LibGuides: COM 408: Rhetorical Criticism (Bloomfield): Research Starting Points, Databases, and Websites

Starting Points for Your Research

Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a great place to begin when investigating your artifact. Check out the list of references at the end of the page that will direct you to additional resources. (Remember not to cite Wikipedia)
Google
You will most likely find readily available articles, interviews, and other resources on Google.
YouTube
You might find some interesting interviews, in addition to speeches, performances, and other useful resources about your artifact.
Internet Archive: Moving Image Archive
More than 2.5 million videos including public domain feature films, television and news service videos
Podbean.com--Podcast Directory
This resource allows users to search podcasts by subject category.

Current Newspaper Databases

You will most likely find some good information in the wide variety of current newspaper databases about your artifact. Remember to refine your search by date.

Los Angeles Times, 1996 - current This link opens in a new window
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1996-
Major daily newspaper from Los Angeles. Click on the publications link above the search box and then select "Los Angeles Times" to search only this publication.
With the nation's largest editorial department, it offers extensive coverage of national, international, and local news.
Las Vegas Review Journal (NewsBank) This link opens in a new window
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1996-
Full text of articles, not including images.
New York Times, 1980 - current This link opens in a new window
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1980-
Full text of articles only; includes New York Times Book Review and New York Times Magazine from 1997 forward.
Newspaper Source Plus This link opens in a new window
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Regional newspapers and broadcast television transcripts.
Newspaper Source provides full text coverage for 40 national and international newspapers including USA Today, The Christian Science Monitor, The Times (London), and The Toronto Star. Selected full text is offered from more than 330 regional newspapers including The Buffalo News, Orange County Register, Philadelphia Inquirer, San Francisco Chronicle, and St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Full text transcripts are available from CBS News, CNN, CNN International, FOX News, National Public Radio, and more.
Nexis Uni This link opens in a new window
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Searchable published news, legal, medical and business information.
The news section delivers the full text of international, national and regional newspapers along with wire services, broadcast transcripts, magazines, and non-English language sources. The legal section contains U.S. Federal and state case law, codes, regulations, legal news, law reviews and international legal information. This includes Shepard's Citations for all U.S. Supreme Court cases back to 1789. The medical section supplies information from news and medical journals, and provides abstracts to medical news from Medline. The business section includes business news journals, company financial information, SEC filings and reports, and industry and market news.
US Newsstream This link opens in a new window
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1980s-
Searchable current and recent articles from newspapers, including Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
Full text of articles from major national newspapers: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, USA Today. Also included are the New York Times Book Review, the New York Times Magazine, and the Las Vegas Review Journal.

Current Newspapers: Local and national subscriptions
This extensive resource guide includes today's Las Vegas and national newspapers via library subscriptions.

Movies, Television, Music, Speech Databases

Below are a selection of databases focusing on film, music, television, and speeches. Many of them provide scholarly and peer-reviewed sources and some provide popular and trade sources as well (such as the Rolling Stone Archive & the Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive).

Academic Search Premier This link opens in a new window
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Searchable articles from academic and professional journals and magazines covering every academic discipline.
Update frequency: Updated daily
This excellent one-stop resource lets you search citations and summaries by keyword and then instantly retrieve the full text of articles from journals online. The Get Text button helps you locate any article without linked full text in alternate online sources or in UNLV's print journal collection.
America: History & Life with Full Text This link opens in a new window
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Journal articles and books about the history of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. Limited to 6 simultaneous users.
Scope: U.S. and Canada only
Languages: Abstracts of articles in 40 different languages
This index includes almost 400,000 bibliographic entries from over 2,000 journals published worldwide. Books, media reviews, and dissertations are also covered, and approximately 16,000 entries are added each year. The Get Text button links to online full text when available and offers access to UNLV print collections and document delivery options for books and articles not available online.
Bloomsbury Music and Sound This link opens in a new window
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Scholarship about rock and roll and other popular music around the world, plus interdisciplinary studies of the theory, methodology, and practice of sound.
Includes the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, ebooks analyzing significant popular albums in the 33 1/3 series, and books about sound from disciplines like art, aesthetics, architecture, contemporary music, history, philosophy, technology, and cultural studies.
Communication & Mass Media Complete This link opens in a new window
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1900-
Journal articles in the fields of communication and mass media studies .
Update frequency: weekly
Communication & Mass Media Complete contains journal articles in the fields of communication and mass media studies. It merges CommSearch (formerly produced by the NCA, National Communication Association) and the Mass Media Articles Index (formerly produced by Pennsylvania State University). Communication & Mass Media Complete provides current issues and backfiles of in the fields of communication and mass media.
Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive This link opens in a new window
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1880-2015
Music, film, broadcasting and theater industry trade publications published before 2015 including Variety, Billboard, Spin, The Hollywood Reporter, American Cinematographer, American Film, Picturegoer and more.
Film & Television Literature Index This link opens in a new window
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Journal and magazine articles about film and television.
Filmakers Library Online This link opens in a new window
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Documentary films reflecting diverse cultures and points of view with relevance across the curriculum.
Award-winning documentaries about topics in international relations, criminal justice, the environment, bioethics, health, political science and current events, psychology, arts, literature, and more.
Internet Movie Database This link opens in a new window
Online database of information about movies, movie stars, television shows, television stars and video games.
Movie Review Query Engine This link opens in a new window
Free online index of movie reviews from both offline and online sources.
Search by movie title, recent releases, lists of festivals and selections of the American Film Institute.
Rolling Stone Archive This link opens in a new window
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Dates covered: 1967-current
Rolling Stone magazine reports on popular music, politics, society and entertainment. This archive includes full page images with photos from all issues up to the current issue.
Screen Studies This link opens in a new window
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Search through a collection of film criticism books and screenplays, including the BFI Screen Classics series, or consult a timeline about the history of cinema.
Contains books, screenplays

