ryan-matura library & learning resources

Research Guide for History

This guide currently contains a number of useful links for research in History. In the coming months, it will be expanded and all of the links will be given descirptions. Please feel free to send comments/suggestions to the Patrick Gavin, the Research Librarian for the Humanities.








Reference


Research Guides


Virtual Reference

  • Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages - Consists of articles on all aspects of the period from the fifth to the fifteenth century, exploring art, architecture, religion, law, science, language, philosophy, and theology, as well as cultural, religious, intellectual, social and political history.

  • The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography - 56,000 biographies of people who shaped the history of the British Isles and beyond, from the earliest times to the year 2003 (also available in print).

  • The Oxford Dictionary of the Renaissance - Providing rich detail on all aspects of the Renaissance in 14th to 17th century Europe, this dictionary includes comprehensive coverage of the art, literature, science, culture, philosophy, religion, economics, history, and conflict of the period.

  • The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt - Covers all branches of Egyptology: archaeology, anthropology, architecture, linguistics, literary studies, epigraphy, papyrology, history, art history, religion, economics, ecology, geomorphology, and the life sciences.

  • The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History - "International in scope and spanning all time periods of human history, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History includes 900 original articles by noted scholars from more than thirty-five countries."

  • The Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas - "With an unprecedented scope and cutting-edge scholarship, the Encyclopedia draws together the diverse historical and contemporary experiences in the United States of Latinos and Latinas from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Central America, South America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East."

  • The Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures - "The Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures is the first comprehensive reference source to chronicle Pre-Hispanic, colonial, and modern Mesoamerica, defined as the lands stretching from Mexico to the southern tip of Central America."

  • The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation - A quality source of "information about the religious and social changes that altered the face of Europe in the sixteenth century, encompassing not only issues of church polity and theology but also developments in politics, economics, demographics, art and literature."


Notable Works in Print

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Books



Quick Enterprise Search:


Search Library Catalogs:

  • Enterprise - search the Sacred Heart University catalog for books in our collection (print and electronic).

  • reQuest - search the statewide library catalog.

  • Library of Congress Catalog - The Library of Congress Online Catalog contains approximately 14 million records representing books, serials, computer files, manuscripts, cartographic materials, music, sound recordings, and visual materials.

  • WorldCat - search the collections of over 50,000 libraries worldwide. Should we not have the book you find, fill out an Interlibrary Loan form and we'll get it for you!



Find Articles and Criticism


In the Ryan Matura Library, the entire basement is devoted to our collection of printed periodicals (newspapers, magazines, and trade and scholarly journals). Periodicals do not circulate (cannot be checked out), so you should always be able to find the particular issue for which you are seeking.

Enterprise, our library catalog, gives detailed information about all of our print and electronic journal holdings, but it does not give any information about the specific content (the articles) of those journals.

In order to find articles on a particular topic, it is necessary to use one of the 70+ databases that the Ryan-Matura library liscences for your research needs. Determining the proper database (and knowing how to search it) is one of the most important steps in the research process.

Below you will find some of the most frequently used databases that we license for the purpose of research in History.


Multidisciplinary Databases

For most searches, these multidisciplinary databases are great places to begin. They index historical material along with a wide variety of other subjects:

  • Article First - Available through the OCLC FirstSearch service, ArticleFirst indexes the contents of over 16,000 journals in all areas, including the humanities and social sciences.

  • Academic Search Premier - This EBSCOhost database is often the first stop for researches of all disciplines. It is a scholarly, multi-discipline database specifically geared towards academic institutions.

  • Disertations

  • Encyclopedia Britannica Online

  • Expanded Academic ASAP - Periodicals covering all academic concentrations. Gale's version of Academic Search Premier.

Humanities/History Oriented Databases

The following databases are great places to find articles and criticism relevant to research in Historical Research:

  • History Reference Center - Offers full text from more than 2,000 reference books, encyclopedias and non-fiction books, 120 history periodicals, historical documents, biographies of historical figures, historical photos and maps, and 80 hours of historical video.

  • JSTOR - Find full-text PDFs from more than 50 major language and literary journals.

  • Project Muse - Full-text coverage of Johns Hopkins University Press Journals in Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences, and Mathematics.

Related Databases



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Primary Source Materials

Distinguishing Between Primary and Secondary Sources

  • How to Distinguish Between Primary and Secondary Sources - This is just one of UC Santa Cruz's many How To guides. It's short, but good and gives suggestions for further reading.

  • Primary Sources - A page on primary sources composed by librarians at the University of California, Berkley.

  • Researching History: Types of Sources - As it might seem from the title, this site, developed at the University of Washington, aims to give a basic overview on doing research in history.

  • Using Primary Sources on the Web - What are primary sources? How do you find them on the Web? How do you evaluate primary source web sites? These are but a few of the questions that this web site, also maintained by the University of Washington, attempts to answer.


Primary Sources Online

  • American Memory - A website produced by the Library of Congress that provides free and open access to historic maps, photos, documents, audio files, and video files.

  • Civil War Women: Primary Sources on the Internet - This collection, brought online by the Sally Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture, is comprised of the transcription and/or scans of various diaries, letters, photographs, and prints from the manuscript collections at Duke University that document women's experiences in the Civil War.

  • Repositories of Primary Sources - "A listing of over 5000 websites describing holdings of manuscripts, archives, rare books, historical photographs, and other primary sources for the research scholar."


Career Resources



Coming Soon!




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