Library Resources for Hist 498J

There are many ways to go about doing historical research, and you can expect to employ several strategies to find the material you need. As you begin formulating your thesis, you’ll want to identify the main currents of thought on your topic. Which historians have taken up this topic and what are their main arguments? How has our understanding of the subject changed with shifts in the predominant methodologies and theoretical perspectives in the historical profession? In answering these questions, you will use secondary sources (the published work of scholars specializing in the topic).

Secondary literature includes scholarly books, articles, and essays (both analyses by contemporary scholars as well as older scholarly analyses), surveys, criticism, comparative studies, reference sources, and works on theory and methodology. When we talk about secondary sources, most of the time we are referring to the published scholarship on a subject, rather than the supplemental material (bibliographies, encyclopedias, handbooks, etc.). Secondary literature is published both in book form and as articles in periodicals, either in print or digital format. (Digital format includes both reproduction of print material or original e-text.)

To identify secondary literature, you can do subject searches in the online catalog (to get books) or subject searches in article databases (which may list books as well as articles from journals); you can consult standard published bibliographies (e.g., the American Historical Association Guide to Historical Literature) and specialized bibliographies (e.g., Bibliography of the History of Medicine of the United States and Canada).

You can also look for review essays, in which a historian who specializes in the subject analyzes recent scholarship; you may find more lengthy historiographical treatments of the topic published as chapters in collections, journal articles, or even monographs; you can read about the topic in a subject encyclopedia and look at the bibliography at the end of the entry; you can find a major work of scholarship on the topic and follow up on the sources used by the author (footnote tracking).

Most of the time you will find the secondary literature you need by using the online catalog, the appropriate article databases, and a subject encyclopedia or bibliography.

If you are doing original research, you will need to identify primary sources, in addition to the secondary literature on the subject. Primary sources can be published or unpublished (archival).

Published primary source material covers a wide range of publications, including first-person accounts, memoirs, diaries, letters, newspapers, statistical reports, government documents, commentary in periodicals contemporaneous with the phenomenon you are investigating, reports of associations, organizations and institutions, maps, even iconographic material (e.g., photographic images, posters, advertising images) or literary works. What constitutes a primary source depends in part on how you have formulated your research topic.

The UIUC Library also has some unpublished primary source material (archives and manuscripts), including personal papers and the records of certain organizations and associations, but this is a relatively small body of material compared to the abundance of published primary sources held by the Library.

You can identify published primary sources through the online catalog and by using bibliographies. You can also look at secondary literature on your topic to see what sources other scholars have used in their research.

Where to Start

Once you have defined your research topic, you need to decide what type of material you are looking for. Do you want books? Journal articles? Primary or secondary sources, or both? The type of material you need determines where you should begin your search.

The UIUC Library online catalog and card catalog contain records for books and journals. Use these when you are looking for books on a topic (subject searching), or when you have a citation to a specific book or journal. The catalog will lead you to secondary sources and to published primary sources.

The online article databases and the older print periodical indexes provide citations to articles and, in the case of some of the online article databases, links to the actual text of the articles. These online databases are subject-based, and some of them include citations to books as well as articles.

Use the online article databases when you want to find citations to articles on a topic. For the older, print indexes, and for some of the online article databases, once you compile a list of articles on your topic, you will need to search the journal titles in the online catalog in order to determine their call number and location (departmental library, such as History, Philosophy and Newspaper Library, or the main bookstacks). However, many of the article databases will include links to the full text of the articles.

Books and journals are organized in the library by subject. Each item is assigned one or more subject headings and a unique call number. Subject headings are standardized terms from the Library of Congress. The call number is based on the Dewey Decimal Classification.

Why bother with subject headings in the online catalog when you can do keyword searching?

It’s true that you can find sources on a topic by doing keyword searches. But if you limit yourself to keyword searching, you are likely to miss important material on your topic that uses other terms. If you only need two or three books, you can probably find what you need by doing keyword searches, but if you are doing historical research, you can’t afford to miss critical material on your topic. For a comprehensive subject search, search with subject headings as well as keywords.

A good way to identify subject headings for a topic is to do a keyword search in the online catalog using terms you think describe the topic and try to identify a few relevant books. Look at the full record for those books to see what subject headings were used, then do another search on those headings.

As a rule of thumb, use fairly broad headings, as well as the specific ones that describe your topic, in order to make sure you haven't inadvertently eliminated relevant material that is contained within works of larger scope. Most likely you will find multiple headings to describe your topic, and you should use all of them. You can narrow your search in the online catalog by combining subject headings (as a phrase) with keywords, using the “Guided Keyword Search” option.

