How
do I find ... ? This guide will lead
you to the different types of resources and tools used in historical research.
Guide
to Using Primary Sources on the Web
Databases
for Americanists
Related
Yale
Library Research
Workshops
The Yale University Library holds periodic workshops for
researchers, tailored either to general or specific needs. See Workshops
& Tutorials.
How To Locate Books
A book can be either a primary or secondary source, depending
upon factors like publication date, viewpoint of the author and the topic
of your research.
Catalogs - tell you what is in a library in all formats
(books, periodicals, manuscripts, videos, databases) and where it is kept. The collections of the Yale University Library are represented
in multiple catalogs. Together Orbis, Morris (the Law Library catalog) and the Center
for Research Libraries (CRL) catalog constitute the Yale University
Library catalog.
Eureka (RLIN) provides catalog records for books, journals, maps, sound recordings,
musical scores, films, archives, and computer files held in research,
corporate, and public libraries, as well as museums, archives and historical
societies.
WorldCat (OCLC) contains catalog records from academic, public, special and national
libraries around the world.
Full-Text Online Books
ACLS
History E-Book Project is an electronic publishing initiative for
books in the field of history.
Early
English Books Online (EEBO) is based on the Bell & Howell microfilm
collections Early English Books 1475-1640 and Early English Books 1641-1700.
Early
American Imprints, Series I. Evans, 1639 - 1800 is based on the American
Bibliography by Charles Evans. It contains over 37,000 non-serial
works from 1639 - 1800.
Early
American Imprints, Series II. Shaw-Shoemaker, 1801-1819 provides full-text
access to the 36,000 American books, pamphlets and broadsides published
in the first nineteen years of the nineteenth century.
Eighteenth
Century Collections Online contains nearly 150,000 English language
titles and editions published between 1700 and 1800.
Use quotation marks (ex. "african american history" ) to find online books.
Enter search terms below including quotation
marks:
Note: Use quotation marks around phrases
to search for other topics such as "slave narratives"
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How To Locate Scholarly Analysis - Peer Reviewed Journals and Dissertations
Scholarly analysis can usually be found either as a monograph
or an article. Here are the places to look in addition to Yale Catalogs.
America: History
and Life contains annotated references to articles about US and Canadian
history from periodicals published worldwide. AHA includes book and media
reviews and citations to abstracts of dissertations.
Academic
Search provides access to journal articles in most academic areas
of study. It includes full-text coverage for journals from 1990 to the
present and abstracts/indexing of journals from 1984 to the present.
Historical
Abstracts contains annotated references to books, articles, and dissertations
on the history of the world from 1450 to the present (excluding the United
States and Canada,
which are covered in America:
History and Life).
Arts
and Humanities Citation Index indexes articles from arts and humanities
journals, plus relevant articles from social science and science journals.
The database covers 1975 to the present.
AHA
Guide to Historical Literature ed. Mary
Beth Norton,
Pamela Gerardi.
3rd
ed
.
New York
:
Oxford
UP, 1995. 2 v.
The product of over 400 historians. This edition of the Guide presents
an integrated, selective listing of books and articles that most successfully
introduce others to the study of key issues in history. Works have been
chosen for inclusion on the basis of (1) their function as reliable syntheses
or reference works that provide entry to a field; (2) works that set the
standard of excellence in various fields of history; and (3) major alternative
interpretations represented in current scholarly debates. Contains nearly
27,000 annotated citations arranged in 48 chapters. Each chapter includes
a brief introductory essay summarizing the history and development of
that area of historical inquiry. With author and subject indexes and a
list of journals.
SML, Reference Z6201 A55 1995. Also at the SML Reference Desk
History
Cooperative contains full text of current issues of the American
Historical Review, the Journal of American History, Law
and History Review, William and Mary Quarterly, The History
Teacher, and Western Historical Quarterly.
JSTOR (Journal Storage Project) contains the full text of several journals in
the Arts & Sciences.
