Archives)
• Philadelphia Inquirer, 1860-2009 (ProQuest Historical Newspapers)
• Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 1786-2008 (ProQuest Historical Newspapers)
• Washington Post Historical: 1877- (ProQuest)

Darren G. Poley is Associate Director of Research Services and Scholarly Engagement, and Theology, Humanities & Classical Studies Librarian at Falvey Memorial Library.