Here are some examples of subject headings relevant to the decline of the British Empire:

Great Britain—Colonies—Administration Postcolonialism—Commonwealth countries

Great Britain—Colonies—History—20^th century Imperialism—History

Commonwealth countries—History British—India—History

India—History—British occupation, 1765-1947 Decolonization—History

Imperialism—Public opinion—Hisotry—20^th century Colonies in literature

Great Britain—Colonies—Public opinion—History Commonwealth literature

Travelers’ writings, English—20^th century Imperialism in literature

Great Britain—Colonies—India—History—Sources Women—Great Britain—Colonies

Great Britain—Colonies—Africa—History—Sources Armies, Colonial

Great Britain—Colonies—Canada—History—Sources Mission, British

Decolonization—Africa, English-speaking Women missionaries

Culture diffusion—Great Britain—Colonies British travelers

Travelers, English Orientalism

Decolonization—Great Britain—Colonies—History—20^th century

Imperialism—Government policy—Great Britain—History—20^th century

The online catalog offers both “Quick Search” and “Guided Keyword” search options. Use the “Guided Keyword Search” to identify subject headings on your topic, to combine subject headings (or elements from subject headings) in a Boolean search, or to combine keywords from any part of the record with subject headings to narrow your search.

Do a Guided Keyword Search on the phrase “British empire” to find books on these topic. (This is not a Library of Congress subject heading.) Then look at the subject headings in the catalog record for those books (

Great Britain

—Colonies—History). Then do a Quick Search on the subject heading to find more books on the topic.

Do a Guided Keyword Search combining the phrase “empire” as a subject heading with the term “Great Britain” as a subject heading. Or try a Guided Keyword Search combining the keyword “gender” with the keyword “empire.”

Use “Quick Search” to browse a subject heading (e.g., Decolonization), to search a title when you know exactly how it begins (e.g.,The Absent-Minded Imperialists), to locate a work or works by a particular author (e.g., Julie Codell), or to search by call number for a specific book (e.g., 941.082 B7772).

There are many online article databases you can use to find scholarly articles on historical topics. For British history and colonial studies, Historical Abstracts is the best starting place. This is an online periodical index with abstracts, with coverage of world history (minus North America) back to 1954. You can do a subject search in this database and get a list of articles (citations) on your topic. Historical Abstracts will only give you the citations to the articles, not the text of the articles themselves, unless the journal is linked to a full text journal collection, such as JSTOR. (More on JSTOR below.) Except for articles linked to full-text collections, to get the actual articles indexed in Historical Abstracts, you will have to search the titles of the journals in the online catalog, which tells you where the journals are located in the Library (or if they are available online).

To search Historical Abstracts, start at the Library Gateway (http://www.library.uiuc.edu/orr/) and type “historical abstracts” in the search box.

Other article databases useful for studying colonialism and the end of empire include the Bibliography of Asian Studies (1971- ), Index Islamicus (1906- ), Periodical Contents Index/ Full Text (18^th century – 1991), ATLA [American Theological Library Association] Religion Database (1949- ), African Studies Centre Database (1988- ). All of these are available from the Library Gateway at http://www.library.uiuc.edu/orr/

There are several major collections of full-text electronic journals. In these databases you can browse individual issues of journals, or you can do a search across the entire database.

For older journals, use JSTOR ("journal storage"). This is a digitized, fully searchable version of the full content of nearly 400 scholarly journals from their inception (sometimes as early as the 18^th century) to the late 1990s (recent issues are excluded). To get to JSTOR, go to the "Quick Links" on the History and Philosophy Library web site, or go to “Online Research Resources” (http://www.library.uiuc.edu/orr/) and type JSTOR in the search box. (Make sure that “Article Indexes & Abstracts” or “All Resources” is the active tab.) Several key historical journals are included in JSTOR, such as

Articles in these and other historical journals in JSTOR are linked directly from the citations found in America: History and Life and Historical Abstracts. In addition, you can search JSTOR directly. Because it is a collection of digitized texts rather than a periodical index, it does not use subject headings. You can only search by keyword (i.e., the words used in the articles published in these journals), so it is prudent to try several different approaches for any given topic. Note that only about 10% of the articles in JSTOR have abstracts, so limiting your search term to the abstracts might cause you to miss relevant material. When a Boolean keyword search produces a large set of results, try using the proximity (“near”) operator to limit the results to a combination of terms occurring within 10 or 25 words of one another.

For the full text of more than 300 recent scholarly journals, use Project Muse. These too are fully searchable. In most cases, only the issues from the last few years are available. Here you will find, for example,

The full text of 18 scholarly journals in history is available through the History Cooperative, a joint project of the University of Illinois Press, National Academy Press, American Historical Association, and the Organization of American Historians. This includes the Journal of American History, Common-place, Law and History Review, William and Mary Quarterly, Oral History Review, Western Historical Quarterly, Indiana Magazine of History, and others. To get to the History Cooperative, go to the "Quick Links" on the History and Philosophy Library web site

The UIUC Library has an extensive collection of newspapers, both current and retrospective, in a variety of formats, including hard copy, microfilm, and digital reproductions. Not all of them are included in the online catalog, but if you are looking for a particular newspaper title, try searching it first in the online catalog. Look for more than one record for each newspaper, as our holdings may consist of a combination of hard copy and microfilm, for example, and there may be a separate catalog record for each format. Most of these will be located in the History, Philosophy and Newspaper Library, but in some cases, the material will be found in another part of the UIUC Library.

