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Professor
Hugh Dubrulle
Library Liaison
Jeff Waller
Contents
Introduction
Background & Reference
Find Newspaper Articles
Find Books at Geisel Library
Find Books beyond Geisel
Library
Find Articles
Selected Websites
How to Cite Your Sources
Subject Guide
History
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This guide ties in with the class assignment to research an event or development in modern European history, with particular attention to how that event was portrayed in The Times (London) newspaper. Start your research by searching the Times (London) Digital Archive to locate articles that describe and comment upon the historical event as it unfolded. To obtain other perspectives on the event, search the library catalog for relevant books and search the history and full-text databases for journal articles. If you need additional material, use our Interlibrary Loan service to request books and articles from other libraries. These secondary sources will help you fill in details that are unavailable in the newspaper articles, while offering a more retrospective point of view on the people and events that you're studying.
Before delving into the newspaper articles, you may wish to consult reference sources in order to get the basic facts of the event in question. Reference materials can provide background information on your topic and help you identify keywords for further searching; for example, the names of important leaders, places, or events.
Some reference resources include bibliographies at the ends of each entry or volume, which will point you to additional books and journal articles worth exploring. Many of these will be in our collection, but if the "perfect" book/article is not here at Geisel, don't hesitate to request it from another library through our Interlibrary Loan service. Articles often arrive within 3–5 days, while books generally arrive within 1–2 weeks.
Encyclopedia of African History (3 vols.)
Ref DT20 .E53
Encyclopedia of Eastern Europe
Ref DJK6 .E53
Encyclopedia of Russian History (4 vols.)
Ref DK14 .E53
Encyclopedia of the Cold War (5 vols.)
Ref D840 .E63
Encyclopedia of Western Colonialism Since 1450 (3 vols.)
Ref JV22 .E535
Historical Dictionary of the French Fourth and Fifth Republics, 1946–1991
Ref DC401 .H57
Modern Germany: An Encyclopedia of History, People, and Culture (2 vols.)
Ref DD14 .M64
Oxford Reference Online
This database enables you to search within many of Oxford's highly-regarded reference works in the field of history, including the Oxford Companion to World War II and Oxford Companion to British History.
Twentieth Century Britain: An Encyclopedia
Ref DA566 .T835
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Newspaper articles offer firsthand perspectives on major developments in world history. Although the primary intention of newspaper article writers is to report and communicate the facts, they also implicitly convey their assumptions and ideologies through how they choose to report the story. By reading multiple articles about a particular person or event, you can often discern the underlying perspectives and biases that color the newspaper's presentation of the facts. Naturally, this presentation may in turn influence the opinions and attitudes of political leaders and the general public, and shape how the historical narrative is written.
Times (London) Digital Archive (1785–1985)
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.
Here are some tips on how to use this database effectively:
- Before you begin searching, use reference sources or a textbook to discover keywords to search and to identify starting and ending dates for the period you want to examine.
- Enter these starting and ending dates into the "Limit the current search by date" textbox. This date can be specified in a variety of ways. For example, enter 1951–1957 to study the Ghana independence movement, or 7/17/1945–8/2/1945 to explore coverage of the Potsdam Conference.
- Combine keywords using Boolean operators (AND and OR) to increase the specificity of your search. For example, searching De Gaulle will yield a massive number of hits, so try searches like (De Gaulle AND constitution) or (De Gaulle AND (Cold War OR NATO)) to produce more focused results.
- If you do not find enough articles, switch the search to "in entire article content", which may pick up articles that contain brief mentions of your events or people.
- To obtain opinion pieces only, use "Limit the current search by section" and checkmark "Editorial and Commentary". However, remember that a newspaper's ideological inclinations can also be detected in news articles.
- In the Results list, click on an Article link to view the article. To print, use the Print button in the left-side menu rather than the Internet browser's print option, so that the article will fit nicely on the printed page.
Times (London) in LexisNexis (1985–present)
For historical events and developments since 1985, you will need to search The Times (London) in LexisNexis. The above link opens a LexisNexis "power search" of the weekly and Sunday Times.
Here are the steps to follow in order to search LexisNexis successfully:
- Enter keywords representing your topic in the Search Terms box, using the Boolean operators AND and OR to combine them together.
- Click the Specify Date drop-down box and choose "Date is between." to input the date range of issues that you want to search.
- Hit the Search button.
- Search results are displayed in from newest to oldest, which can help you trace the chronological development of the newspaper's opinion. But to read the most relevant articles given your search terms, use the Sort drop-down box to change the sort order to Relevance.
- In the Article view, use the Printer icon at upper right to use LexisNexis's printing feature, which provides several handy options for formatting your printout.
