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Professor
Matthew Masur
Library Liaison
Jeff Waller
Contents
Introduction
Research Basics
Background and Reference
Find Books
Find Journal Articles
Find Newspaper Articles
Find Primary Sources on
the Web
How to Cite Your Sources
Subject Guide
History
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This guide is designed to support the various research assignments in Part II and Part III of the Introduction to History class. The resources described below will provide the gateway for your research. If you need further assistance, please stop by the Reference Desk in person or pose your question online at Ask a Librarian.
The reference librarians have created a group of Web pages named Research Help, and a tutorial called Searchpath, designed to help teach you the basics of library research and to introduce you to Geisel Library. On the Research Help pages, you will find a guide on Research Basics and a helpful guide about evaluating your Web sources, Judging What You Find. Please take advantage of these resources.
Reference materials can provide basic background information on your topic and help you identify keywords for further searching; for example, the names of important leaders, places, or events. Many reference resources provide bibliographies at the ends of each entry or volume, which will point you to additional books and journal articles worth exploring. Check for the books in our library catalog, and use Journal Finder to see if the journals are available electronically or in print. The following reference books are good starting points for understanding the topics addressed in Part III of this course.
General
The Historian's Toolbox: A Student's Guide to the Theory and Craft of History
Ref D16 .W62
A Short Guide to Writing About History
Ref D13 .M294
Oxford Reference Online: History
This online collection enables you to conduct keyword searching on many of Oxford's reference works in the field of history.
United States
Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery
Ref E441 .D53
Dictionary of American History
Ref E174 .D52
Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century
Ref E740.7 .E53
Oxford Companion to World War II
Ref D740 .O94
Slavery in America: From Colonial Times to the Civil War, an Eyewitness History
Ref E441 .S36
Asia
Encyclopedia of Asian History
Ref DS31 .D53
Encyclopedia of Modern Asia
Ref DS4 .E53
Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War
Ref DS557.7 .E53
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To find books related to your topic, start by doing Keyword searching in the Geisel Library catalog. Use the Boolean AND to combine together multiple concepts, and use the Boolean OR to expand your search with synonyms and related terms. Use the *(asterisk) as a truncation symbol to retrieve variant forms of a word root; for example, diploma* will catch books with the words "diplomacy" or "diplomatic" in the catalog record. Here are some examples, based on the topics studied in Part III of this course:
- (nuclear OR atomic) AND ethic*
- Japan AND isolation*
- abolition* AND religion
- Vietnam War AND (public opinion OR attitude*)
When you find useful books, click on the Subject Headings in their catalog records to identify additional books on the same topic. Books are assigned Subject Headings based on the topics that they deal with, so the books you find using Subject searching will often be very relevant to your needs. You can also find additional books by browsing the shelves near a relevant book, since books are organized in the library by subject.
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As with the book catalogs, search the journal databases using keywords related to your topic, combining concepts together using the Boolean AND and OR operators. Once you find relevant articles, examine the subject headings that have been assigned to them and conduct Subject searches on the ones that seem most potentially fruitful. Be sure to read the bibliographies of articles to identify additional sources worth tracking down.
If there is no link to the full text of the article, click on the  icon to determine whether the journal is available in the Geisel Library or in full-text via another electronic database.
America: History and Life
Use this database to locate abstracts to journal articles, book/media reviews, and dissertations focusing on United States and Canadian history and culture from prehistoric times to the present. Abstracts are available for over 1,700 journals published worldwide.
Historical Abstracts
This database provides abstracts to key history journals from around the globe, covering world history from 1450 to the present (excluding North America, which is covered in America: History & Life). Historical Abstracts includes citations from books, dissertations, and a selection of journals in the social sciences and humanities.
JSTOR
Search here for full-text articles from major journals in the humanities and social sciences, including a number of important history journals. Coverage is generally from the beginning of publication to within 5 years of the current issue.
Academic Search Premier
A broad index providing abstracts and some full-text of scholarly and popular journals for a range of academic areas, including history.
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Newspaper articles can offer firsthand perspectives on major developments in world history. Articles written at the time of historical events can be regarded as primary source material. The two databases below contain full historical runs of two major English-language newspapers.
New York Times — Historical
This database provides full-text access to every page of the New York Times, from 1851 to 2003. The searchable collection includes digital reproductions, so that even advertisements and political cartoons from every available issue may be viewed.
Times of London Digital Archive
This database provides full-text access to every issue of The Times (London) newspaper from 1785 through 1985, except for Sunday editions. The digital archive includes not only articles but also advertisements, editorials, obituaries, and pictures. It can be searched by keyword and date range, with options to limit to specific sections of the newspaper.
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These websites were handpicked for their relevance to your project. You may also want to conduct keyword searching on your topic in a search engine such as Google, but be sure to look for indications that the site's information is authoritative, objective and reliable.
General
American Memory
From the Library of Congress, the American Memory project is a collection of digitized documents, photographs, recorded sound, moving pictures and text from the Library of Congress and other institutions. There are over 100 collections included in the project, which can either be searched with keywords or browsed by topic.
Internet Modern History Sourcebook
This sourcebook of primary source texts are generally arranged by country, period and topic for easy browsing. A vast resource for researching world history.
Voice of the Shuttle: History Resources
This website has a long history as an electronic gateway for humanities researchers, including an enormous listing of online history resources organized by country and time period.
Unit Specific Resources
American Slave Narratives
Read the complete interviews of thousands of former slaves, collected here; they are browsable and searchable by topic, names, place, or year of birth. Also at this site is more information about the WPA Federal Writers Project, responsible for the conducting the interviews in the 1930s.
Samuel May Anti-Slavery Collection (Cornell)
The Samuel May Anti-Slavery Collection gathers together over 8,500 important pamphlets and leaflets relating to the anti-slavery struggle at the local, regional, and national levels. Sermons, position papers, newsletters, Freedmen's testimonies, and broadsides all document the social and political implications of the movement.
Tennessee versus John Scopes (The "Monkey Trial")
This webpage offers primary documents related to the Scopes evolution trial, including court transcripts, journalist accounts, and Tennessee's anti-evolution statute.
Alcohol, Temperance, and Prohibition (Brown University)
A digital collection of pamphlets, broadsides, poetry, and government publications related to the prohibition of alcohol. It includes documents from the decades leading up to the enactment of Prohibition in the United States, and others from the Prohibition era itself.
Black Ships and Samurai (MIT)
A variety of images and narratives portraying the opening of Japan by Commodore Matthew Perry.
Ground Zero 1945: Pictures by Atomic Bomb Survivors (MIT)
A large collection of drawings accompanied by explanatory text narratives, documenting the experience of bomb survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II (National Security Archive)
This collection of primary source documents includes memoranda, diary entries, meeting notes, and diplomatic communications. Most were written by US government officials, but translations of key Japanese communications and memos are also included.
Documents Relating to American Foreign Policy: Vietnam (Mt. Holyoke)
This website offers a massive chronological listing of links to government documents about the Vietnam War, including memoranda, telegrams, press conference transcripts, presidential addresses, and reproduced versions of the Pentagon Papers.
Virtual Vietnam Archive (Texas Tech)
A searchable online database of nearly 3 million scanned pages of documents pertaining to the Vietnam War. Contents include photographs, letters, and oral histories, with an emphasis on personal rather than governmental documents.
Watergate Trial Conversations
This Nixon Presidential Library webpage offers audio recordings (in MP3 format) of the taped conversations that were introduced as evidence at the Watergate trial, along with transcripts of those conversations.
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See the library's How To Cite Your Sources guide for resources on how to properly cite research materials. Always confirm the style required by your instructor.
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