Finding Artifacts

100 Greatest Songs of the Century--So Far (Rolling Stone)
Billboard.com
Billboard Magazine Archive (1894-2021)
Country Music Hall of Fame
Hollywood Reporter
Metacritic.com
National Rhythm & Blues Hall of Fame
Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
TVTropes.org
Variety.com
American President: Presidential Speech Archive
American Rhetoric Online Speech Bank
Movie speeches, sermons, interview, top 100 speeches and rhetorical figures in sound. Scroll down to view all.
Blackpast.org--Speeches
Gifts of Speech: Women's Speeches from Around the World
Great Speeches Collection: The History Place
History Matters: Making Sense of Evidence
"This section helps students and teachers make effective use of primary sources. “Making Sense of Documents” provides strategies for analyzing online primary materials..." (From website.)
History Vault: Famous Speeches & Audio
Rhetoric of 9-11 (AmericanRhetoric.com)
Rhetorical Literacy: 50 Important Speeches in 21st Century America (American Rhetoric)
Say it Plain Say It Loud
From American Radio Works, this site features a century of great African American speeches.
SoJust: Speeches on Social Justice
Presidential Inauguration Resources
From Washington-to-Trump

Finding Visual Artifacts

Advertising Age: Creativity Online
Examples of recent marketing materials from Advertising Age.

ARTstor This link opens in a new window
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Art digital images and related data.
A repository of hundreds of thousands of digital images in the areas of art, architecture, the humanities, social sciences and related data; the tools to actively use those images; and a restricted usage environment that seeks to balance the rights of content providers with the needs and interests of content user.

CineFiles
CineFiles is a gateway to digitized film-related documents and ephemera that have been collected by the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive since the 1970s.
Google Cultural Institute
Exhibits and collections from a range of museum collections and cultural institutions.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
Access the various image collections from the Library of Congress.
The Living Room Candidate
Archive of presidential campaign commercials from 1952 - 2008 provided by the Museum of the Moving Image.
NYPL Digital Collections
Posters, maps, photographs, book illustrations, etc.
Reading the Pictures
"Reading the Pictures is a web-based, non-profit 501(c)(3) educational and publishing organization dedicated to visual culture, visual literacy and media literacy through the analysis of news, documentary and social media images."
Shorpy.com
Vintage photography blog featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1950s
Sociological Images
"Sociological Images encourages people to exercise and develop their sociological imaginations with discussions of compelling visuals that span the breadth of sociological inquiry."
viz
Visual Rhetoric, Visual Culture, Pedagogy. The award-winning digital publication viz. is committed to the intersections of Rhetoric and visual culture. In keeping with its mission to promote visual literacy, the viz. blog presents a daily community forum for discussing images in the digital age. The website attracts a steady, significant following with an international audience made up of users from 144 countries and territories.
Vintage Ad Browser
Over 100,000 vintage ads categorized by subject and browsable by decade
World Images
Includes all areas of visual imagery

Online Movies & Streaming Video Available via UNLV Libraries

Online Movies & Streaming Video
Guide to the Libraries' licensed collections of streaming video and other sources. The collections provide access to thousands of educational videos, documentaries and feature films on a variety of subjects.

Here are some examples of the videos available. You can access these and all films using your ACE Account:

COM 408: Rhetorical Criticism (Bloomfield): Research Starting Points, Databases, and Websites

COM 408 Library PowerPoint--Researching Databases and Other Sources