Specialized Databases with Literary Content

Films on Demand This link opens in a new window
29 full length videos for the study of literature, history, religion and theater. Includes: Alice Walker, August Wilson, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, and Eudora Welty.
Create a personal account to customize playlists, create clips, and access other features.
Films on Demand Tools & Features
Theatre in Video This link opens in a new window
Definitive performances of the world's leading plays, together with more than 100 film documentaries.
Contains more than 250 of the world’s most important plays, together with more than 100 video documentaries, representing hundreds of leading playwrights, actors and directors.
Kanopy Streaming Video This link opens in a new window
Watch streaming films, documentaries, and training videos from Criterion Collection, Women Make Movies, First Run Features, and other leading producers. The library owns some titles on this platform, but most content is leased solely for classroom use; see https://library.mtsu.edu/mediaresources/policy
Kanopy Troubleshooting Guide
Kanopy Accessibility Statement
Creating playlists and/or clips (Must first create a Kanopy account)
PBS Video Collection This link opens in a new window
Streaming video of almost 1,600 videos aired on PBS, including series such as NOVA, Nature, American Experience, etc.
Product brochure (pdf)
African American Poetry This link opens in a new window
Complete texts for poetry by African Americans, 1746-1900.
Contains nearly 3,000 poems by African American poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It provides a comprehensive survey of the early history of African American poetry, from the earliest published African American poems to the works of Paul Laurence Dunbar, the first African American poet to achieve national success and recognition.
Faber Poetry Library This link opens in a new window
Texts of poems from 50 notable 20th century American poets.
The authors are all part of the Faber Poetry list and the database enjoys the active support of the publisher and the poets or their estates. Authors covered include Simon Armitage, Rupert Brooke, Wendy Cope, T. S. Eliot, Lavinia Greenlaw, Thom Gunn, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, David Jones, Louis MacNeice, Andrew Motion, Paul Muldoon, Tom Paulin, Sylvia Plath, Siegfried Sassoon, Stephen Spender and Edward Thomas

Poetry Foundation Videos
Watch poets read or discuss their works and the world of poetry. Classics, new poems and children's poems are featured.

African American Music Reference This link opens in a new window
Chronicles the diverse history and culture of the African American experience through music.
• Full text from major reference works
• Biographies and personal narratives from oral histories
• Manuscripts, song-sheets, lyrics, discography data, and other text sources
cover jazz, spirituals, civil rights songs, slave songs, minstrelsy, rhythm and
blues, gospel, and other forms of African American musical expression
Twentieth-Century African American Poetry This link opens in a new window
Database of modern and contemporary African American poetry, featuring almost 9,000 poems by 62 of the most important African American poets of the last century, including Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Imamu Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde and Rita Dove.
Black Thought and Culture This link opens in a new window
Searchable texts of non-fiction work by prominent African Americans, 1700 to present.
Contains 1,297 sources with 1,098 authors, covering the non-fiction published works of leading African Americans. Particular care has been taken to index this material so that it can be searched more thoroughly than ever before. Where possible the complete published non-fiction works are included, as well as interviews, journal articles, speeches, essays, pamphlets, letters and other fugitive material.

About Us

ENGL 6221/7221: Major African American Writers - Advanced Research

Specialized Databases with Literary Content