Databases by Subject

This aggregated database provides access to all of KU’s Alexander Street Press collections.  Video, audio, and text covering a wide variety of subject matters are included.  In addition to contemporary sources, this database contains significant amounts of primary sources. 

Search for and watch over 700 educational streaming videos, including all 37 of the BBC Shakespeare plays. 

Covers three centuries of rare and modern dramatic works that together have formed the internationally recognized voice that is American theater. More than 1,500 plays are available, from over 500 playwrights.

This database includes over 250 plays by Asian Americans, starting in the 19th century. It also includes biographical, production, and theatrical information for each play. 

The Royal Historical Society's online bibliography provides bibliographic data on historical writing dealing with the British Isles, and with the British empire and commonwealth, during all periods for which written documentation is available - from 55BC to the present. 

Created from the renowned holdings of the Library Company of Philadelphia, Includes personal narratives, autobiographies, histories, expedition reports, military reports, novels, essays, poems and musical compositions from black authors from the Americas, Europe, and Africa.

Black Drama, now in its expanded third edition, contains the full text of more than 1,700 plays written from the mid-1800s to the present by more than 200 playwrights from North America, English-speaking Africa, the Caribbean, and other African diaspora countries. Many of the works are rare, hard to find, or out of print. More than 40 percent of the collection consists of previously unpublished plays by writers such as Langston Hughes, Ed Bullins, Willis Richardson, Amiri Baraka, Randolph Edmonds, Zora Neale Hurston, and many others.

Access over 82,000 pages and an estimated 11,000 works of short fiction produced by writers from Africa and the African Diaspora from the earliest times to the present.

This platform provides access to the Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience, Black Studies Center Periodicals, The Chicago Defender, and the Black Literature Index (1827-1940). Materials are both historic and contemporary and covers Africa, the United States, and Caribbean.

This resource contains literature and essays related to feminism by black women writers from the United States, Caribbean, and over 20 African countries.

C19 Index includes the Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue, The Wellesley Index, Poole's Index, Periodicals Index Online, and American Periodicals Series.  It indexes books, government publications, archival collections, and serials. 

Cambridge Companions searches across the Companions for Literature and Classics; Philosophy, Religion, and Culture; and Music.

Indexes poetry in anthologies. Some poems are full-text, others are excerpts.  Also includes short biographies of selected poets, comments on poems and poets by well-respected scholars, and a poetry glossary.

Indexing and abstracting for nearly 600 titles, nearly 300 of which full text. Also provides a Communication Thesaurus and biographical information.

A streaming video database of theater productions, including Shakespeare, classics, musical theater, dance, opera, and recent British productions.

Digital Theatre Plus uses Single Sign On for both on and off campus users:

• Click Sign in and enter your email address ending in 'ku.edu' then click Next.
• Type in 'Kansas' or scroll down to find 'University of Kansas' then click the institution name.
• Sign in with KU username and password.

The Evans collection covers virtually every book, pamphlet and broadside published in America over a 160-year period. Digitized from one of the most important collections ever produced on microform, Early American Imprints, Series I is based on Charles Evans' renowned American Bibliography and Roger Bristol's supplement. Including more than 36,000 printed works and 2.3 million pages, Series I also offers new imprints not available in microform editions. This link also includes access to Early American Imprints, Series I: Supplement from the Library Company of Philadelphia, 1670-1800. To search Early American imprints Series 1 and 2 together, see America's historical imprints.

Early American Imprints, Series II: Shaw-Shoemaker, 1801-1819 provides a comprehensive set of American books, pamphlets and broadsides published in the early part of the 19th century. It is based on the noted -American Bibliography, 1801-1819 by Ralph R. Shaw and Richard H. Shoemaker. With more than four million pages from over 36,000 items, including 1,000 catalogued new items unavailable in previous microform editions. This link also includes access to Early American Imprints, Series II: Supplement from the Library Company of Philadelphia, 1801-1819. To search Early American imprints Series 1 and 2 together, see America's historical imprints.

Contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700.  It contains over 125,000 titles included in Pollard & Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640) and Wing's Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700) and their revised editions, as well as the Thomason Tracts (1640-1661) collection and the Early English Books Tract Supplement. The Text Creation Partnership (TCP) addition allows for full-text searching for legible and searchable encoded texts that link to corresponding page images from ProQuest's EEBO product.

Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), Parts I and II, comprises over 200,000 printed volumes. It includes every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom in the 18th century, thousands of important works from the Americas produced in the same period, along with contemporary titles that debate and analyze those works.

Includes more than 3,900 plays in verse and prose from the late thirteenth century to the early twentieth. The database contains works acted on or intended for the stage. It includes masques, interludes, short dramatic pieces, translations and adaptations, closet dramas, and works written for children.

A research portal that provides enhanced ways and methods to search literary collections from Gale.