Some newspapers that are not represented in the online catalog may be included in the Library's separate online database of newspapers (http://web.library.uiuc.edu/asp/nex/searchnews.asp). This database is searchable by place of publication and by keywords from the title.

We have access to the full text of the New York Times online from 1857 to the present, the Wall Street Journal from 1889 to 1985, and the Chicago Tribune from 1849 to the present (still in production, 1849-1879 not yet available). We also have access to the Times (London) from 1785 to 1985. These are digital facsimiles of the originals and are keyword searchable. From the Online Research Resources page (http://www.library.uiuc.edu/orr/), type the title of the newspaper in the search box. Although retrospective files of other major metropolitan dailies (such as the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Atlanta Constitution, and Boston Globe) have been digitized, the UIUC Library does not yet have access to them, and our online access to these newspapers generally goes back only to the mid-1980s.

For newspapers that have not been digitized, article-level indexing is limited, particularly before the 1970s. The digital versions of the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Wall Street Journal, and Times (London) are fully searchable, so you don’t really need a separate index to use them.

There are hundreds of encyclopedias and dictionaries devoted to particular regions, time periods, and genres. These vary widely in degree of scholarly sophistication and completeness. The difference in quality from one encyclopedia to another can be very striking. The best way to become familiar with these resources is to browse the reference sections in the History, Philosophy and Newspaper Library and also in the main Reference Library (in the 300s, 900s, and 016s) and Undergraduate Library, and for online sources to browse some of the collections of reference works linked under “Online Reference Collection” at http://www.library.uiuc.edu/orr.

American Historical Association Guide to Historical Literature. Edited by Mary Beth Norton. (1995) 016.9 G941 1995 History, Philosophy and Newspaper Library, Reference Library

Encyclopedia of European Social History from 1350 to 2000. Edited by Peter N. Stearns. 6 vols. (2001) Q.306.09403 En19 History, Philosophy and Newspaper Library, Reference Library

Oxford Companion to Australian History. Edited by Graeme Davison et al. (2001) 994.003 Ox22 2001 History, Philosophy and Newspaper Library

Reader’s Guide to British History. David Loades, editor. 2 vols. (2003) Q.941.003 R227 History, Philosophy and Newspaper Library

Encyclopedia of Africa South of the Sahara. John Middleton, editor. 4 vols. (1997) Q.967.003 En19 Reference Library, Undergraduate Library

Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century African History. Edited by Paul Tiyambe Zeleza and Dickson Eyoh. (2003) 960.3103 En 192 History, Philosophy and Newspaper Library, Reference Library, Undergraduate Library

Subject Catalogue of the Librayr of the Royal Empire Society. 4 vols. (1930-37) Q.017.142 R81s Reference Library

Catalogue of the Library of the Royal Geographical Society. (1895) 016.91 R81c Reference Library

Subject Catalogue of the Royal Commonwealth Society, London. 7 vols. (1971) Q.017.142 R811s Reference Library

Catalogue of the Colonial Office Library, London. 15 vols. (1964) 016.325342 G798c Reference Library

Library Catalogue of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. 28 vols. + supplements. (1963) Q.016.915 L841 Reference Library

A Reference Guide to the Literature of Travel. By Edward Godfrey Cox. 3 vols. (1969) 016.91 C83r 1969 Reference Library

Travel Accounts and Descriptions of Latin America and the Caribbean, 1800-1920. By Thomas L. Welch. (1982) 016.98 W445t Reference Library

The sources digitized for section I include travel narratives (journals, memoirs, and reports of expeditions), various publications of the Church Missionary Society, such as the periodicals Church Missionary Quarterly Token and Indian Female Evangelist, as well as the Missionary Papers from 1816 to 1878. There are annual reports of the Church Missionary Society and other organizations, correspondence and journals from missionaries in Africa, North America,

India

, and the Caribbean, and a selection of documents from the Macmillan Cabinet Papers (1957-63). Part II includes novels, memoirs, travel accounts, government reports, and missionary papers, and Part III offers images, such as photographs, illustrations, exhibition catalogs, maps, posters, and other pictorial material. Each section is accompanied by a series of major essays by leading scholars in the field. Note that Professor Antoinette Burton , chair of the Department of History at UIUC, contributed an essay to this project, entitled “The Visible Empire and the Empire at Home, c1832-1905.”

