Research Guides: English 302: Contemporary and Digitized Sources

Digitized Magazines and Newspapers

Independent Voices
An open access digital collection of alternative press newspapers, magazines and journals, drawn from the special collections of participating libraries. These periodicals were produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century.

Women's Magazine Archives This link opens in a new window
Includes these popular magazines:
Cosmopolitan (1886-2005)
Essence (1970-2005)
Seventeen (1944-2005)
Town and Country (1846-2005)
Woman’s Day (1937-2005)
Women’s International Network News (1975-2003)

Google Books
Contains the full text of popular magazines digitized by Google including Life, Ebony, Jet, and more. Choose "Magazines" and select the publication dates to get more relevant results.

ProQuest Historical Newspapers (US) This link opens in a new window
Searches across the full text and images of major U.S. and Black historical newspapers. Includes New York Times, Boston Globe, Chicago Defender, L.A. Times, and more.

Library Databases

Women and Social Movements in the United States This link opens in a new window
Publication Dates: 1600-2000
Provides the full text of primary sources from document projects and archives.

Audiovisuals and Zines

Herstories: Audio/Visual Collections
Contains digitized copies of some of the 3,000 oral history cassettes in the Lesbian Herstory Archives' Spoken Word Collection and 950 videotapes in the Video Collection.
Queer Zine Archive Project
The Queer Zine Archive Project (QZAP) was first launched in November 2003 in an effort to preserve queer zines and make them available to other queers, researchers, historians, punks, and anyone else who has an interest DIY publishing and underground queer communities.

Periodical Indexes/Databases

Readers' Guide Retrospective This link opens in a new window
Publication Dates: 1890-1982
Includes brief information about articles from popular and general interest magazines published in the U.S. and Canada. Also includes book reviews.
Alternative Press Archive This link opens in a new window
Publication Dates: 1969-1990
Contains summaries of articles from alternative, radical and left magazines and journals. Use to research topics not covered well in the mainstream press.

The Women's Movement in the `70s
Call Number: SAWYER REFERENCE HQ1154 .K74 1977
An international bibliography of materials published 1970-1975 on the status of women. U.S. section is categorized into themes. Includes subject index.

Print Magazines

The library has a rich historical collection of popular magazines in print, but it represents the background of the students attending Williams College at the time (i.e., white men). Magazines for women and people of color tend to start appearing in the collection in the late 1980s/early 1990s. Magazines can be found by searching for the title in the library catalog.