Theatre Arts 121 - Stage Design: Scenery and Costumes I
The World of the Play
Environmental Facts--geographical information, date, season, time & economic, political & social environments
Try any or all of the following:
- Facts on File --Online or paper at D410 .F3 (older copies in Main stacks, most recent 5 years in Information Commons Reference). This source covers economic, political, and social environments. For example, it includes Presidents' "State of the Union Address," a "Best Seller Lists," which incudes hit T.V. programs, popular music, books.
- America: History & Life--or-- Historical Abstracts: use the CLIO NOTES section to see chronology of events.
- Go to the Microfilm section (floor 1, behind photocopy); pick a newspaper based on the setting of your play; locate the date you need; pull out a few microfilms and browse them. See the list of 18th and 19th century newspapers in UA library.
- Locate the call number for a magazine that was published during the time period by doing a journal title search in the catalog (Life, Time, Harpers, etc); go to the library book stacks and browse the year you need.
- History Resources on the Internet (select the Web Resources section in each topic or period)
- For additional material, check out the "Finding Primary Sources" link on the UA History Subject Guide
The following online sources are also helpful, but browsing is not always a feature:
Historical Newspapers online --Times of London (1790-1980; full-text from 1785-1870) and New York Times (1851-1922)
Historic New York Times 1851-current until last 3 years. Complete version of the New York Times, including viewing of entire pages as well as specific articles. Some of the images will be blocked due to copyright restrictions, so you might have to use the microfilm.
Complete version of the New York Times, including viewing of entire pages as well as specific articles
Harpweek
Harper's Weekly; full-text from 1857-1865.
Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe--current coverage, some sources back to 1970; a great place for current news articles from national and regional newspapers, wire services, transcripts from NPR, etc. The database includes national and regional news sources. If you're searching for information in a particular geographic region, then for "Step One: Select a news category": use the pull-down menu and select "U.S. News"; for Step Two: Select a news source"--use the pull-down menu to choose either a region or a state; for "Step Three: Enter keywords with Boolean logic."
Academic Search Elite
Covers a broad range of disciplines including general academic, business, social sciences, humanities, general sciences, education, and multi-cultural topics. Offers full text coverage for 1,360 journals and indexing and abstracts for 2,920 journals.