English & American Literature

The Center for Applied Linguistics Collection contains recordings (speech samples, linguistic interviews, oral histories, conversations, and excerpts from public speeches) documenting North American English dialects. Forty-three states, D.C., Puerto Rico, and parts of Canada are represented. Recording dates range from 1941 to 1984, with the bulk being recorded 1968-1982.

Explore 60,000 selected recordings of music, spoken word and human and natural environments.

16,000 BBC sound effects from the 1920s onwards are made available by the BBC in WAV format to download for use for personal, educational or research purposes. Browse by broad category (e.g., animals), search within a category, or search the entire database.

Includes @300 audio examples of English dialects from England and Wales.

Sound recordings of interviews with actors, stage designers, writers and critics, theatregoers, etc. talking about post-war British theatre.

The Poetry Archive is a free, online collection of recordings of poets reading their work.

Listen to over 40 years of interviews with Terry Gross on NPR's "Fresh Air."

The Boston Public Library sound collection includes hundreds of thousands of audio recordings in a variety of historical formats, including wax cylinders, 78 rpms, and LPs. The recordings span many genres, including classical, pop, rock, jazz, and opera – from 78s produced in the early 1900s to LPs from the 1980s.

The British Council Film Collection is an archive of 100+ short documentary films made by the British Council during the 1940s designed to show the world how Britain lived, worked and played. Preserved by the BFI National Film Archive.

(Internet Archive ->  Moving Image Archive ->) Sub-collection of the Moving Image Archive. 6,000+ digitized and videotape titles and a large collection of home movies, amateur and industrial films. Its goal remains to collect, preserve, and facilitate access to films of historic significance that haven't been collected elsewhere. Included are films produced by and for many hundreds of important US corporations, nonprofit organizations, trade associations, community and interest groups, and educational institutions.

Contains thousands of free digital movies uploaded by Archive users which include: classic full-length films, daily alternative news broadcasts, cartoons, and concerts. Many are available for free download.

EU-funded portal to the digital collections of 35+ European film archives. Offers free access to digital videos, photographs, magic lantern slides, film posters, and text materials.

Provides online access to Europe's television heritage through videos, stills, texts and audio from European broadcasters and audiovisual archives. Explore selected content from early 1900s to the present.

British newsreels covering all of the twentieth century.

Streaming video of archival newsreels dating from 1929-1967. These newsreels are the precursors of television news reporting.

(from the website) The National Screening Room showcases the riches of the Library’s vast moving image collection, designed to make otherwise unavailable movies, both copyrighted and in the public domain, freely accessible to the viewers worldwide.

Digital motion picture and television collections collected by the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division of the Library of Congress.

Created and maintained by the Museum of the Moving Image, this is a "gateway to the best online resources related to film, television, and digital media." Note: some resources in the guide are not available to the general public.

Digital archive of avant-garde film and video.