Research Guides: History : Welcome and Getting Started

Welcome

Welcome to the History LibGuide page. Here you can find valuable information for conducting research, crafting an argument or historical narrative, or just learning the basics about history. Resources are divided by geographical area, then time period, with areas of specialization highlighted with their own pages on the sidebar. Some general resources that span one or more of these areas are also highlighted below.

This LibGuide was originally created by Mindy Williams.

Recommended General Primary Source Databases

Getting Started

Gale Primary Sources
Gale Primary Sources is an integrated research environment that allows scholars to search across more than 30 Gale primary source collections, including Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Nineteenth Century Collections Online, Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers, Archives of Human Sexuality and Identity, The Making of the Modern World, and other collections.
HathiTrust
A growing collection of several million scanned books, journals, and other digital resources, comparable to Google Books. Benefits include full-text and advanced bibliographic search capabilities, and full PDF downloading of works in the public domain (26% of the collection).
HathiTrust is a partnership of more than 50 major research libraries working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future. It ingests digital content from its partner institutions as well as from Google, the Internet Archive, and Microsoft. In some cases, books that are only available in snippet view through Google Books are full text at HathiTrust, which is actively investigating the copyright status of works published up to 1964. Hathi (pronounced HAH-tee) is the Hindi word for elephant, a symbol of memory, wisdom, and strength.
History Reference Center This link opens in a new window
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This database features full text for thousands of primary source documents and informational texts.
Newspaper Source Plus
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This database provides selected full text coverage for 245 newspapers, newswires and other sources. This collection includes cover-to-cover full text for The Christian Science Monitor and The Los Angeles Times as well as selected full text from hundreds of regional newspapers. International newspaper coverage includes cover-to-cover full text for The Times (London), The Toronto Star, The Australian, and more. Newswire coverage includes AP Online (Associated Press), Asia Pulse, Canadian Press Wire, World Stream Newswires and more.
ProQuest Historical Newspapers
Newspaper digital archive offering full-text and full-image articles for the following newspapers:

Atlanta Daily World (1931-2010)
Baltimore Afro-American (1893-2010)
Chicago Defender (1910-2010)
Chicago Tribune (1849-2013)
Cleveland Call and Post (1934-1991)
Indianapolis Star (1903-1922)
Jerusalem Post (1932-2008)
Korea Times (1950-2016)
Los Angeles Sentinel (1934-2005)
Louisville Defender (1951-2010)
New York Amsterdam News (1922-1993)
New York Times (1851-2018)
Norfolk Journal and Guide (1916-2003)
Philadelphia Tribune (1912-2010)
Pittsburgh Courier (1911-2010)
South China Morning Post (1903-2001)
Times of India (1838-2010)
Wall Street Journal (1889-2011)

Recommended Secondary Source Databases

Getting Started
Dictionaries, Encyclopedias, & Biographies

Humanities Full Text
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Humanities Full Text™ provides coverage of feature articles, interviews, bibliographies, obituaries, and original works of fiction, drama, poetry and book reviews, as well as reviews of ballets, dance programs, motion pictures, musicals, radio and television programs, plays, operas, and more.
Humanities International Complete
Humanities International Complete is an essential collection for comprehensive coverage of the humanities with full text content.
JSTOR
Full-text digital archive of over 2600 scholarly journals, especially strong in Social Sciences, Humanities, Economics, and Mathematics.
Women's Studies International
Index to over 871,000 records drawn from a variety of essential women's studies databases, including Women Studies Abstracts, Women's Studies Database, Women Studies Librarian, Popline Subset on Women, Women of Color and Southern Women, and Women's Health and Development.
WorldCat
OCLC WorldCat database is the OCLC online catalog. It contains over 43 million records describing library holdings.
Historical Abstracts
Abstracts of selected journal articles, citations of books, book reviews and dissertations on the history of all parts of the world (excluding the United States and Canada) from 1450 to present.

Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) This link opens in a new window
The authoritative source on American colloquialisms and local slang. The interactive map enables browsing by region, including states and major areas within each region.
Dictionary of Old English/Corpus
The Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus is an online database consisting of at least one copy of every surviving Old English text. In some cases, more than one copy is included, if it is significant because of dialect or date. As such, the DOE Web Corpus represents over three million words of Old English and fewer than a million words of Latin, or almost five times the collected works of Shakespeare.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography This link opens in a new window
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford DNB) is the national record of men and women who have shaped British history and culture, worldwide, from the Romans to the 21st century. The Dictionary offers concise, up-to-date biographies written by named, specialist authors.
Oxford English Dictionary (OED) This link opens in a new window
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is widely regarded as the accepted authority on the English language. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of 600,000 words— past and present—from across the English-speaking world.
Oxford Reference Online
Searchable full-text of more than 150 reference books published by Oxford University Press on many subjects in the arts, history, and sciences. Includes dictionaries, encyclopedias, and several of the Oxford Companion series.
Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (TLL) This link opens in a new window
A dictionary of ancient Latin providing all instances of a given word in Latin literature from the earliest times to 600 A.D. 31 academies, and scholarly societies from 23 countries support the work of the Bayerische Akademie (Thesaurusbüro München). The HSSE Library also holds a printed version, call no. 473 T343.

PLEASE NOTE that from the 1st of February up until the 15th of February, 2021, the TLL (Thesaurus Linguae Latinae) database will not be accessible. This is due to the publisher launching a new platform and the special structure of the TLL, which is cause for the delay. We will inform you, should we get anymore information about this, if not, the resource should be back online on the 15th of February.

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Recommended General Primary Source Databases

Recommended Secondary Source Databases