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Background & Overviews

The Advertising Age Encyclopedia of Advertising. Reference HF5803 .A38 2003.

Encyclopedia of Major Marketing Campaigns. Reference HF5837 .E53 2000

Advertising in America: The First Two Hundred Years. General Collection HF5813 .U6 G64 1990

The Mirror Makers: A History of American Advertising and its Creators. General Collection HF5813 .U6 F66 1984

Advertising and the Transformation of American Society, 1865-1920. General Collection HF5813 .U6 N67 1990

Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America. General Collection HF5813 .Ug L418 1994

Advertising to the American Woman, 1900-1999. General Collection HF5813.U6 H54 2002

Handbook of American Popular Culture. Reference E169.1 .H2643 1989

Bibliographies and Guides to Research

Business Periodicals Index. 1958-1995/96. Index HB1 .B87

Information Sources in Advertising History. Reference HF5811 .P64 

Those Were the Good Old Days: A Happy Look at American Advertising, 1880-1930. General Collection HF5813 .U6 J66 1954

Library Catalogs

Randall Library Catalog = Local holdings of library's books, videos, government documents, manuscript collections and journal holdings. (Note that the journal information in the catalog tells what issues we have but does not index individual articles.) Some web sites are also cataloged.

WorldCat = Cataloged holdings of over 9,000 libraries. WorldCat is the union catalog of books, web resources, and other material located worldwide cataloged by OCLC member libraries (approximately 26,000 libraries.) Books in the catalog are generally available via Interlibrary Loan, and many of the websites are freely available.

Subject Headings

Select Suggested Subject Headings

Advertising -- History -- Bibliography
Advertising -- United States
Advertising -- United States -- History -- 19th century
Advertising -- United States -- History -- 20th century
Advertising -- United States – History -- Sources
Advertising campaigns -- United States -- History
Commercial art -- United States
Popular culture – United States
Social change -- United States
Social change -- United States – History
United States -- History
United States -- Social History
United States -- Social Life And Customs

• The library catalog and WorldCat use Library of Congress Subject Headings. This list of authorized subject headings is available in the 5-volume set at the Reference Desk. However, you can start with keyword searches to gather some relevant titles, then look at their subject headings to discover the official terms to use.
  
• Libraries and database creators try to structure language in a way to make browsable lists.  Subject terms tend to be set up in a hierarchical manner.  To understand this better, try a Keyword search in the Randall Library Catalog for "Advertising History"  Then, do a Subject search on " Advertising --United States -- History "  The hierarchical display of the subject search allows you to browse through results for various aspects and periods of history.
  
• Subject headings are not "natural language." For example, books on social history commonly use the subheading Social life and customs.
  
• Keep in mind that the most specific terms will be used as subject headings.
  
• Just because an item's subject heading does not include "History" as a subdivision does not mean it has no history in it. In particular, look at the publication date. It may be a source contemporary to the period.
  
• There are several commonly used subject subheadings that indicate an item is a primary source. Look for or search these subheadings:
  • correspondence*
  • diaries*
  • interviews*
  • personal narratives
  • pictorial works
  • songs and music
  • sources
  • speeches, addresses, etc.*
  • treaties

Browsing

After finding some sources through searching the online catalog, be sure to browse the shelves near these times. The call numbers are devised to place materials on the same subject together on the shelf. In the catalog, the call number is presented as a link, so you can even browse the shelves when searching the catalog:

You may also wish to browse the Reference Collection to see what special sources are available. A basic outline of the Library of Congress Classification Scheme is at http://library.uncwil.edu/is/outlinelc.html. For more detail, see the outline from the Library of Congress: http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/lcco/lcco.html

Scholarly Journal Databases & Indexes

Use these databases and journal indexes to search for articles in journals and magazines.

America: History and Life Indexes and summarizes article and reviews about U.S. and Canadian history published since 1957.

Business Source Premier covers all areas of business including marketing and provides full-text articles dating from 1965.

Communication & Mass Media Complete includes journals in communication and mass media studies as early as 1915.

EbscoHost Academic Search Premier is a multidisciplinary periodical index to over 8,000 journals and magazines, 4,700 of which are full-text online.

JSTOR Full-text searching of an archive of over 40 history and 25 political science journals. Typically excludes the latest 3-5 years of publication.

PAIS Archive The PAIS Archive database contains references to monographs, periodical articles, government and non-governmental agency reports about public affairs, public and social policies and international relations. The archive database contains references from 1915 to 1976.

Primary Sources

See the guide "Finding Primary Resources for Historical Research" for a more complete discussion of the library's resources. For public policy history, be sure to consider the following searches and sources:

Don't miss these collections of source material:

Newspapers and Popular Magazines

Electronic Resources
HarpWeek. Harpers Weekly 1857-1876.

Making of America (Cornell University) Full text of 22 journals and 109 monographs, ca. 1840-1900.
Making of America (University of Michigan) Full text of 13 journals and 8,500 books, ca. 1840-1900.

New York Times Archive  Full-image online access for the NYT back to 1851.

Readers' Guide Retrospective (1 user at a time) Indexes about 250 magazines popular in the US, 1890-1982. (Does not index ads.)

Newspapers on Microfilm (Index availability)
The library has a collection of 18th and 19th century newspapers from various locations.

News & Observer (Raleigh) 1897-1901; 1965-present (Index Collection AI21 .N53 1967-1973; 1975-76; Index Microfiche 1974, 1977-80.)

Wilmington Morning Star (no index available)

New York Times (New York Times Index Index Collection AI21 .N45)  
     You may want to use this index to make sure you find articles you can retrieve through the online version.

Print Indexes to Periodical Literature
International Index to Periodicals (Index Collection AI3 .R5)  Indexes selected scholarly periodicals.

