American Studies Resources
Other American Studies Programs | Useful Websites | American Studies Journals
Theory and Methods | Writing Papers | Style Manuals
Other American Studies Programs
Bowling Green State University
See list of affiliated organizations.
Brown University
See especially the websites created by Brown students, faculty and staff.
University of Maryland-College Park
This site has a useful bibliography of Web "Metasites for American Studies."
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
University of Texas-Austin
This site also provides links to American Studies-related websites and other resources.
University of Virginia
This is a "must visit" website for American Studies on-line material.
Washington State University
This website includes a number of useful sites, arranged in categories, such as "popular culture," "theory and method," "social movements and culture," and the "multicultural American west."
Yale University
Yale provides web links to internet material relating to American Studies, some on-line courses, and a hypertext essay on Route 66.
Useful Websites
The most comprehensive site for American Studies-related on-line resources is the CROSSROADS PROJECT.
The LIBRARY OF CONGRESS now a number of "AMERICAN MEMORY" collections on-line, with materials ranging from African-American Sheet music (1850-1920) to Voices from the Dust Bowl.
The NATIONAL ARCHIVES has images and transcriptions of important historical documents and also many interesting on-line exhibits on aspects of American history.
Those people teaching the AMERICAN DREAMS course will probably be interested in accessing the HEATH ANTHOLOGY'S website.
HISTORY MATTERS offers useful material for teaching U.S. history, including primary source documents and online student guides for using various types of historical material, including films, maps, letters and diaries, etc.
Take a look at the UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA'S AMERICAN STUDIES website. It includes the hypertext versions of SISTER CARRIE, UNCLE TOM'S CABIN, WALDEN, etc.--AS WELL AS a "Yellow Pages" listing Department of American Studiess, specialized search engines and the like--AND a "Virtual Museum"--AND MORE!
For anyone interested in American poetry see this University of Illinois multimedia companion to the ANTHOLOGY OF MODERN AMERICAN POETRY edited by Cary Nelson.
Those people teaching the Sixties will be interested in visiting THE SIXTIES PROJECT.
AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE: ON-LINE RESOURCES was created by Professor T.V. Reed as part of an American popular culture course taught at Washtingon State University. The site focuses on the critical analysis of American popular culture, particularly on issues of race/ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, cultural imperialism and censorship, as shaped by and reflected in various mass media. This site also includes sections that introduce and give resources for four main types or elements of popular culture analysis: production analysis, textual analysis, audience analysis, and historical analysis On-line resources include sites on various genres of popular culture, including, music, film, television, advertising, magazines and comic books, and cyberculture. The site also has links to other on-line pop culture courses, to journals treating popular culture, and to other key sites for cultural analysis.
For a recent database source on advertising see Duke University's Special Collections library: "THE EMERGENCE OF ADVERTISING IN AMERICA, 1850-1920 " from the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History.
Most of the AMERICAN EXPERIENCE DOCUMENTARIES, such as "A Midwife's Tale" and "America and the Holocaust," have accompanying websites.
The INTERNET MOVIE DATABASE provides a mixture of useful and trivial information about films.
THE VOICE OF THE SHUTTLE began in late 1994 as an introduction to the Web for humanists at the University of California, Santa Barbara. VoS became publicly accessible in 1995, and has grown to a vast collection of links to humanities and humanities-related resources on the Internet, organized by subject. It is a good starting place for almost any search of on-line material relating to American Studies topics such as anthropology, music and dance, history, literature, architecture, cultural studies, photography, women's studies, etc.
DO HISTORY.ORG is a website for historians, teachers, and lay people interested in history and America's past. It was launched by the Harvard Film Study Center on February 4th, 2000. The site is an experimental, interactive case study that allows its users to experience the process of piecing together the life and world of an "ordinary" person in the past. Currently at the site, users get to try to piece together the world of 18th century midwife and healer Martha Ballard, from thousands of downloadable pages from original documents at the site, presented in both their original format and in transcription: diaries, letters, maps, court records, town records, account books, medical texts, and more.
CITY SITES is an inter- and multi-disciplinary study of the iconography, spatial forms and visual and literary cultures of New York and Chicago in the period 1870-1939. It was published electronically by the University of Birmingham Press in 2000, and it features essays on the urban cultures of New York and Chicago, with extensive online resources, map pages, bibliography, moving and still images and sound.
