LibGuides: American Studies: Scholarly Journals and Articles

Find Articles: Recommended Databases

Essentials
Multidisciplinary & Related Disciplines

To find articles related to your topic, try searching through these essential, comprehensive humanities databases.

America: History and Life This link opens in a new window
1964 - present. Unlimited users.
Updated regularly. Contains citations with abstracts to social science and humanities literature on all aspects of U.S. and Canadian history, culture and current affairs from prehistoric times to the present. Covers books, book reviews, journals and dissertations. Also reviews films and video projects. The database corresponds to the print America: History and Life, which is produced by ABC-CLIO. The database covers history, interdisciplinary studies of historical interest and history-related topics in the social sciences and humanities.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
Dates of coverage vary. Unlimited users.
Updated regularly. Offers a high-quality, interdisciplinary archive to support scholarship and teaching. Includes archives of over 1,000 leading academic journals across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, as well as select monographs and other materials valuable for academic work. The entire corpus is full-text searchable, offers search term highlighting, includes high-quality images, and is interlinked by millions of citations and references.

For more information on ebooks see the Ebook Guide
Project MUSE This link opens in a new window
Dates of coverage vary. Unlimited users.
Journals: Updated as issues are published. Project MUSE is a leading provider of humanities and social science content for the scholarly community, with complete, full-text versions of scholarly journals from leading university presses and scholarly societies.
Books: Selected titles from university presses and scholarly societies. All content from the print edition of the book is included in the digital edition. There are no DRM restrictions.

For more information on ebooks see the Ebook Guide
Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
1990 - present. Unlimited users.
Updated daily. A comprehensive scholarly, multi-disciplinary full text database, with more than 5,300 full text periodicals, including 4,400 peer-reviewed journals. Offers indexing and abstracts for more than 9,300 journals and a total of 10,900 publications including monographs, reports, conference proceedings, etc.
Features PDF content going back as far as 1865, with the majority of full text titles in native (searchable) PDF format. Searchable cited references are provided for 1,000 journals.

Some of these databases are focused on topics related to U.S. History and contain scholarship and secondary sources. Other databases focus on articles from history adjacent disciplines that may be helpful to explore more of your topic.

Anthropology Online This link opens in a new window
Dates of coverage vary. Unlimited users.
A comprehensive resource for the study of human culture and behavior. Features cross-searchable access to the acclaimed Ethnographic Video Online and Anthropology Online collections and provides anthropologists, sociologists and cultural historians with an expansive and multifaceted survey of the discipline. Researchers can explore a wide range of materials—from documentaries and field notes to written ethnographies and reference works.
Thematic areas include: family and race, material culture, language and culture, kinesthetics, body language, food and foraging, cooking, economic systems, social stratification and status, caste systems and slavery, male and female roles, kinship and families, political organization, conflict and conflict resolution, religion and magic, music and the arts, culture and personality, marriage, gender, and family roles.
Chicano Database This link opens in a new window
1967 - present. Unlimited users.
Updated quarterly. Contains records for all types of material on Mexican-American topics and Chicanos. Since 1992, the Chicano Database covers material on the broader Latino experience, including Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans, and Central American immigrants.
LGBTQ+ Life This link opens in a new window
1917 - present. Unlimited users.
This comprehensive database is the definitive index to the world's literature regarding lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues. LGBT Life contains indexing and abstracts for more than 250 LGBT-specific core periodicals as well as periodicals in Women’s and Gender Studies. It also contains more than 350 books and reference works.
LGBT Life provides comprehensive coverage of traditional academic, cultural, lifestyle and regional publications, including The Advocate, Lesbian News and Bay Windows. LGBT Life also provides indexing and abstracts for the full run of many historically significant titles such as ONE, The Ladder, Mattachine Review, Christopher Street and Body Politic. In addition, LGBT Life includes other source types such as monographs, reference books, newsletters, case studies and speeches. It also provides relevant bibliographic data from NISC's Sexual Diversity Studies.
MLA International Bibliography
1926 - present. Unlimited users.
Updated ten times per year. Indexes critical materials on literature, criticism, drama, languages, linguistics, and folklore. Provides access to citations from over 4,400 journals, series, books, essay collections, working papers, proceedings, dissertations, and bibliographies. Produced by the Modern Language Association.
PAIS This link opens in a new window
1915 - present. Unlimited users.
Updated monthly. Bibliographic index with abstracts covering the full range of political, social, and public policy issues. Covers selected journal articles, books, statistics, yearbooks, directories, conference proceedings, pamphlets, reports, government documents, and microfiche. More than 1,600 journals and over 8,000 monographs are indexed each year. Includes documents published worldwide in any of six languages: English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. The subject headings and abstracts are in English.
The PAIS Archive database comprises a retrospective conversion of the PAIS Annual Cumulated Bulletin, Volumes 1-62, published 1915-1976. At completion of this conversion, the PAIS Archive contains over 1.23 million records.
Race Relations Abstracts This link opens in a new window
1975 - present. Unlimited users.
Includes more than 49,500 bibliographic records covering essential areas related to race relations, including ethnic studies, discrimination, immigration studies, and other areas of key relevance to the discipline.
SocINDEX with Full Text This link opens in a new window
In addition to full-text journals, SocINDEX with Full Text contains informative abstracts for core coverage journals dating as far back as 1895. Includes indexing for books, monographs, conference papers and other non-periodical content sources.

Screenshot showing a box around the main library search bar. A second box is drawn around the Articles & More link.

Start searching with the big search box on the library homepage.

It searches most but not all the library's resources and will show results across six different categories: Articles & More, Books & Media, Journals, Databases, Research Guides, and the Library Website.

A more targeted place to search is at the link for Articles & More beneath the search bar.

On the left toolbar in an Articles & More search, check these boxes for credible & relevant results:

Peer-Reviewed Journals

If you want to narrow even more, try these options to filter:

Resource Type
Subject
Creation Date

Keep an eye on the number of your search results. Start browsing when you feel you have a manageable number of results to skim through.

Are you getting too many results?

Use the word AND (in all-caps) between your search terms.

latinos AND "civil rights"
"american revolution" AND family

Search for a Specific Phrase

Put quotations around a group of words like "united states" to retrieve results with that exact wording.

Do you need more results?

Use the word OR (in all-caps) between your search terms.

19th century OR nineteenth century
realise OR realize

Use an * at the end of a word to search for all forms of that word.

educat* will return results for education, educator, educated, educating;etc.
environment* will also return results for environmentalism and environmentalist

An * can also be used to replace a character in a word.

wom*n will search for women and woman

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Use the word NOT (in all-caps) between your search terms.

UT NOT Tennessee
advertisement NOT magazine

Try grouping the above strategies in a single search:

(children OR adolescents) AND disability AND (19th century OR nineteenth century)

Article Not Available Online?

In some cases, our online journal subscriptions do not provide access to specific articles. This issue is often due to the online subscription only covering a specific date range for the journal (e.g. 1992 to present). However, the article may be available online in another database.

If you don’t see a .pdf of the article you want, click to find it in another database or in print in the libraries.

If it is only in print in the Libraries or we don’t own the article, click to have the article emailed to you. This is a FREE service available to all current UT students, staff and faculty, with a 3-5 day turnaround time.

American Studies

Scholarly Journals and Articles