Includes the complete encyclopedia, as well as a Merriam-Webster dictionary and thesaurus.
American History Online spans more than 500 years of political, military, social, and cultural history. Thousands of biographies, subject entries, timeline entries, primary source documents, maps, and images cover the entire spectrum of the American experience.
Covers both U.S. history, with full-text articles and primary sources, as well as access to the abstracts and citations in the premier U.S. historical bibliography, America: History & Life.
Suggested Articles and Topical Overviews:
A note on using Wikipedia for background information: Wikipedia can be a valuable background source, and there will most likely be topic pages that focus specifically on an element of your topic, like a specific robber baron, labor union, or event like The Homestead Strike. Though you cannot cite Wikipedia directly in a paper/project, look with a critical eye at the references listed at the end of each article for the possibility of discovering more scholarly, reputable resources.
|
Be intentional about your keywords - who are the important figures, or events? How could you distill your topic into the most crucial words or phrases? Use the Advanced Search option whenever possible to join together keywords and key phrases. Use quotation marks around phrases to ensure all words appear together in order. Such as "dollar diplomacy" Add search filters - limit to scholarly journal articles, book chapters (avoid book reviews!) |
As you research, you will not have time to read every article thoroughly - practice "skimming" an article to understand the main points. You may use the AI tools recommended in your assignment sheet to help you in summarizing and understanding an article's perspective. You must cite every AI prompt that you use to find sources! Noodletools has an AI template. For more information check out the citation section of this guide.
Once you have selected articles, you may use this checklist to "skim" an article for useful information. Make a copy for yourself and use it to take notes on your sources.
Online Collections at Bunn Library:
Covers both U.S. history, with full-text articles and primary sources, as well as access to the abstracts and citations in the premier U.S. historical bibliography, America: History & Life.
This full-text database contains a broad range of scholarly journals in the arts, sciences, humanities, and social sciences. The JSTOR mission is unique in that it creates a permanent, digitized archive of the selected titles.
A comprehensive selection of prestigious humanities and social sciences journals to support a core liberal arts curriculum at any academic institution. Every journal is heavily indexed and peer-reviewed, with critically acclaimed articles by the most respected scholars in their fields.
A very large collection of periodicals covering a broad range of subject areas. ProQuest includes four basic databases: Platinum Periodicals, ProQuest Newspapers, Reference, and The Historical New York Times. The New York Times collection is complete back to 1851.
Academic Search Engines:
A primary source collection sourced from The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
American History Online spans more than 500 years of political, military, social, and cultural history. Thousands of biographies, subject entries, timeline entries, primary source documents, maps, and images cover the entire spectrum of the American experience.
NYT Historical edition covers the newspaper from 1851-2016. For more recent articles try New York Times (ProQuest Central), which covers June 1, 1980-Present. For today's news, visit the digital New York Times.
Founded in 1865, The Nation is America's oldest continuously published weekly magazine. The archive includes the full run of the paper from that time. The Nation is frequently quoted and referred to in works of historical analysis. In the contemporary period, it is characterized by a liberal point of view.
Image Collections: these resources only contain images.
Bridgeman Education is a complete visual resource offering over 1,000,000 digital images of art, history and culture from global museums, galleries, private collections and contemporary artists all copyright cleared for educational use.
Jstor Images contains over 1.8 million digital images in the arts, architecture, the humanities and science from outstanding international museums, photographers, libraries, scholars, and photo archives.
Digital Public Library of America:
Digital History:
Library of Congress Research Guides & Topics in Chronicling America (LOC newspaper archive):
To view all LOC research guides, click here. Look under the menu for "American History" for related content.
These are just a few selections to get started. For more, search the library catalog. Add keywords "sources" or "documents" to your search terms to focus on primary document collections.
How the Other Half Lives by 
Twenty Years at Hull-House by 
The Gilded Age and Progressive Era by 