"FIRST-PERSON NARRATIVES OF THE AMERICAN SOUTH" is a collection of diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, travel accounts, and ex-slave narratives written by Southerners. The majority of materials in this collection are written by those Southerners whose voices were less prominent in their time, including African Americans, women, enlisted men, laborers, and Native Americans.
MAKING OF AMERICA (MOA) is a digital library of primary sources in American social history primarily from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. The book collection currently contains approximately 8,500 books with 19th century imprints.
American Studies Journals
AMERICAN QUARTERLY
Now over fifty years old, this publication, the official journal of the American Studies Association, publishes essays on American culture as well as reviews of books, exhibitions and films of interest to American Studies scholars.
PROJECT MUSE
A consortium of academic presses publishing over sixty journals (with at least the current issue of each on-line) You can access back issues of these journals via the Online Databases at Healey Library
JOURNAL OF ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES
The official publication of the Association for Asian American Studies, the Journal of Asian American Studies (JAAS) explores all aspects of Asian American experiences.
49th PARALLEL: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL OF NORTH AMERICAN STUDIES
This quarterly electronic journal is run by postgraduate students in the Department of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Birmingham (UK), and 49th Parallel aims to promote the work of postgraduates alongside that of more established scholars.
IMAGES: AN ONLINE JOURNAL OF POPULAR CULTURE AND FILM
This journal is particularly interested in visual culture, and articles that reference the visual in their analysis. In addition to articles, the journal publishes reviews--and is also looking for people interested in writing them.
THE JOURNAL OF MULTIMEDIA HISTORY
Published by the History Dept at the State University of New York at Albany " to bring serious historical scholarship and pedagogy under the scrutiny of amateurs and professionals alike, to utilize the promise of digital technologies to expand history's boundaries, merge its forms, and promote and legitimate innovations in teaching and research that we saw emerging all around us."
POSTMODERN CULTURE
Theoretical journal with articles on a range of topics relating to contemporary culture.
POP POLITICS
PopPolitics covers politics through an exploration of popular culture. One section of the web site, Culture Clash, is devoted to articles and essays related to a specific topic. Other sections publish more timely political and historical analysis, as well as music, film, television, and book commentary and reviews.
BAD SUBJECTS
Political Education for Everyday Life is a monthly journal which features articles in American studies, media studies, and gender studies
IN[ ]VISIBLE CULTURE
An Electronic Journal for Visual Studies
The purpose of In[ ]Visible Culture is to provide a forum for critical approaches to the production and analysis of cultural objects. The journal features essays and art projects that address contemporary issues within visual studies. In an effort to encourage lively discussions and debates, the publication entertains the wide spectrum of methodological and disciplinary approaches (including postcolonial, feminist, marxist, psychoanalytic, and queer theories) being applied to the study of visual culture.
SAFUNDI
The Journal of South African and American Comparitive Studies
Safundi is a peer-reviewed quarterly publication dedicated to comparing the histories, cultures, and modern experiences of the United States of America and the Republic of South Africa.
Theory and Methods
Click here for information on the theory and methods in the field of American Studies.
Writing Papers
There are several useful guides to writing papers to be found on the Internet.
A Short Guide to Writing in College (University of Chicago)
Writing the Academic Paper (Dartmouth College)
This web site starts by discussing the basic steps for writing academic papers and then presents suggests for writing papers in specific humanities disciplines (including English, film and music) and then in the social sciences disciplines (including history and sociology).
Getting an A on an English Paper (Rutgers University)
While you may not get an A if you follow this guide, you will certainly improve your paper!
On-Line Style Manuals
Chicago Manual of Style Form Guide
For a basic overview of the correct way to format citations to books, articles, and web sites in your papers, this is the web site for you!
MLA Citation Styles Handbook (University of Illinois at Urban-Champaign)
If you still have a question after visiting the first web site, go to this second one for more details. This site will tell you how to list corporate authors, edited collections, interviews, unpublished dissertations, TV programs, computer software. . .and much, MUCH MORE!
And Don't Forget. . .to take a look at UMass-Boston's own Information Literacy Tutorial on the Healey Library website, with separate modules on beginning your research; finding books, articles and websites; citing sources and avoiding plagiarism; and evaluating resources.