Dissertations
and Theses - Full Text contains entries with information about doctoral
dissertations and master's theses. Many titles published since 1997 (and
selected earlier dissertations including Yale's) are available in full
-text PDF digital format and have 24 page previews available.
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How To Locate Magazine Articles
Indexes analyze the contents of periodicals. There are several
indexes, both in print and electronic formats. Below are the indexes that
historians find most helpful.
20th Century
Readers'
Guide to Periodical Literature indexes some of the most popular general
interest periodicals published in the United States and Canada since 1890
and contains full text of those periodicals from 1983 - present.
Academic
Search indexes academic journals and some magazines and provides full
text for many publications.
Access:
The Supplementary Index to Periodicals indexes magazines not presently
indexed in Reader's
Guide to Periodical Literature, including city and regional magazines.
SML, Reference, Index Case AI3 A23 (LC)
Alternative
Press Index (1969 - present) indexes roughly 250 alternative, radical,
and left publications. Many of these periodicals are not indexed in the
Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature or the Social Sciences Index.
The online version begins with 1991.
Periodicals
Index Online indexes periodicals in the humanities and social sciences,
from their first issues to recent. The scope is international, including
journals in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and other Western
languages.
Commentary
Digital Archive contains every issue of Commentary from 1945
to the present.
Nation
Digital Archive contains every issue of The Nation from July
1865 to the present.
19th Century
American Periodical Series is a full-text/full-image database conatining magazines published between 1741 and 1900.
Harper's
Magazine Online provides access to the full-text Harper's Magazine.
It covers 1850 to the present.
HarpWeek:
The Civil War Era and Reconstruction is a searchable full-text database
of all the pages of Harper's Weekly (1857-1877).
Nation
Digital Archive contains every issue of The Nation from July
1865 to the present.
Nineteenth
Century Index contains several
established indexes.
The
Nineteenth Century Masterfile contains several electronic indexes
to pre-1920 periodical literature, including Poole’s Index to
Periodical Literature (1802-1906). The print version of
Poole
’s is located in SML, Reference, Index Case A13 P656 1963
Periodicals
Index Online indexes periodicals in the humanities and social sciences,
from their first issues to recent. The scope is international, including
journals in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and other Western
languages.
Readers'
Guide to Periodical Literature indexes some of the most popular general
interest periodicals published in the United States and Canada since 1890
and contains full text of those periodicals from 1983 - present.
18th Century
American
Periodical Series is a full-text-/full-image database contains 1000
magazines published between 1741 and 1900.
Periodicals
Index Online (formerly Periodicals Contents Index) indexes periodicals
in the humanities and social sciences, from their first issues to recent.
The scope is international, including journals in English, French, German,
Italian, Spanish and other Western languages.
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How To Look For Online Newspapers
Few newspapers have published indexes. Check Orbis to determine what
is available. Here are a few online newspaper indexes and fulltext databases.
Early
American Newspapers features cover-to-cover reproductions of hundreds
of historic newspapers, providing more than one million pages as fully
text-searchable facsimile images. This collection is based largely on
Clarence Brigham's History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690-1820.
Historical
Newspapers Online contains the New York Times Index
The print version of NYTI is located in SML, Reference, Index Case AI21
+N43 (1851-1945) and
SML
Microtext
Center
, AI21 +N43 (1946-present).
- ProQuest
Historical Newspapers: (Full Text titles)
- Atlanta
Constitution (1868 - 1925)
Boston
Globe (1872 - 1922)
- Chicago
Defender (1905 - 1975)
- Chicago
Tribune (1849 - 1985)
- Christian
Science Monitor (1908 - 1992)
- Hartford
Courant (1764 - 1922)
- Los
Angeles Times (1881 - 1985)
- The
New York Times (1851 - 2002)
- The
Wall Street Journal (1889 - 1988)
- The Washington Post (1877 - 1989)
Lexis-Nexis
Academic Universe is a full-text news and information service that
provides access to newspapers, magazines, transcripts, business and legal
information.
