Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers
A collaboration between the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities, Chronicling America provides access to thousands of articles from American newspapers dating from 1789-1963. New digitized content is added every year. Several American newspapers contain articles regarding Ellis Island. A researcher may find the New York newspapers: New-York Tribune, The New York Herald, and The Sun of interest.
JSTOR
JSTOR has millions of journals articles, book reviews, and books. There are many journals on the humanities and social sciences including The American Journal of Nursing and The Journal of American History. It also includes publications by the Public Health Service which ran the Ellis Island medical inspections and immigrant hospital. The researcher will find articles published during the Ellis Island time period as well as articles published more recently. Recent publications include analysis of the legacy and impact of medical inspections and health requirements at the immigrant hospital.
North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries and Oral Histories
This database focuses entirely on primary resources. It is a collection of personal narratives, interviews, letters, diaries, and oral histories of immigrants who came to the United States and Canada in the years 1890-1920. This includes over 35,000 pages of oral history transcripts from Ellis Island. Much of this content is not published elsewhere and Alexander Street, a ProQuest company, has indexed and added subject headings to the resources in order to make them searchable. Some of the ways resources can be sorted include the author’s date of immigration, political affiliation, job, country of origin, and reason for immigrating. The thesaurus provides a list of subject headings that can be used to search for topics such as medicine, health, disease, and disability.
Project Muse
Project MUSE’s online database provides access to social science and humanity journals and books. The scholarly journals and books are peer-reviewed by professionals in their respective fields. Project MUSE also offers open access material. Multiple academic journals available the database provide information about the people and events of Ellis Island, including Bulletin of the History of Medicine and American Jewish History.
PubMed Central
PubMed Central (PMC) is a database maintained by the U.S. National Institutes of Health that provides free access to life-science journals, including medical and biological sciences. The database provides additional features such as “Similar Articles in PubMed” and records the researcher’s search history. A researcher may find it beneficial to use the corresponding database, PubMed, to identify and select additional resources. Many of the journals include articles for medical treatment on Ellis Island as well as the treatment of specific ethnic groups on the island.
Medicine on Ellis Island 