American Studies Collections

Collecting Goals	Government Information	Microform Collections	UNC Web Sites
Reference Collections	Media Collections	Special Collections	Other Web Sites
Electronic Collections	Newspaper Collections	Related Collections	Library Contacts
General Collections			Faculty Library Liaison

Collecting Goals:

American Studies is an interdisciplinary program in the humanities and social sciences that studies not only the "high" culture found in literature, art, music, and drama, but also the "popular" culture found in every aspect of daily life in the United States. The library collections, which offer thousands of titles in all formats, support teaching and research in American Studies and in related departments and programs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They also serve as a resource for the people of the state.

Reference Collections:

The Library has an extensive collection of reference materials in all formats to support American Studies. Major indexing and abstracting tools are available online, notably America, History and Life and the MLA International Bibliography. Printed works are located primarily in the Reference Department of Davis Library. E-Reference materials are a good place to begin work in American Studies, while subject guides and tutorials facilitate exploration in depth in a few selected areas. For further information about reference materials or help using them, please consult the Reference staff.

Electronic Collections:

The Library provides remote access to tens of thousands of retrospective titles that are important to the study of America. Noteworthy among them are Early American Imprints I (Evans) and II (Shaw-Shoemaker) which contain 75,000 items published in North America between 1639 and 1819. The Literature Online (LION) databases have searchable text for many primary works of American Literature. UNC Library's own digitization project, Documenting the American South, focuses on Southern history and culture, including first-person narratives, literature, and slave narratives. Specialized full-text databases of historical newspapers appear as separate entries under "News" in "Article Databases" and include the New York Times Historical Newspaper, the Atlanta Constitution, the Pennsylvania Gazette, Civil War: A Newspaper Perspective, and African American Newspapers: The 19th Century. A noteworthy serials database, Communication and Mass Media Complete, provides the full text of over 200 journals, some of them devoted to the study of popular culture and cultural studies. Information about electronic journals related to American Studies can be found on a collected list. However, the best way to find information about individual electronic serials is to enter a title search on the Library's "E-Journal Finder" web page. Extensive statistical data is also available online. To request a database or serial, please contact the Humanities Bibliographer.

General Collections:

Because of the interdisciplinary nature of the field, the printed collections related to American Studies are extensive. They include books and serials on virtually every aspect of the American experience and support investigations of the ways in which elite, popular, and vernacular expressive culture contribute to a broad understanding of American civilization. They also sustain teaching and research on the spread of American popular culture around the world. American Studies uses a wide range of cultural materials, however, and while the Library acquires most books about the field published by university presses and major trade publishers, the primary materials are less well represented, except for the American South. The collections of popular fiction, for example, are more representative than comprehensive. A list of the current print subscriptions in the discipline is available. For further information or to request a title, please consult the Humanities Bibliographer.

Government Information:

Campus libraries provide online access to the major index and abstracting databases for government information, notably the GPO Monthly Catalog (GPO), which contains more than 450,000 records for all types of government documents printed by the US government. Major full-text and statistical databases are also available, including LexisNexis Congressional, which is a comprehensive source of current and historical bills, testimony, and reports from the US Congress going back to the founding of the republic in 1789. The Documents Section located in the Reference Department of Davis Library holds over three million print and microfilm items from the federal government, U.S. states, and international intergovernmental organizations, such as the United Nations and World Bank. Foreign government printed documents are housed in the Davis stacks. For further information about government publications or help using them, please consult the Documents Staff. Online information about North Carolina is available through NC Information Resources, while the North Carolina Collection has the most complete holdings of printed documents for the state. The Law Library contains extensive electronic and paper collections of federal and state legal publications, such as codes and statutes.

Media Collections:

The Media Resources Center, in the House Undergraduate Library, contains more than 12,000 feature and documentary films, hundreds of screenplays, music, a growing collection of audio books, and some popular materials of potential interest to faculty and students in American Studies. For further information about this collection, please consult the Media Resources Librarian.

Newspaper Collections:

Current newspapers arrive daily in the Serials Reading Room. The Library acquires at least one print newspaper and microform backfile from each of the major regions of the country, with emphasis on the Southeast. It also subscribes to more than 40 foreign newspapers from Europe, Latin America, Russia, Eastern Europe, and China, to support academic programs in those areas and provide their perspectives on this country. To request a title, please consult the Humanities Bibliographer.

Microform Collections:

The Microform Reading Room contains thousands of titles of potential interest to faculty and students in American Studies, particularly those relating to American history and American literature Of particular note are materials about Native Americans from the National Archives, historical periodicals, and the backfiles of important newspapers. For further information about microforms or help using them, please consult the Reference staff. To request a title, please contact the Humanities Bibliographer.

Special Collections:

The Rare Book Collection in Wilson Library has significant holdings of materials pertaining to American Studies. The Mass-Market Paperbacks Collection consists of approximately 700 twentieth-century paperbacks designed for distribution to a mass audience through supermarkets, drugstores, newsstands, and other outlets. Several collections of publisher file copies reveal popular taste in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially the Grove Press Imprint Collection and the Ticknor and Fields Imprint Collection. The Barzun-Taylor Mystery-Detective Collection contains 12,500 volumes of novels and short stories by American and British writers, while the Breen collection has 26,000 comic books. For further information, please consult the Curator for the Rare Book Collection.

The North Carolina Collection has has unmatched resources for the study of the culture and history of the state, most notably its newspapers, clipping files, and Photographic Archives. An imprint file for items printed in North Carolina through 1880, with access by both date and place of publication, is an additional resource for faculty and students. For further information, please consult the reference staff of the North Carolina Collection.

The Manuscripts Collection houses the Southern Historical Collection (SHC), a vast collection of original and unique primary documents, such as diaries, journals, letters, correspondence, photographs, maps, drawings, ledgers, oral histories, moving images, albums, scrapbooks, and literary manuscripts covering the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. For further information, please contact the Manuscripts Department.

Related Collections:

Collections in African and African American Studies, anthropology, communication studies, English and American literature, folklore, history, and women's studies extend library holdings related to American Studies. Statistical data in the Odum Institute includes public opinion data, U.S. Census data, North Carolina State data, and health statistics, among other resources. Perkins Library, at Duke University, also has material relevant to the field. Users can therefore expect to find most of the resources they need in the area. The Center for Research Libraries supplements these holdings with additional microform collections related to American Studies, particularly foreign dissertations and government publications, books and periodicals in languages other than English, newspapers published abroad, ethnic newspapers published in North America, and large microform sets (especially for foreign area studies). UNC faculty and students can request unlimited amounts of materials from CRL via the web and keep them indefinitely, or until another person needs them. For further information about library collections, please consult the Humanities Bibliographer.