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Art History Databases
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ARTbibliographies Modern This link opens in a new window ABM provides wide-ranging coverage of information on all forms of modern and contemporary arts, dating from the late 19th century onward. It includes abstracts of English and other language material on artists, movements, and trends. It provides full abstracts of a variety of literary forms, dating from the late 1960s onward.
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Art Full Text This link opens in a new window This database offers full text plus abstracts and indexing of an international array of peer-selected publications—now with expanded coverage of Latin American, Canadian, Asian and other non-Western art, new artists, contemporary art, exhibition reviews, and feminist criticism. Full-text coverage for selected periodicals is also included. In addition to articles, Art Full Text indexes reproductions of works of art that appear in indexed periodicals.
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Art Index Retrospective (1929-1984) This link opens in a new window An in-depth record of contemporary art history, Art Index Retrospective allows users to search 55 years of art journalism at a keystroke. Users can research leading English-language sources, plus others published in French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Dutch. Besides periodicals, users have access to data from important yearbooks and select museum bulletins.
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Oxford Art Online This link opens in a new window Simultaneous user limit: 11
Oxford Art Online provides access to Grove Dictionary of Art and Benezit Dictionary of Artists. It includes hundreds of thousands of articles that span ancient to contemporary art and architecture, including images, structures, plans, and artist signatures.
Interdisciplinary Databases
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Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window Academic Search Complete is a comprehensive, scholarly, multi-disciplinary full-text database. It includes numerous full-text periodicals, many of which are peer-reviewed. In addition to full text, this database offers indexing and abstracts for a number of journals and other publications including monographs, reports, conference proceedings etc. The database features PDF content going back as far as 1887, with the majority of full text titles in searchable PDF format.
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America: History and Life This link opens in a new window Simultaneous user limit: 6
America: History and Life is an index to scholarly literature dealing with Canadian and U.S. history. It covers the history of these two countries from prehistoric times to the present. The database indexes articles, book reviews and dissertations. Political, diplomatic, military, economic, social, cultural, religious and intellectual history are included. The history of science, technology and medicine is also covered.
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Anthropology Plus This link opens in a new window Anthropology Plus combines two older reference tools--the Royal Anthropological Society's Anthropological Index Online and the Harvard University Tozzer Library's Anthropological Literature. It provides extensive worldwide indexing of journal articles, reports, commentaries, edited works, and obituaries in the fields of social, cultural, physical, biological, and linguistic anthropology, etc.
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Canadian Business & Current Affairs Database (CBCA) This link opens in a new window Canadian Business & Current Affairs Database combines full text and indexed content from all four CBCA database subsets (Business, Current Events, Education, and Reference). Canadian Business & Current Affairs Database includes over 540 periodicals and daily news sources (over 480 of which are Canadian), plus indexing to an additional 1,100 other titles (over 95% Canadian).
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JSTOR This link opens in a new window JSTOR is a database of back issues of academic journals, books, and primary sources. With content extending over a century, subject areas include area studies, the arts, business & economics, history, the humanities, law, medicine, science & mathematics, and social sciences.
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Project MUSE Full Database This link opens in a new window Project MUSE offers full-text articles from scholarly journals from major university presses, covering literature and criticism, history, performing arts, cultural studies, education, philosophy, political science, gender studies, and more.
First Nations Article Databases
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Bibliography of Indigenous Peoples in North America This link opens in a new window Please Note: Database formerly called Bibliography of Native North Americans.
Bibliography of Indigenous Peoples of North America (BIPNA) is a bibliographic database covering a wide range of topics including archaeology, history, multicultural relations, gaming, and governance. BIPNA contains a multitude of citations for books, essays, journal and newspaper articles, and government documents of the United States and Canada. Dates of coverage range from the sixteenth century to the present.
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Early Encounters in North America : Peoples, Cultures and the Environment This link opens in a new window Early Encounters in North America documents the relationships among peoples in North America from 1474 to the present. The collection is made up of personal accounts and unique perspectives.
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Indigenous Peoples of the Americas: History, Culture & Law This link opens in a new windowThis collection includes an expansive archive of treaties, federal statutes and regulations, federal case law, tribal codes, constitutions, and jurisprudence. This library also features rare compilations edited by Felix S. Cohen that have never before been accessible online.
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Indigenous Studies Portal (iPortal) This link opens in a new window The Indigenous Studies Portal (iPortal) is a database of full-text electronic resources such as books, articles, theses and documents as well as digitized materials such as photographs, archival resources, diaries, maps, and more. Its focus is primarily on First Nations and Aboriginals of Canada with a secondary focus on North American materials.
E-books
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Cultural Memories and Imagined Futures In the past decade, Jane Ash Poitras, a First Nations woman from northern Alberta, has emerged as one of the most important Canadian artists of her generation. Raised by a German widow who powdered her dark skin and tried to make her straight hair curl, Poitras did not begin to fully explore her indigenous roots until adulthood. Seeking out her extended family and participating in profound cultural experiences, she began to discover the side of herself that she was denied as a child. At the same time, she made a commitment to her art. With the opportunity to pursue a masters degree at Columbia University in New York, Poitras was at the centre of the North American contemporary art scene. Together, these dual influences shaped Poitras unique style, one that combines representational strategies of postmodern art - collage, layering, overpainting, incorporation of found objects - with a deep commitment to the politics and issues common to indigenous peoples. Cultural Memories and Imagined Futures situates Poitrass work in the national context of Canadian First Nations art during the late 1980s and early 1990s, the period when she began to receive wide recognition. It is the first book-length study to examine Poitrass career as a whole, recounting her development as an artist, participation in major exhibitions, and recognition as a significant Canadian and international artist. Along with detailed analyses of specific artworks, Pamela McCallum has also compiled the most extensive bibliography of writings on Poitras to date.
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Indians Playing Indian Explores how American Indian artists have responded to the pervasive misunderstanding of indigenous peoples as cultural minorities in the United States and Canada Contemporary indigenous peoples in North America confront a unique predicament. While they are reclaiming their historic status as sovereign nations, mainstream popular culture continues to depict them as cultural minorities similar to other ethnic Americans. These depictions of indigenous peoples as "Native Americans" complete the broader narrative of America as a refuge to the world's immigrants and a home to contemporary multicultural democracies, such as the United States and Canada. But they fundamentally misrepresent indigenous peoples, whose American history has been not of immigration but of colonization. Monika Siebert's Indians Playing Indian first identifies this phenomenon as multicultural misrecognition, explains its sources in North American colonial history and in the political mandates of multiculturalism, and describes its consequences for contemporary indigenous cultural production. It then explores the responses of indigenous artists who take advantage of the ongoing popular interest in Native American culture and art while offering narratives of the political histories of their nations in order to resist multicultural incorporation. Each chapter of Indians Playing Indian showcases a different medium of contemporary indigenous art--museum exhibition, cinema, digital fine art, sculpture, multimedia installation, and literary fiction--and explores specific rhetorical strategies artists deploy to forestall multicultural misrecognition and recover political meanings of indigeneity. The sites and artists discussed include the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC; filmmakers at Inuit Isuma Productions; digital artists/photographers Dugan Aguilar, Pamela Shields, and Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie; sculptor Jimmie Durham; and novelist LeAnne Howe.