LIBRARY GUIDE TO HST 3000 - Seminar in Historical Research (Estes)

Kresge Library Catalog
You can use the library catalog to find books, scholarly & popular journals, government documents, dvds & videos, reference materials, sheet music, and more.

MelCat
A statewide catalog of many of Michigan's libraries. It allows you to request books at another library be sent to Kresge Library for you.

WorldCat
A catalog of materials owned by libraries worldwide. How to export to RefWorks

Encyclopedia of the New American Nation: good bibliographical references (Ref. E 301 .E53 2006)

Interlibrary Loan
You may request materials we don't have and we'll borrow them from another library for you.

The main databases for scholarly articles on the early American republic:

America: History & Life
The definitive index of literature covering the history and culture of the United States and Canada, from prehistory to the present. Provides indexing for 1,700 journals. How to export to RefWorks. Coverage: 1964-present. To find articles that are not directly available in it, be sure to use the link to determine where to find it.

JSTOR and Project MUSE
Project Muse provides full-text access to the content from over 400 scholarly journals in the humanities and the social sciences. How to export to RefWorks
Full text of numerous scholarly history journals.

Some important journals:

• The Journal of the Early Republic. Covers the period 1776-1861.
• The William and Mary Quarterly. Scholarship in history and related disciplines from initial Old World-New World contacts to the early nineteenth century and beyond. Articles, notes and documents, and reviews range from British North America and the United States to Europe, West Africa, the Caribbean, and the Spanish American borderlands.
• The Journal of American History. One of the leading scholarly publications in the field of American history.

• Annals of America
  A multi-volume set that includes copies of documents on the colonial period and the early Republic.
• Early American Imprints, entire series
  Books, pamphlets, broadsides, newspapers, government documents and ephemera printed in colonial America and the early republic.
• American Periodicals Online Series
  Digitized images of the pages of American magazines and journals published from 1740-1940.
• In print at Kresge Library:
  United States History 1783-1815 Sources., United States History 1783-1865 Sources.
• Papers of George Washington (KL)
• Papers of George Washington (online)
• Founders Online (papers of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison)
• The American Constitution - a Documentary Record (Avalon Project)
• Documents from the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention (American Memory)
• Congressional Documents and Debates, 1774-1873 (American Memory)
• Early Newspapers: KL has a collection of over 20 newspapers from early America dating from the 18th and 19th centuries, available on microcards.
• Guide to Nineteenth-Century periodicals online
• The Transatlantic Slave Trade (Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture)
• The First American West: The Ohio River Valley, 1750-1820
• Indians of the Midwest (Newberry Library)
• Martha Ballard's Diary Online
• Virginia and Maryland Probate Inventories (1740-1810)
• Colonial Williamsburg
• Documenting the American South (documents from 18th to 20th century South)

For more primary sources:

• Search the Digital Public Library of America, a portal to digitized collections of major libraries
• Browse History Matters' list of websites relating to early U.S. history

To find primary sources on your topic:

1) consult the bibliography and notes of a good secondary source on on the subject
2) if you're studying a person or an organization, try to find if a library has their papers
3) Google your topic, using words like "papers" or "archives" as part of your search; or add "site:edu" at the end of your search
4) Search the Digital Public Library of America or ArchiveGrid

See also:

• 19th Century American History research guide
• History research guide

 

• Locating historical newspapers online

 

• Early American Imprints: advanced searching

To learn how and when to use sources, go to the plagiarism tutorial

Refworks allows you to create a personal database of references and automatically generate formatted bibliographies for your projects.

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