Irish University Press Series of British Parliamentary Papers. Colonies: Africa. 70 vols. Q.960 Ir4 Stacks

Irish University Press Series of British Parliamentary Papers. Colonies:

Australia

. Q.994.03 Ir4 Stacks

Irish University Press Series of British Parliamentary Papers. Colonies:

Canada

. 33 vols. Q.971.03 Ir4 Stacks

Irish University Press Series of British Parliamentary Papers. Colonies: East India. 22 vols. Q.382 Ir4 stacks

Irish University Press Series of British Parliamentary Papers. Colonies: General. 37 vols. Q.325.342 Ir4 stacks

Irish University Press Series of British Parliamentary Papers. Colonies:

New Zealand

. 17 vols. Q.993.1 Ir4 stacks

Irish University Press Series of British Parliamentary Papers. Colonies: West Indies. 10 vols. Q.972.904 Ir4 stacks

Index to British Parliamentary Papers on

Australia

and

New Zealand

, 1800-1899. 2 vols. Q.994.03 Ir4 Index Government Documents

Mary Stuart	History, Philosophy, and Newspaper Hours, Fall 2005:
History, Philosophy and	Mon- Thurs 9 a.m.-9 p.m., Fri 9 a.m.-5 p.m.
Newspaper Librarian	Sat 1 p.m.-5 p.m., Sun 1 p.m.-8 p.m.
m-stuart@uiuc.edu	Library Website: http://www.library.uiuc.edu/hix
244-0797	History Library Circulation and Reference: 333-1509

Type of Source	Primary or Secondary?	Where to look	Example	How to get there
Books	Secondary or primary	UIUC Online catalog, History e-book	Fasce, Ferdinando, An American Family: The Great War and Corporate Culture in America Ohio State University Press, 2002).	http://www.library.uiuc.edu (“UIUC Library Catalog”) or http://www.library.uiuc.edu/orr (“History e-book”)
Scholarly journal articles	Usually secondary	Online article databases and print periodical indexes (America: History & Life, Historical Abstracts, Infotrac)	Bachin, Robin Faith, “At the Nexus of Labor and Leisure: Baseball, Nativism, and the 1919 Black Sox Scandal,” Journal of Social History, v. 36, no. 4 (2003), pp. 941-962.	http://www.library.uiuc.edu/orr (type name of database in search box or browse databases by subject)
General interest or popular magazine articles	Secondary at time of publication but primary as historical document	Online article database and Print periodical indexes (Reader’s Guide, Infotrac, American Periodical Series)	“All in the Day’s Work: Bolshevik Activities in the U.S.,” New Republic, v. 18, pp. 372-73 (April 19, 1919), or “How the Russian bolshevik agent does business in New York City,” Literary Digest, v. 61, pp. 60-63 (May 17, 1919).	http://www.library.uiuc.edu/orr (type name of database in search box or browse databases by subject)
Newspapers	Usually primary	Newspaper databases, UIUC Online catalog, UIUC newspaper database	“House Balks at Immigrant Bill: Senate Proposals to Exclude Negroes and Admit Belgians are Rejected,” Chicago Daily Tribune, January 8, 1915, p. 4.	http://www.library.uiuc.edu/orr (type name of database in search box) http://www.library.uiuc.edu/nex/newsform.php (enter search terms in form)
Memoirs, diaries, correspondence	Primary	UIUC Online catalog, Digital text collections	Nurses at the Front: Writing the Wounds of the Great War, edited by Margaret Higonnet (2001). (anthology of reprinted war sketches)	http://www.library.uiuc.edu and http://www.library.uiuc.edu/orr
Reference books	Secondary or tertiary	UIUC Online catalog, reference section in departmental libraries	Encyclopedias, bibliographies, biographical dictionaries, e.g., Encyclopedia of European Social History, 6 vols. (1993) or Dictionary of American History, 10 vols. (2003).	http://www.library.uuc.edu http://www.library.uiuc.edu/orr (browse) Browse shelves in departmental library, such as History, Philosophy and Newspaper Library
Govt. documents, Reports of organizations, Statistical reports, Legal cases and decisions	Primary	UIUC Online catalog, Statistical and legal databases (Legaltrac, Hein Online, Lexis/Nexis)	The Race Riots: Biennial Report, 1918-1919 and Official Record of Inquests on the Victims of the Race Riots of July and August, 1919 (Chicago, 1919).	http://www.library.uiuc.edu http://www.library.uiuc.edu/orr
Images: photographs, posters, maps, advertisements	Primary	UIUC Online catalog, Specialized databases	Cataloged maps, digital maps, digital images of poster and advertisements, digitized photographs	http://www.library.uiuc.edu (maps, collections of reproduced photographs) http://www.davidrumsey.com/ http://www.comm.uiuc.edu/darcy/ http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html