Doing History Research at UCDHSC

A Resource Guide Constructed by
Professor Marjorie Levine-Clark

This page is designed to help students find the resources they need to successfully complete the projects for their history courses. It contains both print and electronic sources, and students are expected to make use of both media.

A good place to start is always the Auraria Library home page; many of the links on this resource page duplicate links from the Auraria Library.

You should be able to access all the links in this resource guide from home if you have set up your computer to do so: see Access from Off-Campus.

History papers must be properly documented. Use the Chicago Manual of Style (or Chicago Style) to find out how to use footnotes or endnotes in a history paper. If you have questions about documentation, ask your instructor.

For ways to think about searching for research materials, see A Guide to Search Strategies.

ARTICLES

For general information on finding articles, see the Auraria Library guide, Find Articles.

The articles you use as secondary sources should be from peer-reviewed, academic journals. The following are examples:

American Historical Review

Journal of American History

French Historical Studies

Journal of British Studies

Journal of Family History

Journal of Social History

Social History

Journal of Policy History

etc

There are several article indexes to which Auraria subscribes that are especially useful to historians. You will need to log in from off-campus with your name and student ID number. Your best bets for history databases are

ABC Clio Online Databases: America: History and Life and Historical Abstracts

JStor

The library has a page to help you find article databases and indexes. This page suggests some good multi-subject databases which can also be useful for historical research.

Each of these databases has links to full-text articles where available.

If you find an article that is in a journal our library doesn't carry, you can order that article from interlibrary loan electronically, from the Interlibrary Loan page.

HINTS for using article databases: when you are in the ABC Clio Online Databases, you do not have to enter the word "history" for your searches; all articles contained in these databases are historical. With all other databases, you need to specify "history" as one of your search terms.

BOOKS AND BOOK REVIEWS

For general information on finding books, see the Catalogs page, where you can link to several catalogs of books.

By searching Skyline, you will find books useful in historical research. You can do a very broad keyword search (e.g. women history Europe, or gender history Europe), but you will get a lot of responses. Limited keyword searches will be more useful to you (e.g. women health history England; or employment women history France; and other things along those lines). If you find a book that our library doesn't hold or that is checked out, you can order the book through Prospector (a consortium of regional libraries searchable through our library resources). You can broaden your search for books significantly by searching Prospector at the outset. To do the broadest search possible, go to the WorldCat link on the Catalogs page, which contains titles of books in libraries throughout the world. If you find a book you want through WorldCat, you can order it through Interlibrary Loan.

It is a very good idea to become proficient in finding book reviews. Auraria holds the two major book review indexes: Book Review Digest and Book Review Index.

PRIMARY SOURCES

Primary sources are documents, images, artifacts, etc. that are produced during the time you are studying. For example, if you are interested in women's health in the nineteenth century, an article on female insanity written in 1872 would qualify as a primary source; an article written in 1972 about female insanity in 1872 would not qualify -- that's a secondary source.

There are published primary source document collections that you can find by searching the various book resources listed above. Microfilm collections of published and unpublished materials are also listed in Skyline, Prospector, and WorldCat.

For information about government documents, go to Auraria Library's Government Publications site.

Newspapers and periodical journals and magazines are excellent primary sources.

You also have good access to several archival collections -- at Auraria, Denver Public Library, the Blair-Caldwell African American Research Library, the Colorado Historical Society, University of Denver Penrose Library, etc. Archives are collections of (generally unpublished) materials that can range from individual correspondence to institutional records.

INTERNET SOURCES

For information about documenting Internet sources in your papers, see Citation Styles: Online!.

The following Internet sites may be useful to you when looking for topics, articles, and secondary and primary sources for your research papers. Some also have useful materials concerning the study of history itself. This is only a small sampling of what is available on the Internet.

Internet History Sourcebooks
Primary sources arranged thematically and chronologically from ancient times to the present.

H-Net
Home site for a variety of history discussion lists (topical and chronological) with many resources for research, such as bibliographies, book reviews, etc.

American Historical Association

This is the homepage for the primary organization for historians in the United States.

The History Guide
See especially A Student's Guide to the Study of History.
Essays concerning the theory and practice of history, with links to resources and topical lectures.

Voice of the Shuttle History Page
A wide variety of links to primary, secondary, and reference sources.

Yahoo! History Links
History links searchable by subject, region, or time period.