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Searching the Online Catalog
Browsing Popular Magazines
Using Online Databases
Websites
Searching the Online
Catalog:
The objective of this guide is to
assist you in finding images to support your specific topic on the
American Dream.
The phrase "American Dream" is not a LC subject heading, but it has
been used so frequently in the titles of books and articles that it
is useful to do a title search for American Dream then
look at the results and the subject headings used. You can also do a
keyword search forAmerican dream but this results in
more than 400 titles. Modify that by using the phrases
photographs, or pictorial or illustrations or
exhibitions and you'll find titles such as this:
- American photography and the American dream.
To use just one specific example among the many topics associated
with the American Dream, the term housing in your keyword
search will retrieve a relevant title for that subject, an
exhibition catalog from the National Building Museum and a book on
Levittown, an icon of postwar development.
- World War II and the American dream.
- Expanding the American dream: building and rebuilding
Levittown.
Combining the phrase with terms such as television or
Hollywood will also yield useful titles.
- Movie land: Hollywood and the great American dream.
- Brought to you by: postwar television advertising and the
American dream.
- The western: parables of the American dream.
- Honey, I'm home: Sitcoms, selling the American dream.
Another useful search might be a keyword search for American
Dream AND popular culture
- Mythmakers of the American dream: the nostalgic vision in
popular culture.
- The American dream: the 50s (a Time-Life book which
is mostly illustrated; Time-Life books are a good source of
illustrations. Combine the phrase time-life with another
keyword to locate others.
Many of these will be illustrated or will lead you to the source
of illustrations. At the
Media Resources Center in the UL, you may be able to find
films for your analysis of images.
Film Index International can also be useful if you are
focusing on film as a type of image.
There are also relevant videos, such as David Halberstam's
The Fifties (6 vhs) and R. Crumb's animation.
There are also a number of photographers who documented American
life during the postwar period to 1968 ("the day the Dream died.")
Robert Frank's The Americans (1959) is a famous work you
may wish to look at (along with his other work-search the online
catalog with Frank as author.) The American obsession with
self-portrayal and the rise in color snapshot photography and
the popular "photo booth" are documented in books on those
subjects:
- Americans in Kodachrome 1945-1965.
- Photobooth
These two, along with many other books on photography, are in
the Art Library, usually in the TRs. Davis has a TR section as
well. A subject search on photography-united states
is a good starting point for general works on photography in the
U.S.
Artists of the Postwar era, particularly the abstract
expressionists like Pollock and DeKooning or the
advertising-influenced artists of the Pop movement like Robert
Indiana and Andy Warhol may lend visual support to your topics.
Indiana even had a series entitled American Dream. Once you
have identified artists you can find images from museum web pages.
Books to assist you in identifying some American painters of the
postwar era are:
- The triumph of American painting; a history of
abstract expressionism.
- Pop Art (numerous works)
Another way to find information is by consulting some of the
surveys decade by decade. You can use subject headings like
nineteen fifties or nineteen sixties to
retrieve illustrated titles like:
- The sixties. (a work by celebrated photographer
Richard Avedon)
- The 1960s. (a book on fashion and costume)
- All shook up: a flash of the fifties. (a book on
pop cultures)
- 60s a decade in Vogue.
- Out of the 60s. (the actor Dennis Hopper's
photography collection)
Specific dates can also be searched, or decades used in a
keyword search:
- 1968: the Year the dream died.
- In opposition; images of American dissent in the
sixties.
For all the book titles listed above, search by title to get the
call number (omitting the initial article "the.")
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Other sources of visual information
will be popular magazines, such as Life, Look,
Saturday Evening Post, Time, or fashion magazines such
as Vogue. Alternative or underground press publications
should not be overlooked for the Sixties (e.g. the heavily
illustrated Whole Earth Catalog.) Rather than searching for
an article within them, you might want to proceed sequentially
through the issues of a particular magazine, focusing on your area
of interest (advertising, feature articles, etc.) for a given year
or range of years.
In addition to browsing, you can use
a database like
Readers Guide Retrospective to zero in on citations for articles
in those magazines. Use the advanced search option, the title of the
magazine, and your topic (e.g. teenagers, or automobiles). Since
there are illustrated magazines, you are likely to find illustrations
in them. These magazines are in Davis Library, either in hard copy
or microfilm. In the Libraries'
Basic Catalog search option, type in the title of the magazine
and in the optional search limit box limit to Journal/Magazine to
get the call number.
Using Online Databases, continued
Newspapers are an important source of
documentary information, and there are several databases that can
help you find them. One to start with is:
New York Times Historical Newspapers. Using the advanced search
option, you can select a range of dates in which you are interested,
then the article type (e.g. comic, editorial cartoon, or photo
standalone.)
AccuNet/AP Photo Archive, a source of news and other photographs
is a huge database of photographic images from the Associated Press.
The fastest way to display your search is the directory, then after
looking at the titles download the images. Using a search
"American Dream" and a range "from 1940 to 1950" retrieves a number
of hits, such as American family TV, Cadillac coupe de ville, Jiffy
Java (a coffee vending machine,) Satchel Paige in the World Series,
and the darker side of the Dream, the Korean War, Nixon and the
House Un-American Activities Committee, and segregation. From sports
heroes to politicians and astronauts, from the Black American voter
to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., from the Beats
to the Beatles or Woodstock this is a fantastic database to explore.
You can use a term more specific than American Dream to find many
more images. This may be one of the best ways to document your
topic/idea. Be sure to look at the help guides for constructing
your search.
Academic Search Premier includes an image search component
(see top bar of the database) which can be searched by a specific
name or term (McDonald's or astronaut.) You'll retrieve thumbnails.
America: History and Life uses American Dream as a subject heading
so is worth searching, perhaps combining your search with a subtopic.
Searching this database retrieves substantive articles as well as
reviews of books that might be relevant and image-rich such as the
following:
- In the driver's seat: the automobile in American
literature and popular culture.
- Pride of place: building the American dream. an important
book for anyone looking at the role of architecture in
constructing the American Dream
- Popcorn Venus; women, movies & the American dream.
Art Full Text and
Art Index Retrospective (searchable simultaneously) can be
searched to find articles and citations for images.
ARTstor provides curated collections of art images and associated
data for noncommercial and scholarly, non-profit educational use.
CAMIO offers rights-cleared, high-quality art images for class
projects, art history and studio art programs, course Web sites,
lectures, presentations, and research resources.
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Library of Congress' American
Memory
Not a UNC database, but an authoritative site to explore for all
aspects of American life.
Google Image Search (then
go to advanced image search option.)
Smithsonian American
Art Museum
A good source for images of works by American artists.
Other museum websites are a source of visual images as well:
The National Gallery and the
Metropolitan.
The Art Library has a color copier and
a scanner which you can use to capture images from books or periodicals.
Be sure to bring a disk for the scanner.
Heather Gendron, Art Librarian
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