Accessible
Archives provides a searchable collection of American newspapers from
the 18th &19th Centuries. Titles include the Pennsylvania Gazette
and African-American Newspapers: the 19th Century.
Factiva contains same-day and archival coverage of many US and international newspapers,
newswires and transcripts.
How To Look For Newspapers in Other
Formats
First determine the title and date of publication of the
newspaper. These guides will help:
Brigham,
Clarence
Saunders
. History and Bibliography
of American Newspapers, 1690-1820.
Worchester
,
MA
: American Antiquarian Society, 1947.
Many of the newspapers listed and discussed in this work are available
on microfilm in the Early American Newspapers Collection shelved
in the Microform Reading Room.
SML, Reference Z6951 +B75.
American Newspapers, 1821-1936: A Union List of
Files Available in the
United States
and
Canada
.
Ed.
Winifred
Gregory
.
New York
:
H.W.
Wilson
, 1967.
SML, Card Catalog Reference Shelf Z6945 A48 1967. Also in SML,
Andrews
Study
Newspapers on Microform: United
States, 1948-1983.
Washington
,
DC
:
Library or Congress, 1984.
SML, Catalog Reference Desk Z6951 +U469. Also in SML, Reference, Microform
Reading Room.
To determine if Yale University Libraries own a particular
newspaper, first check Orbis,
the online catalog. Then check this database:
Newspaper
Holdings of the Yale University Library is a record of Yale Library
holdings of newspapers in microform. This list contains only some of the
newspapers to be found in the original, reprints, or facsimile in the
SML stacks, Mudd Library, or the Beinecke. It does include some of the Underground
Newspaper Collection (Film S618).
If we do not have a particular newspaper, you may be able
able borrow it from another library via interlibrary loan. Check the Center
for Research Libraries (CRL), Eureka,
and/or WorldCat
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How to Locate Government Documents
When looking for government-related documents, databases
and indexes are useful. Below are some databases and websites that are
particularly helpful when looking for pre-1900s government documents.
American
Broadsides and Ephemera, Series I offers searchable facsimile images
of broadsides printed between 1820 and 1900 and pieces of ephemera printed
between 1760 and 1900. The subjects range from contemporary accounts of
the Civil War, unusual occurrences and natural disasters to official government
proclamations, tax bills and town meeting reports and pieces of ephemera
that include clipper ship sailing cards, early trade cards, bill heads,
theater and music programs, stock certificates, menus and invitations
documenting civic, political and private celebrations.
American
State Papers, 1789-1838 contains U.S. Congressional materials. It
overlaps somewhat with the U.S.
Congressional Serial Set.
U.S.
Congressional Serial Set is comprised of the bound, sequentially numbered
volumes of all the Reports, Documents, and Journals of the U.S. Senate
and House of Representatives. This digitized version includes Serial Set
volumes 1-161 (15th-19th Congresses, 1817-1827).
Lexis-Nexis
Congressional Universe is an online legislative and regulatory service.
It provides indexing and abstracting for congressional hearings, prints,
bills, reports and documents.
Lexis-Nexis
Primary Sources in U.S. History full text modules include Access
to African American Studies, and provide a range of sources, including
autobiographies, manuscripts, government documents, photographs and images,
reference and scholarly articles, and speeches.
Historic
Government Publications from World War II provides online access to
a collection of World War II publications published by the U.S. government
in support of the war effort.
AMDOCS:
Documents for the Study of American History contains full-text documents
of many important historical and government texts.
Nineteenth
Century Documents Project (Furman) includes accurate transcriptions
of many important and representative primary texts from nineteenth century
American history, with special emphasis on those sources that shed light
on sectional conflict and transformations in regional identity.
Collection
Finder for the American Memory Project at the Library of Congress.
