The study of American cultures from an interdisciplinary perspective. Examines significant aspects of U.S. institutions, policy, media and cultural expressions by drawing on a wide range of resources from the social sciences and humanities.
Theatre critic Lyn Gadner described theatre as "a form of activism – and activism as a form of theatre – [which] has long been with us, from the activities and the performances of the Actresses’ Franchise League, which supported the women’s suffrage movement, through the protest theatre of 1960s and 1970s with companies such as San Francisco Mime Troupe, Bread & Puppet, and Julian Beck and Judith Malina’s The Living Theatre."
This research guide will help you explore the symbiotic relationship between performance and protest, inviting you to discover resources on activist theatre and theatre-makers throughout the brief history of America.
[Image of Penumbra Theater’s 2018 production of “For Colored Girls” Credit: Allen Weeks/NYT https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/10/theater/systemic-racism-theater.html]
Contains more than 1,500 dramatic works from the early eighteenth century up to the beginning of the twentieth century. Represented genres include plays in verse, farces, melodramas, minstrel shows, realist plays, frontier plays, temperance dialogues, and others.
Major dramatists include David Belasco, Rachel Crothers, Augustin Daly, Clyde Fitch, Edward Harrigan, James Herne, William Dean Howells and Joaquin Miller.
Full text access to 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. Includes detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. The database also includes selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays.
More than 40 percent of the collection consists of previously unpublished plays by writers such as Langston Hughes, Ed Bullins, Willis Richardson, Amiri Baraka, Randolph Edmonds, Zora Neale Hurston, and many others.
256 full-text plays by 49 American Indian and First Nation playwrights of the 20th century.
Also includes information about the plays and their production, and biographical data, as well issues of the Native playwrights' newsletter. The collection represents groups across the United States and Canada , including Cherokee, Métis, Creek, Choctaw, Pembina Chippewa, Ojibway, Hawaiian/Samoan, Comanche, Cree, Navajo, Rappahannock, and others. newsletter.
A full-text database of plays written by women from the United States and Canada, primarily in the 20th century.
Fully-searchable database of original plays by more than 250 women from Colonial times to the present. Each play is extensively indexed, allowing both keyword and multi-field searching. Accompanying materials include reference resources, ancillary information, and a performance database. The collection covers melodrama to contemporary drama, including performance art.
Asian American Drama contains 252 plays by 42 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more.
The collection begins with the works of Sadakichi Hartmann in the late 19th century and progresses to the writings of contemporary playwrights, such as Philip Kan Gotanda, Elizabeth Wong, and Jeannie Barroga. The plays themselves have been selected using leading bibliographies. Some 50% of the plays have never been published before.
Full text of more than 2,000 plays, including all types of U.S. and Canadian dramas.
Contains 2,059 plays by 434 North American playwrights, written from the late 1800s. Many of the works are rare, hard-to-find, or out of print. Nearly a quarter of the collection will consist of previously unpublished plays. Also includes detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. The database also includes selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays.
Collection of published plays throughout the English-speaking world.
Twentieth-Century Drama is a collection of published plays throughout the English-speaking world from the 1890s to the present. It contains the work of authors from North America and Canada, Britain and Ireland, India, Africa, Australia and the Caribbean. Subject categories include: African American drama, American ethnic theatre traditions, off-Broadway, off-off-Broadway, popular successes, women playwrights, The complete works of Bernard Shaw, Irish Theatre, "1956 revolution" at London's Royal Court Theatre, The Royal Court's first era of avant-garde prominence, political plays, historical dramas, alternative and community theatre, global and postcolonial theatre in English, Innovative re-readings of the classics.
In addition to the text, there is subject and monologue indexing. With a subject field search you may restrict searches to plays with specified topical subjects or settings. For example: Geographical locations -- London, Paris, Vienna, New York City, the Appalachian Mountains, Hawaii, Sicily, Australia, New Delhi, Yorkshire and Nigeria; historical settings -- 19th Century, World War I, World War II, the American Civil War, the Easter Rising or the Vietnam War; historical figures -- Shakespeare, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Jack the Ripper, Alexander the Great;or topical subjects -- Disability, Education, Sexual Politics, Marriage, Strikes, and the African-American Experience to Baseball, Newspapers, Turkish Baths and Strip-Tease.
Includes classic plays such as Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan (1923), Thornton Wilder's Our Town (1938), August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984), David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow (1987), Harold Pinter's The Homecoming (1965) or Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa (1990) as well as less well-known texts drawn from the full range of modern theatrical traditions. Areas such as postcolonial writing, women's theatre, and community theatre are given full representation, and Naturalist, Expressionist and absurdist works appear alongside popular comedies, melodramas, farces and thrillers.
Playtexts, audio plays, scholarly text, and video, from across the history of the theater, ranging from Aeschylus to the present day.
Includes access to the following modules: the Core Collection, LA Theatre Works, Aurora Metro Books, Nick Hern Books, the RSC Live Collection, the Classic Spring Oscar Wilde Collection, the Donmar Shakespeare Trilogy, the National Theatre Collection, Shakespeare's Globe on Screen (2008-2015), and Shakespeare's Globe on Screen 2 (2016-2018).
Provides access to streaming video for theater education. Includes filmed stage performances, master classes, documentaries, and training material, in addition to playlists, video clips, and on-screen transcripts.
Includes access to two volumes:
Theatre in Video: Volume I: access to plays, documentaries, interviews, and instructional materials in more than 550 hours of streaming video. Covers 20th century theater history, from productions of Shakespeare to in-depth footage of the work of Samuel Beckett.
Theatre in Video: Volume II: greater focus on new and international productions. Includes new performances from Shakespeare's Globe Theatre collection (Opus Arte), Theatre Arts Films, the BBC, and TMW Media Group.
A database of full-text reference works in theatre, drama, and related fields, including links to full-text plays.
Includes in-depth detail records for more than 10,000 plays, many never published previously. It also includes over 40,000 pages of reference sources in electronic format, including Annals of the New York Stage, and the American Theatre Companies series. Thousands of posters, playbills, and photographs are also included.
Indexes classic and historical plays, along with the works of contemporary playwrights. Includes new editions and translations, as well as descriptive annotations to summarize the plot and indicate musical requirements.
Includes a variety of types: one-act plays, radio and television plays, historical plays, puppet performances, classical drama, musicals, comedies, and melodramas.
Historic American publications, books, broadsides, ephemera, newspapers, dating from as early as 1535 through the 20th Century.
Digital archive of American newspapers published between 1690 and 1922, representing every state in the U.S.
Based on a collection of rare newspapers held by the American Antiquarian Society, with contributions from the Boston Athenaeum, the Connecticut Historical Society, the Connecticut State Library, the Library Company of Philadelphia; the Library of Congress, the libraries of universities such as Brown and Harvard, and private collections. Fully text-searchable; browseable by newspaper title.
Collections included: African American Newspapers, Series 1 ; African American Newspapers, Series 2 ; Caribbean Newspapers ; Ethnic American Newspapers from the Balch Collection ; Hispanic American Newspapers ; Early American Newspapers, Series 1-7, 11-12, and 17-19.
Bibliographic database focusing on the history and life of the United States and Canada, indexing more than 1,800 journals published, dissertations and reviews.
In addition to the principle English language sources in the field, it includes some (about 10%) in other languages, as well as some state and local history journals. All aspects of historical inquiry are represented: diplomatic, ecclesiastical, agricultural, cultural, economic, political, military and others. The index also provides citations to book and media reviews from about 100 journals and references to abstracts of dissertations in the field. All abstracts are in English.