Reference Materials for English Majors

• Bibliography of American Literature (BAL) The Bibliography of American Literature (9 volumes, Yale University Press, 1955-1991) provides nearly 40,000 records of the literary works of approximately 300 American writers. Coverage includes 1776 to 1930.
• Modern American Poetry (MAPS) MAPS is a comprehensive learning environment and scholarly forum for the study of modern American poetry. It is an online journal and multimedia companion to The Anthology of Modern American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2000).
• The Academy of American Poets
• Al Filreis’s “Modern and Contemporary American Poetry” Site A compendium of resources on 20th century American poetry.
• Early American Imprints, Series I (1639 - 1800)  Indexes more than 36,000 items consisting of some 2,400,000 images offering insight into every aspect of American life in the 17th and 18th centuries such as agriculture, auctions, foreign affairs, diplomacy, literature, music, religion, the Revolutionary War, temperance, and witchcraft. Provides online access to the print and microform counterparts American Bibliography by Charles Evans, and Supplement to Evans' American Bibliography by Roger Bristol. (Archive of Americana allows cross-searching of several databases: Early American Imprints , Series I and II; Early American Newspapers; American State Papers; US Congressional Serial Set.)
• Early American Imprints, Series II (1801-1819) Indexes more than 36,000 books, pamphlets, broadsides, state papers and other print genres published from 1801-1819. Covers all aspects of American life including taxation, public health and diseases, slavery, military law, Indians, Christianity, cosmology, etiquette, and much more. Based on the American Bibliography of Ralph R. Shaw and Richard H. Shoemaker. (Archive of Americana allows cross-searching of several databases: Early American Imprints , Series I and II; Early American Newspapers; American State Papers; US Congressional Serial Set.)
• C19: The Nineteenth Century Index Comprehensive coverage of nineteenth-century books, periodicals, official documents, newspapers and archives. C19 Index draws on the Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue, The Wellesley Index, Poole's Index and Periodicals Index Online to create integrated bibliographic coverage of over 1.4 million books and official publications, 64,891 archival collections and 15.6 million articles published in over 2,500 journals, magazines and newspapers.
• Making of America (Cornell University) Access to 267 monograph volumes and over 100,000 journal articles from 22 journals with 19th century imprints. The collection is particularly strong in the areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. Making of America is a collaboration between the libraries of Cornell University and the University of Michigan to document American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction by drawing upon the primary materials at these two institutions.
• Making of America (University of Michigan) Access to 9,500 books and almost 2500 digitized issues of 12 journals published in the 19th century. The collection is particularly strong in the areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. Making of America is a collaboration between the libraries of Cornell University and the University of Michigan to document American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction by drawing upon unique primary materials held at each institution.
• American Periodicals Series Online, 1740-1900 (currently under construction) Contains digitized images of more than 1,100 periodicals. Includes special interest and general magazines, literary and professional journals, children's and women's magazines and many other historically significant magazines.
• Early American Newspapers Access to hundreds of historic newspapers, providing more than one million pages as fully text-searchable facsimile images. Based largely on Clarence Brigham's "History and Bibliography of American Newspapers,1690-1820." (Archive of Americana allows cross-searching of several databases: Early American Imprints, Series I and II; Early American Newspapers; American State Papers; US Congressional Serial Set.)
• Emily Dickinson Electronic Archives

The following are informative and helpful resources students interested in Composition and Rhetoric, or the Rhetoric and Writing minor, will find helpful.

• CompPile
• National Council of Teachers of English

MOA Texts: Here you can search through dozens of early American periodicals - among them the Southern Literary Messenger and the American Whig Review - and retrieve actual images of full pages with illustrations. A limited number of books are also included, and all texts are keyword-searchable. The collection is split between Cornell University and the University of Michigan.

• The Cornell University Library Making of America (MOA) Collection
• University of Michigan Making of America (MOA) Collection

The American Memory Collection is the premier online amalgamation of materials (including artwork, photographs, sound recordings, and early motion pictures) from American history and literature:

• Library of Congress: American Memory Collections

The University of Virginia has a wonderful collection of online texts, many of which can be searched from its public site: search the Publicly Accessible Texts at the Electronic Text Center at UVA.

The Labyrinth website is one of the earliest and best online collections of online texts; its focus is on medieval literature:

• Labyrinth: An Online Collection of Medieval Texts

For those who 'prefer not to,' Project Bartelby offers a variety of canonical texts online:

• The Oxford book of English Verse (1919)
• The Cambridge History of English and American Literature (1907-21)
• The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language (1875)

• Open Source Shakespeare, the complete works online, with search features
• The First Folio, UVA, a reprint of Shakespeare's 1623 First Folio
• Primary Sources Archive, The Folger Shakespeare Library, a collection of primary early modern documents that contextualize Shakespeare's work, arranged by topic and by the plays to which they pertain
• Understanding Shakespeare, JSTOR and The Folger Shakespeare Library, an open-access collection of Shakespeare's plays with links to scholarly articles

• Strunk, Elements of Style A simple and basic handbook for effective composition of sentences and of essays. (Sadly, its amplification by Strunk's student E.B. White is still in copyright and not available for free.)
• Academic Word List As an aid to enhance academic vocabulary, this site divides the Academic Word List (the most common 808 words in academic texts in English, excluding the most frequent 2000 words in English) into eleven levels.
• Oxford English Dictionary (OED) The accepted authority on the evolution of the English language. Entries contain detailed etymological analyses that trace word development through time and are illustrated by quotations from a wide range of English-language sources.
• Chicago Manual of Style Online Searchable, online version of the Chicago Manual of Style (15th edition) providing two basic documentation systems, the humanities style (notes and bibliography) and the author-date system for editors and writers.
• Purdue Online Writing Lab Writing resources and easily searchable instructions in citation practices (especially MLA format) for research papers as well as other tips on resumé and CV composition.
• Fowler, The King's English

• The Modern Language Association (the discipline's governing body)
• The English Server at Carnegie Mellon University
• The HELIN Library Search Page
• HELIN / OCLC First Search Databases (Includes the full MLA bibliography)
• The Bodleian Library, Oxford University
• The Library of Congress