Provides access to biographies, bibliographies and critical analysis of authors from every age and literary discipline. Covers novelists, poets, essayists, journalists and other writers, with in-depth coverage of the most-studied authors. Includes essays on the history of specific publishing companies.

A full-text searchable database of articles on individual critics and theorists, critical and theoretical schools and movements, and the critical and theoretical innovations of specific countries and historical periods. It also treats related persons and fields that have been shaped by or have themselves shaped literary theory and criticism.

Provides image and full-text online access of all licensed JSTOR archival journals and primary sources. The collection covers all academic disciplines.

Research the writings of Latin American playwrights from the last three centuries. In addition to plays this database includes biographical, production, and theatrical information.

The Literary Encyclopedia is an online reference work that provides authoritative articles about literary and cultural history. Coverage includes English-language, Classical, German, French and Francophone, Hispanic, Italian, Russian, East European, and other world literatures. Over 7800 articles are included, with 20-40 new articles currently being added each month.

Provides a broad spectrum of full-text information on thousands of authors and their works across literary disciplines and timeframes. Includes plot summaries, synopses, articles, author biographies, books reviews, poems, short stories and more.

Provides searchable full-text of more than 350,000 literary works in the English language--poetry, drama, and prose; 175 full-text literary journals; the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature; and reference sources including American Poetry and other bibliographies, biographies, and dictionaries. Individual units run from Anglo-Saxon literature, through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the 18th and 19th centuries right up to the late 20th Century.  LION also offers comprehensive cross-searching of EEBO - Early English Books Online.

This collection brings its users to the teeming streets of 19th century London through posters, penny fiction, chapbooks, maps, cartoons, song sheets, and more. Of interest to scholars and students of social history, popular culture, language and literature, and urban development.

Provides a classified listing and subject index for books and articles published on modern languages, literatures, folklore, and linguistics. Coverage includes literature from all over the world--Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and North and South America.

North American Indian Drama contains 244 plays by 48 playwrights representing the stories and creative energies of American Indian and First Nation playwrights of the twentieth century. More than half of the works are previously unpublished, and hard to find, representing groups such as Cherokee, Métis, Creek, Choctaw, Pembina Chippewa, Ojibway, Lenape, Comanche, Cree, Navajo, Rappahannock, Hawaiian/Samoan, and others. Together, the plays demonstrate Native theater’s diversity of tribal traditions and approaches to drama—melding conventional dramatic form with ancient storytelling and ritual performance elements, experimenting with traditional ideas of time and narrative, or challenging Western dramatic structure.

Describes both fiction and nonfiction book titles for all ages. NoveList includes book lists, discussion guides, award lists, and feature articles.

Provides expert commentary. Subject coverage includes: African Studies, Anthropology, Art History, Chinese Studies, Classics, Latino Studies, International Law, Latin American Studies, and Music.

Due to budget constraints, Cinema and media studies and Sociology have been cancelled and are no longer available as of July 1, 2024.

If you have questions or concerns, please contact us.

The accepted authority on the evolution of the English language over the last millennium. It is the guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over half a million words, both present and past. The Historical Thesaurus is a taxonomic arrangement of the contents of the OED.

The Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge contains 538 Old English and medieval manuscripts. This database provides full digital copies of each manuscript along with thousands of citations to the relevant secondary literature on the manuscripts.

Find citations to some 30,000 plays published individually or in collections from 1949 to the present. Covers a wide range of plays written in or translated into English, including one-act plays, pageants, plays in verse, radio and television plays, and classic drama. (Restricted to 1 simultaneous user.)

Provides online access to current issues of selected scholarly journals in the arts and humanities, social sciences, and mathematics. 

Shakespeare Survey is a yearbook of Shakespeare studies and production. Since 1948 Survey has published the best international scholarship in English and many of its essays have become classics of Shakespeare criticism. Each volume is devoted to a theme, or play, or group of plays; each also contains a section of reviews of that year's textual and critical studies.

A literary journal with writers from around the world founded by Victoria Ocampo in 1931. Contents include literature, film, theatre, art, music, history, and politics. The electronic version offers all pages and images of the 364 issues, including covers and advertisements.

Contains a wide range of material relating to popular entertainment in America, Britain, and Europe in the period from 1779 to 1930.

Includes annotated entries for all important books, articles, book reviews, dissertations, theatrical productions, audiovisual materials, electronic media, and other scholarly and popular materials related to Shakespeare. The goal is to add material published or produced since 1900. Each year, coverage will move forward one year and backwards at least three years. 

Collating material from archives around the world, this resource features ephemera, souvenir artifacts and personal reflections collected by fair-goers as well as official records from the organizing committees and examples international reception. Material includes pamphlets, guide books, official catalogues, periodicals, minutes, correspondence, and a large number of visual materials.