America: History and Life  

Provides citations and abstracts for journal articles, dissertations, books, and collections in North American history.

Historical Abstracts

Provides citations and abstracts for journal articles, dissertations, books, and collections in world history (non-North American).

Historic Events of the 20th Century -- Full-text

"Historic Events of the 20th Century" is a collection of 5 individual sourcebooks and covers the following:

• The Civil Rights Movement (overview)

• The Collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union (overview)

• The Holocaust (overview)

• World War I (overview)

• World War II (overview)

Daily Life Through History -- Full-text

Using dozens of different source books, Daily Life through History provides text, chronologies and pictures on many different topics from the ancient Greeks and Egyptians to the current topics in world history. It is peppered with illustrations and heavily referenced.

Primary Sources:

American Slavery: A Composite Autobiography

Indexed by narrator, interviewer, subject or county, these resources include full-text narratives of slaves and include pictures, sound and text.

Early American Imprints

The Evans Early American Imprints Collection is a microfiche collection of over 36,000 titles on over 26,000 fiche. The titles cover the years 1639-1800. The collection is based on Charles Evans' "American Bibliography" and Roger Bristol's "Supplement to Evans' American Bibliography."  It is considered to be the definitive source of information about life in 17th and 18th century America.

Foreign Relations Series
The Foreign Relations of the United States series presents the official documentary historical record of major U.S. foreign policy decisions and significant diplomatic activity. The series, which is produced by the State Department's Office of the Historian, began in 1861 and now comprises more than 350 individual volumes. The volumes published over the last two decades increasingly contain declassified records from all the foreign affairs agencies.

Note: to see the series that is owned by the library do a catalog search for "Foreign relations of the united states." The link above includes indexing and some full-text.

WorldCat on FirstSearch via NCLive -- Abstracts only

Worldcat is one of the oldest resources available to librarians. It covers all of the books in all of the libraries in the US, parts of Canada and many European and Asian countries. Records here date back to the earliest time in publishing. It is easy to search and one can limit to resources in our library to other libraries. Primary research can be easily found with an author search or by using those key phrases such as letters, diaries and so on. Maybe try a subject or keyword search for your topic but published during an historical time period?

Next try my favorite search. Search for words on your topic but limit to internet resources.

Try this search. Look for WPA but limit to internet resources.

LEXIS-NEXIS - Legal research
This database provides access to full text legal cases from the earliest dates of inception for all state and federal courts. Look at case law from all 50 states as well as Supreme Court and appellate court cases. Search by name of the case or the case citation.

Historic Documents Index -- Full-text at R917.3 H62h   

This cumulative index covers all primary documents presented in the twenty-eight volumes of Historic Documents, from 1972 through 1999.

In the First Person

A resource from Alexander Street Press that indexes and often provides full text access to letters, diaries and oral histories.

New York Times Historical (1851-2001) -- Full-text.

An amazing unique primary resource, the Historical NYT provides full image of pages and individual articles. Use the "Advanced Search" to look for certain article types, editorials, cartoons, advertisements and photographs.

North American Women's Letters and Diaries (NAWLD) on NCLive -- Full-text.

The collection includes some 150,000 pages of published letters and diaries from individuals writing from Colonial times to 1950. Drawn from more than 600 sources, including journal articles, pamphlets, newsletters, monographs, and conference proceedings, much of the material is in copyright. Represented are all age groups and life stages, all ethnicities, many geographical regions, the famous and the not so famous. It includes some 300 biographies to enhance the use of the database.

Electronic Reference:

Historical Statistics of the United States

The standard source for the quantitative facts of United States history. Allows for advanced searching of tables, documentation, and essays. Tables can be merged, downloaded, printed, or graphed. Also create custom tables.

Encyclopedia of the American Civil War -- Full-text

Full-text of the ABC-Clio multi-volume Encyclopedia of the American Civil War (R973.703 H36en 2000).

Encyclopedia of the Persian Gulf War -- Full-text

Full-text of the Encyclopedia of the Persian Gulf War (R956.70442 G91en 1995).

General Databases Useful for History Research:

JSTOR Arts & Sciences

Full-text access for 75 history journals and 45 political science journals, as well as journals with historical coverage for many subjects. Does not included recent issues of these journals.

Arts and Humanities Search
This is a "citation" index to

Updated 11/06/2007
by David Bryden [dbryden@highpoint.edu]