Avalon
Project (Yale Law School) presents digital historical documents relevant
to the fields of law, economics, politics, diplomacy and government on
the World Wide Web.
Document
Collections of the Avalon Project (includes the UN).
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How To Locate Manuscripts and
Archives
Manuscript materials can be difficult to locate. Below are
some electronic resources that help locate materials:
ArchivesUSA integrates three resources: The National Union Catalog of Manuscript
Collections (NUCMUC), The Directory of Archives and Manuscript
Repositories in the US (DARMUS), and The National Inventory of
Documentary Sources in the United States (NIDS).
WorldCat contains over 39 million records from academic, public, special and national
libraries around the world.
ArchiveGrid integrates the portion of the Research Libraries Group's RLIN database
(Eureka)
containing close to half a million descriptive records of archival collections
with a growing range of online finding aids or detailed collection guides
and inventories. ArchiveGrid uses a modified form of the Eureka interface.
Yale
Finding Aids Project provides access to archival finding aids in a
platform-independent electronic format, using SGML (Standard Generalized
Markup Language) and HTML. Finding aids are inventories, indexes, or guides
that are created by archival and manuscript repositories to provide information
about specific collections. While the finding aids created by repositories
may vary somewhat in style, their common purpose is to provide detailed
description of the content and intellectual organization of collections.
Access to finding aids through the Internet will assist scholars in determining
whether collections contain material relevant to their research.
Guides
to Microforms (in Lexis-Nexis
Primary Sources in U.S. History) provide a web-based finding aid for
certain microform collections. Instead of searching through several printed
guides that accompany microforms, you may search all the microform collections
in the database by keyword or browse the electronic versions of the printed
guides by title or subject. The end result will be a list of descriptions
of records you can find either in Yale University Library's microform
collections or through interlibrary loan.
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Where To Find
Basic Biographical Information and To Check Facts (online)
American
National Biography offers portraits of men and women -- from all eras
and walks of life including illustrations, hyperlinked cross-references
and links to select web sites.
Biography
and Genealogy Master Index indexes biographical sketches of current
and retrospective reference books, covering both contemporary and historical
figures throughout the world.
Biography
Index cites biographical material appearing in periodicals indexed
in Wilson databases and additional selected periodicals, some current
annuals of individual and collective biography, and incidental biographical
material in otherwise non-biographical books.
Biography
Resource Center (BioRC) is a database of biographical information
throughout history, around the world, and across all disciplines and subject
areas.
World
Biographical Index is a good first step for locating very basic information
about people from North and South America, Western and Central Europe,
Australia, New Zealand, and Oceania, through the beginning of the 20th
century. It is essentially an index to biographical reference works
which have been microfilmed. Yale's microfiche sets are housed in the
SML, Starr Main Reference Room Annex.
General (online) Encyclopedias
Britannica
Online includes the complete, updated
Encyclopędia
Britannica
,
selected articles from magazines, including Newsweek, Discover, and The
Economist, and reviews of Web sites.
Dictionary
of American History (third edition) is the first comprehensive revision
of the classic reference source originally published in 1940. Illustrations
and maps have been incorporated into the main body of the work.
Keesing's World News Archive provides objective international news reports
and resources to communicate with leaders around the world since 1931.
Oxford
Reference (History) brings subject dictionaries and reference works
published by Oxford University Press into a single cross-searchable resource.
It is also possible to search each title in the collection individually.
Reference
Universe provides the ability to search the article titles and back-of-the-book
indexes to subject encyclopedias and reference works, with links directly
to Orbis to indicate which of the titles Yale owns. It also links to online
versions of the sources, if available, and to reviews of the works indexed.
The Browse feature permits exploration by publisher, title, subject heading,
index terms, and LC call number.
Topic-Specific Databases
Databases
& Article Searching lists all Yale databases. Try using the Search
feature to locate databases for your topic. For example, the search american
history manuscripts results in the database Lexis-Nexis
Primary Sources in U.S. History
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