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History

Welcome to the History Department Guide!

The purpose of this Research Guide is to provide you with the specific information and tools that you'll be using to do research. On this page, you will find our librarians' recommendations for best resources for your subject. This includes relevant resources, such as subject specific databases, citation format guidance, search tips, and contact information of the subject librarian

Need additional assistance? Reach out to your subject librarian! We are always happy to help.

Best Bets: Databases

Unsure of which Databases to search for History sources? Here is where we recommend starting:

HathiTrust 

Founded in 2008, HathiTrust is a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries preserving 17+ million digitized items. HathiTrust offers reading access to the fullest extent allowable by U.S. copyright law, computational access to the entire corpus for scholarly research, and other emerging services based on the combined collection. HathiTrust members steward the collection — the largest set of digitized books managed by academic and research libraries — under the aims of scholarly, not corporate, interests.

Humanities Source Ultimate  

Humanities Source Ultimate offers access to key content covering literary, scholarly and creative thought. It also includes hundreds of scholarly full-text journals cited in leading subject indexes to round out student research.

JStor  

JSTOR provides access to more than 12 million academic journal articles, books, and primary sources in 75 disciplines.

Oxford Scholarship Online  

Alternate Name(s) Oxford University Press

16000+ scholarly books in 20 subjects with an estimated 1000 additional titles per year

Project Muse - Social Science Collection  

Provides access to high quality, peer reviewed, interdisciplinary journals in the social sciences including cultural studies, economics, anthropology, politics, and much more.

Student Activism 

[The] Student Activism collection is intended to serve as a scholarly bridge from the extensive history of student protest in the United States to the study of today’s vibrant, continually unfolding actions

Washington Post 

Alternate Name(s) Washington Post, WaPo

The Washington Post is an excellent source for news on current events, national politics, and global issues.

To access freely from anywhere, create an account with your Juniata email and navigate to "Subscription & Billing"

Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) 

The Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) is a series of publications detailing internal State Department communications, organized by presidential administration. These documents provide insight into American foreign policy from the Lincoln Administration to the Clinton Administration. Please note that, while FRUS is periodically updated with new records, many recent administrations have not yet had their records digitized.

Academic Search COMPLETE 

Designed for academic institutions, this database is a leading resource for scholarly research. It supports high-level research in the key areas of academic study by providing journals, periodicals, reports, books and more.

Additional Resources

Digital Civil War Collection at University of Tennessee

American Memory

Library of Congress project to "provide free and open access through the Internet to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience."

Avalon Project - American Historical Documents

Yale Law School's project to  "mount digital documents relevant to the fields of Law, History, Economics, Politics, Diplomacy and Government." Documents from 4000 BCE to 2000.

Civil Rights Documentation Project 

Digital Commons Network - History

"Full-text scholarly articles from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide."

Documenting the American South

Eyewitness to History

Primary sources from the Ancient World to the Twentith Century.

Harry Ransom Center At the University of Texas at Austin

"Advances the study of the arts and humanities by acquiring, preserving, and making accessible original cultural materials. With extensive collections of rare books, manuscripts, photography, film, art, and the performing arts."

Harvard Law School Library Nuremberg Trials Project

"An open-access initiative to create and present digitized images or full-text versions of the Library's Nuremberg documents, descriptions of each document, and general information about the trials. "

Harvard University Library Open Collections

OCP has created seven subject-specific web-accessible collections that can support teaching and learning around the world. Today, OCP collections account for over 2.3 million digitized pages, including more than 225,000 manuscript pages.

Harvard in the 17th and 18th Centuries

Reading: Harvard Views of Readers, Readership, and Reading History

Islamic Heritage Project

Expeditions and Discoveries: Sponsored Exploration and Scientific Discovery in the Modern Age

Contagion: Historical Views of Diseases and Epidemics

Immigration to the United States, 1789–1930

Women Working, 1800–1930

Holocaust Resource Library

Making of America

"A digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction.

Manhattan District History

"General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Engineer District, in late 1944 commissioned a multi-volume history of the Manhattan Project called the Manhattan District History. Prepared by multiple authors under the general editorship of Gavin Hadden, a longtime civil employee of the Army Corps of Engineers, the classified history was "intended to describe, in simple terms, easily understood by the average reader, just what the Manhattan District did, and how, when, and where."" Made available through the United States Department of Energy's OpenNet.

National Park Service - The Civil War

The Newberry Digital Resources

"Digital exhibitions, publications, reference materials, and image collections" about the Americas.

Internet History Sourcebooks Project

Fordham University's curated "collection of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts presented cleanly (without advertising or excessive layout) for educational use."

Post-Holocaust American Judaism Archive

"Materials examining Judaism and the Jewish experience through the lens of religious, cultural and social movements in America, as well as various philosophies of Judaism and Jewish organizations, originating from the late 1940s to the present."

Vietnam Center and Archive

"Collects and preserves the documentary record of the Vietnam War, and supports and encourages research and education regarding all aspects of the American Vietnam Experience."

Women's History Archive

"published and unpublished materials that reflect the public and private lives of women, past and present." See their list of Research Guides for topic ranges.

Free eBooks

Interlibrary Loan

Do you need access to something we don't have in our library collection? Try Interlibrary loan - the service that allows us to borrow materials from other libraries. Learn more here.