Archer Library: History Research Guide: Online Databases

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A Little Rebellion Now and Then is a Good Thing --Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States

Databases for History

There are many excellent databases to use when you do your history research. The following are great places to start:

America History and Life
Covers the world's scholarly literature on the history and culture of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. Comprises circa 400,000 bibliographic entries. Subjects indexed include: history,interdisciplinary studies, popular culture, womens'/gender studies, folklore, and law.
Bibliography of Indigenous Peoples in North America
Bibliography of Indigenous Peoples in North America is a bibliographic database covering a wide range of topics including archaeology, multicultural relations, gaming, governance, legend, and literacy. It contains more than 80,000 citations for books, essays, journal articles, and government documents of the United States and Canada. Dates of coverage for included content range from the sixteenth century to the present. The database is an essential research tool for anthropologists, educators, historians, political scientists, sociologists, psychologists, legal and medical researchers, linguists, theologians, ethnobotanists, and policy makers. Bibliography of Indigenous Peoples in North America will appeal to anyone interested in exploring the contributions, struggles, and issues surrounding North America
Cambridge Histories Online
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Full text collection of over 250 volumes of the Cambridge Histories reference series, published since 1960 by the Cambridge University Press. All the available volumes are grouped into 15 different academic subjects: American history, British history, general history, history of science, history of the book, language and linguistics, literary studies, music, philosophy, political and social theory, regional history, religious studies, theatre studies and performing arts, and warfare.
Note: Any titles published after 2012 are not included in the package.
Canadiana Online
Early Canadiana Online (ECO) is a digital library thousands of primary sources in Canadian history from the first European contact to the early 20th century.The collection is particularly strong in literature, women's history, travel and exploration, native studies and the history of French Canada.
Globe and Mail
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Coverage: 1844 - 2018
Electronic full-page newspaper archive includes all the stories, plus images, advertisements, classifieds, political cartoons, births and deaths from more than 1.4 million pages of Canada's National Newspaper, dating back to the pre-confederation era.
Historical Abstracts
Covers the world's scholarly literature on the history of the world (except the United States and Canada) from 1450 to the present. Indexes more than 2,000 journals. Subject coverage includes: history, interdisciplinary studies, popular culture, womens'/gender studies, folklore, and law.
JSTOR
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Full text of backfiles of more than 1100 journals in the humanities, social sciences, sciences and education. Coverage is from volume 1 on, excluding latest 3-5 years.
More than 3 million of the images from Artstor are now available alongside JSTOR’s scholarly content.

Database Searching Tips

Remember that you can't use ordinary language sentences in databases! You have to combine search terms with AND or OR.

Most databases provide some kind of wildcard or truncation used for terms that you put in the searchbox. This may be an asterisk (*), a question mark (?), or a colon (:). Truncation allows you to find variations of a word, like the plural.

For example, wom* will find you records in the database for woman and women. Unfortunately wombat too! Truncation can sometimes pick up records you may not want to see but you can just ignore those.

Databases also often let you limit your search by other elements such as language, date and format. You can use parentheses to group ideas or common phrases e.g. "war of 1812".

Be cautious about using limiters though. In your first try at searching a database it's a good idea to do a broad search first just to find out what the database has on your topic. If you use limiters right away you may lose some records you want to see. You can always limit the same search by trying it again; the search will be narrowed down. This is especially true for the databases Historical Abstracts (European history) and America History and Life (American and Canadian History)

You may need to search a topic several times using different terms to find all you need for your assignment. Try different search words with similar or the same meaning (synonyms). It's not usual to try several searches in different ways to locate the articles you want. Keep trying!