More than 200 years ago, the American Antiquarian Society was founded and has been recognized as a major source for U.S. primary sources published pre-1876, housing the single largest collection of Americana from the Colonial period into the twentieth-century. Now, Gale and the Society have entered an exclusive partnership to digitize the Society’s current and future periodical holdings. By including the Society’s holdings alongside our existing collections, Gale fulfills a core mission: to develop outstanding research collections for use by scholars and students in universities and libraries worldwide. Pairing the Society’s American periodical holdings with Gale’s pioneering primary source interrogation tools opens new research opportunities. Users will have new ways to explore and interact with this unrivaled collection of journals, periodicals, and magazines documenting the American people from the Colonial Era through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the twentieth century.

 

UNPRECEDENTED COMPLEMENTARY ACCESS TO AMERICAN PERIODICALS 

As part of this historic partnership, Gale is extending complementary access to more than six million pages of American periodicals—providing a level of access to American history that was previously unavailable.

Any institution that owns at least one Gale Primary Source collection is eligible to receive full, free access to American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection, Series 1-5, a treasure trove of journals, magazines, and periodicals for undergraduate and advanced researchers alike. The collection offers a highly comprehensive documentary history of the American experience spanning four centuries with multiple perspectives on the thought, culture, and society of North America. These periodicals present history through the eyes of those who experienced it, showing its impact on citizens from all walks of life.

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American Historical Periodicals From the American Antiquarian Society, Part I-V

Available at no cost to Gale Primary Sources customers American Historical Periodicals from the American Antiquarian Society, Part I-V offers a highly comprehensive documentary history of the American experience spanning four centuries with multiple perspectives on the thought, culture, and society of North America. These periodicals present history through the eyes of those who experienced it, showing its impact on citizens from all walks of life.

American Historical Periodicals From the American Antiquarian Society, Part VI

American Historical Periodicals from the American Antiquarian Society, Part VI brings the previous published Part I-V more firmly into the 20th century, with titles running up to 1923.  It does not represent the short date ranges seen in the previously published series, but the entirety of publishing history in the Colonies and subsequent United States. It extends coverage or fills gaps in issues for approximately 45 titles previously digitized in Part I-V, and importantly adds more than 150 entirely new periodical titles recently acquired by the American Antiquarian Society.

American Historical Periodicals from the American Antiquarian Society, Part VII

The seventh collection of newly digitized holdings from the American Antiquarian Society features periodicals covering a wide variety of topics, including archaeology, art, commerce, education, health and medicine, literature, regional and national history, manufacturing, military history, politics, religion, and young people. This diversity of periodicals gives researchers multiple lenses through which to view the American experience.

Platform Features & Tools

Gale Technology Unleashes New Potential

Though this content has been previously published and sold commercially, Gale is providing additional value to the complementary content through the Gale Primary Sources platform. The platform, created to support historical research, features visual search tools, robust metadata to power those searches, and advanced browse functionality.

Removing Barriers to Digital Scholarship

Digital humanists will be delighted to discover this content will be available for text-analysis in Gale’s Digital Scholar Lab—a new, cloud-based research environment that brings historical content together with text analysis tools to remove barriers to digital scholarship. Providing this content in an environment where researchers can build a custom corpus of text for analysis adds immense value to the content and creates new research opportunities.

Newly Digitized Titles Now Available

Together with the American Antiquarian Society, Gale has created American Historical Periodicals from the American Antiquarian Society, Series 6, a new collection of 550,000 pages of never-before-digitized periodicals to extend the coverage of parts 1-5 more firmly into the twentieth-century while filling key gaps with more than 150 newly-digitized titles never-before-available online.

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