InfoGuides: Resources for Dramaturgy: Historical Context

Historical Context

Historical context is another core tenet of an honest production, whether your show has been done before or you're a part of the writing/devising process. If you are telling the story of any time period or population, it is part of your due diligence to round up relevant information. This will lead you into studies of aesthetics, sociopolitical context, and beyond in order to enrich your show with truth and consideration.

Suggested Databases

Daily Life through History
Supplies primary documents, reference works, monographs, images, maps, illustrations, and time lines depicting activities of daily life across the globe and throughout history. Covered time periods: Ancient (beginning of time to 4th century), Medieval (5th century to 14th century), Modern (15th century to 19th century), and Present (20th century to 21st century).
HathiTrust
A digital preservation repository and access platform for long-term preservation and access services for public domain and in-copyright content from a variety of sources, including Google, the Internet Archive, Microsoft, and in-house partner institution initiatives.
JSTOR

JSTOR is a collection of core scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences digitized in most cases back to the first date of issue. Includes selected books, primary sources and other materials for academic work.
ProQuest Historical Newspapers
Provides genealogists, researchers, and scholars with first-hand accounts and coverage of the politics, society and events of the time. Full-text access to 11 Historical Newspaper Titles.

Additional Subject Guides

Just as there are Theater subject guides for research, there are also guides for the other disciplines, like History. If you are not finding what you need through the databases listed here, try the many databases recommended by our History Librarian!

History and Primary Source Subject Guides

Images & Inspiration

Suggested Databases

Looking for historical references, be it for characters or settings? Explore these databases!

AP Newsroom
Formerly AP Images. Explore, discover and curate from the Associated Press’s vast collection of text, photo, video and audio assets, spanning from 1895 to today.
ARTstor

Contains over a million images documenting artistic traditions across many cultures and time periods. Updated frequently, please check back often for updated searches & collections. Note: ARTstor users must create a free account to save and share images. Users must turn off the popup blocker.
Oxford Art Online

Scholarly art encyclopedia. Includes over 200,000 reference articles on every aspect of the visual arts from prehistory to the present, with selected images, written by over 6,800 scholars. Serves as the access point for Grove Art Online, the Benezit Dictionary of Artists, and other Oxford art reference resources.

Suggested Websites

There are also many websites available that have open collections of art and historical images. Especially useful if looking to draw from a certain art movement or aesthetic style.

Artsy
Represents contemporary/practicing artists, with over 50,000 artworks from galleries, museums, and artists' estates
Creative Commons
CC Search is a tool that allows openly licensed and public domain works to be discovered and used by everyone. Creative Commons, the nonprofit behind CC Search, is the maker of the CC licenses, used over 1.4 billion times to help creators share knowledge and creativity online. CC Search searches across more than 300 million images from open APIs and the Common Crawl dataset. It goes beyond simple search to aggregate results across multiple public repositories into a single catalog, and facilitates reuse through features like machine-generated tags and one-click attribution.
NYPL Digital Collections
Images digitized from the New York Public Library's collections, covering everything from historic menus to dance archives and newspaper photos.
Smithsonian Image Gallery
Includes over 530,000 electronic images from several archival repositories and museums at the Smithsonian.

Suggested Subject Guides

Our Art Librarian has created many subject guides surrounding the research of art and images. If you are unable to find what you need in these resources, check out her guides.