Poole's Index to Periodical Literature (Index Collection AI3 .P7) Indexes selected popular magazines, 18002-1907.

Advertisements are not always indexed. The library has a list of popular magazines prior to 1970 that you can browse. Dates of coverage are provided for each title as well as format.

Web Resources

Making Sense of Advertisements Part of the website "History Matters" this leads you through ways to think about ads from a historical perspective.

The free web is becoming a rich resource for primary source material. In particular, try these resources:

Ad Council Campaigns View public service announcements, selected historic campaigns dating back to its founding in the 1940s.

Ad*Access
"The Ad*Access Project, funded by the Duke Endowment "Library 2000" Fund, presents images and database information for over 7,000 advertisements printed in U.S. and Canadian newspapers and magazines between 1911 and 1955. Ad*Access concentrates on five main subject areas: Radio, Television, Transportation, Beauty and Hygiene, and World War II, providing a coherent view of a number of major campaigns and companies through images preserved in one particular advertising collection available at Duke University. The advertisements are from the J. Walter Thompson Company Competitive Advertisements Collection of the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History in Duke University's Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library."

Advertising Archives This searchable database from the UK can be limited by country of origin and time period. Requires free registration to view enlarged images.

All Politics Ad Archive Sponsored by CNN and Time Magazine, this site provides QuickTime movies of presidential campaigns TV ads.

American Food Century: Advertising Jingles
Audio files of of jingles and voiceovers from advertisements. Entries are listed by subject.

American Memory Project, from the Library of Congress currently includes six collections devoted to advertising: The Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850-1920; An American Time Capsule: Three Centuries of Broadsides and Other Printed Ephemera; Fifty Years of Coca-Cola Television Advertisements: Highlights from the Motion Picture Archives at the Library of Congress; Prosperity and Thrift: The Coolidge Era and the Consumer Economy, 1921-1929; Inventing Entertainment: the Early Motion Pictures and Sound Recordings of the Edison Companies; and By the People, For the People: Posters from the WPA, 1936-1943. Collections can be searched individually or collectively.

Classic TV Ads Sorted by eating, drinking, smoking, cleaning, grooming, shopping and traveling.

Clipland TV Commercials Database
The Clipland TV Commercial Database is your online source for television commercials from all over the world.

Emergence of Advertising in America, 1850-1920
"EAA presents over 9,000 images, with database information, relating to the early history of advertising in the United States. The materials, drawn from the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University, provide a significant and informative perspective on the early evolution of this most ubiquitous feature of modern American business and culture. "

The Geography of Slavery in Virginia This site from the University of Virginia includes a digital collection of advertisements for runaway slaves and servants that appeared in Virginia newspapers.

HarpWeek Presents 19th Century Advertising Images of advertisements from Harper's Weekly.

The History Project: U. S. History Images These images were collected by faculty members at the University of California Davis. The Marchand Collection has a category for advertising, with 31 subcategories. You can also use their search engine to retrieve images.

John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing History at Duke University
"The Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History in Duke's Special Collection Library acquires and preserves printed material and collections of textual and multimedia resources and makes them available to researchers around the world. Through these collections and related programming, the Center promotes understanding of the social, cultural, and historical impact of advertising, marketing, and sales."

Library of American Broadcasting: LAB Sound Bites The Library of American Broadcasting at the University of Maryland provides samples of vintage radio commercials, ca. 1950s- 1960s..

Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online Catalog. Search for prints and photos. If the image is too small, note the source and search the Randall Catalog or WorldCat for the item.

The Living Room Candidate Presidential campaign commercials, 1952-2004, from the American Museum of the Moving Image.

Marketing in the Modern Era: Trade Catalogs and the Rise of Nineteenth Century Advertising. This website accompanied an exhibition at the Baker Library, Harvard School of Business.

Medicine and Madison Avenue
"This website explores the complex relationships between modern medicine and modern advertising, or "Madison Avenue," as the latter is colloquially termed. The Medicine and Madison Avenue Project presents images and database information for approximately 600 health-related advertisements printed in newspapers and magazines. These ads illustrate the variety and evolution of marketing images from the 1910s through the 1950s. The collection represents a wide range of products such as cough and cold remedies, laxatives and indigestion aids, and vitamins and tonics, among others. In addition to the advertisements themselves, the MMA website includes historical material -- non-graphical text-only documents -- that put health-related advertising into a broader perspective."

Old Time Radio Commercials Brief background information on commercials, with images and embedded audio files (look for the small red boxes.)

Philip Morris Tobacco Advertising Archives Print ads, outdoor ads, point of sale materials and direct marketing materials dating back to 1900. Use the search box at the top of the page. Must be 21 to enter and agree to terms.

ROAD: Resource of Outdoor Advertising Descriptions
"ROAD: Resource of Outdoor Descriptions, is a database providing access to over 50,000 descriptions of images of outdoor advertising dating between the 1920s through the 1990s.  There are no images available on this web-site, only descriptions of the images. The materials described here are drawn from collections in the holdings of the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University and are included as a supplement to an NEH grant-funded  project to provide access to Duke's outdoor advertising material. "

Sears Archives More than 100 years of stories, product and brand histories, photographs, model homes and catalog images on this website for the retailer.

Tobacco Documents Advertising Collections Over 85,000 images searchable by terms and date.

Truth in Advertising
This website provides access to a collection of vintage cigarette advertisements from the 1940s and 1950s.

Women Working, 1800-1930 Sources selected from Harvard's library and manuscript collections. Browse the topic "Consumerism."

Also of possible interest:

Documenting the American South (UNCCH) provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture.

Digital Scriptorium (Duke) selections from Duke University's Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library.

Last Update: February 21, 2008