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Books are typically written well after the historical events they analyze, so they incorporate information that was unavailable to the writers of newspaper articles documenting an event as it unfolded. This may include the knowledge of subsequent events, declassified documents, or newly-discovered primary source materials (such as memos or diaries) that change the way historians view an event. As a result, books (as well as journal articles) may offer a very different perspective than The Times (London) articles do. Additionally, book authors may exhibit different ideological inclinations than writers for the Times.
To find relevant books, you will want to try a combination of Subject and Keyword searching in the Geisel library catalog. Start by conducting Keyword searches on the events, people, and places addressed in your newspaper articles. This will find books for which the search terms appear in either the title, a chapter title, or a subject term. For example, keyword searches on "Dien Bien Phu", "Solidarity AND Poland", or "Gorbachev AND (glasnost or perestroika)" will unearth directly relevant books as well as more generalized books that contain relevant chapters. When you find a useful book, click on its subject headings to identify similar works.
If this approach doesn't yield enough useful sources, try performing Subject searches to locate books about the history or internal politics of a particular country during the time period being studied. To start this process, run a Subject search on "XXX History" or "XXX Politics and Government", where XXX is the name of the country of interest. Most likely, any books about the country's history or politics during this time period will cover (to some extent) the events or figures that you are researching. Examples of relevant subject headings for this project include the following:
- Czechoslovakia — History — Intervention 1968
- Europe — Politics and Government — 1945–
- European Economic Community
- European Union
- France — Politics and Government — 1958–
- Germany — Politics and Government — 1945–1990
- Hungary — History — Revolution 1956
- Poland — Politics and Government — 1980–1989
- Soviet Union — Politics And Government — 1985–1991
- World War, 1939–1945 — Peace
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Although Geisel Library has an excellent history collection, you may not find sufficient information on your topic without taking advantage of Interlibrary Loan. By searching WorldCat (an online catalog encompassing the holdings of thousands of libraries worldwide), you can identify relevant books owned by other colleges and have them delivered to Geisel Library for your use.
One strategy to exploring WorldCat is to perform Subject searches on the same Subject Headings you used or discovered in the Geisel Library catalog. See the subjects in the previous section for examples. You may wish to combine these Subject search terms with keywords corresponding to the names of events or historical figures. You can also try keyword searches on people, events, and countries. Examples would be "Nyerere AND (Tanzania OR Tanganyika)" or "Carnation Revolution and (Portugal OR Portuguese)".
Inside most WorldCat book records is a "Request ILL" link; to place an ILL request, all you need to do is:
- Click on the Request ILL link
- Input your name and contact information, including the S number on your student ID
- Click the Submit button
The book will be available at our circulation desk within 1–2 weeks. You will be emailed when it arrives, and you can check it out for a specified borrowing period.
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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 (when present) to determine whether the journal is available in the Geisel Library or in full-text via another electronic database. If the article isn't available, consider clicking on the Interlibrary Loan link to request a PDF copy of the article from another library. Articles requested via ILL will be delivered to your email inbox within about a week.
Historical Abstracts
The best place to start. It provides abstracts to journal articles, book/media reviews, and dissertations with a focus on world history and culture (excluding the United States and Canada) from prehistoric times to the present. If your keywords could potentially be relevant across a wide time period, use the Historical Period From/To limiter (down below the full text limiter checkboxes) to specify your narrow time period of interest.
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.
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. For tips on how to use JSTOR effectively, see our User Guide.
Worldwide Political Science Abstracts
Search this database for citations and abstracts from literature in political science and its related fields, including international relations, law, and public administration / policy. This database is worth searching if your topic has a significant political dimension, such as anything involving the creation and evolution of the European Community.
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These websites were handpicked for their relevance to your project. You may also want to conduct keyword searching on your topics in a search engine such as Google, but be sure to look for indications that the site's information is authoritative, objective and reliable.
Cold War International History Project
This digital collection maintained by the Woodrow Wilson International Center consists of a Virtual Archive of primary documents, organized thematically into collections such as the Geneva Conference, Hungarian Revolution, and Poland in the Cold War.
EuroDocs: Primary Historical Documents From Western Europe
Links to online collections of digitized primary source documents, organized by Western European country. This website also includes a collection of primary documents relating to Europe's history as a supranational region.
European Navigator
This website sponsored by the Virtual Resource Center for Knowledge about Europe provides access to important documents from significant events in the formation and development of the European Community and European Union. The website uses a document viewer which requires that Flash be installed on your computer.
Internet Modern History Sourcebook
This web-based sourcebook of primary source texts includes a number of subsections that are germane to this research assignment, especially Post-War Western Europe and Post-War Eastern Europe. These pages provide links to primary documents hosted by various organizations and universities.
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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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