The latest addition to the research libraries’ online electronic collection is access to the American Antiquarian Society’s Historical Periodicals Collection. This online database includes the digitized periodical collection from the American Antiquarian Society (AAS), covering periodicals published during 1684–1912. The database is available at all the libraries’ research centers, branch libraries, and remotely from home with your New York Public Library card.

The database is structured into fifty thematic sub-collections, which allows you to focus your search in a particular era or subject. For example, one sub-collection, Hobbies, Socialization, and Sport Periodicals, 1775-1889 includes periodicals solely dedicated to topics such as checkers, baseball, hunting, and fishing. Other examples of the thematic collections include: American Civil War, 1855-1868; Foreign Language Periodicals in America, 1684-1904; Business, Industrial and Professional Periodicals, 1871-1901; and many more.

You can search the entire collection, search by thematic sub-collection, or browse by title. In addition, the advertisements, images, and etchings that became prevalent in the 19th century publications are searchable by author or artist, if known. Mary Hallock Foote frequently contributed stories and drawings to periodicals. Hallock Foote’s contributions regained acclaim when Wallace Stegner used her papers as the basis for the character Susan Burling Ward, in his novel Angle of Repose.

The database platform allows you to browse through entire issues, page by page. Brother Jonathan, the first weekly illustrated magazine in the United States, is fully browseable via this collection. Flip through to see the various woodcut illustrations throughout this publication.

The breadth of material included in this database provides for endless avenues of research. One can read Edgar Allan Poe’s poems alongside the contemporary advertisements and letters to the editor. Or you can browse through the sheet music of popular hymns. Whether you are interested in a specific research question, or the broad expanse of the American Experience, this database is a gateway to better understanding what Americans read, wrote, and cared about throughout the nation’s history.

Resources 

Mott, Frank Luther, 1886-1964.. A history of American magazines, 1741-1930. Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, c1958-1968. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb.00678.0001.001.