Subject Guide to American History

Back to Guides

If you need help, don't hesitate to ask at the reference desk, or contact Reference Librarians Linda Moore or Mark Maier. Try these encyclopedias, dictionaries, and other reference guides to get started. Click on the link to see the call number.

Historical Literature Guides:
Handbook for Research in American History Ref E 178 .P78 1994
The Historian's Toolbox Ref D 16 .W62 2003

Dictionaries:
Dictionary of American History Ref E 174 .D52

Chronology:
Timetables of American History Ref E 18.5 .T553 1996

Biography:
Dictionary of American Biography Ref E 176 .D5
American National Biography Ref CT 213 .A68 1999
Click here for an online version of the ANB

Primary sources:
Historic Documents 1972- Ref E 839.5 .H57
See also the online version of the Annals of American History

Internet Resources:
The History Highway 3.0: A guide to internet resources.
Ref D 16.255 .C65 H58 2000

Citing Sources:
The History Department requires that you cite your research using Turabian's A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Thesis, and Dissertations which is located at Ref LB 2369.T8.

Online examples of Turabian's can be found here.

An excellent guide to citing electronic sources in history can be found here.

Moving to the next step: finding books

To find books in the Mossey Library, use the Mossey Library Catalog.

Use MeLCat to request books and audio-visual materials directly from other Michigan libraries over the web. Use OCLC WorldCat to search the holdings of over 3000 libraries worldwide in a single search. You will have to use interlibrary loan to obtain copies of these books.

Continuing on: the best places to find articles

Basic level search: to find basic or general articles on American history topics already in the Mossey Library, use the Humanities Abstracts. If your topic deals the political, social or economic aspects of American History, see also the Social Sciences Citation Index. Many of the articles in these two abstracts are available in electronic format.

Intermediate level search: for more advanced topics, you can search over 12,000 journals in a single search by using Article First, which indexes the table of contents pages of over 300 core titles in History. Also try searching the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, which contains full text articles and allows for citation tracking.

Comprehensive search:
Ffor more extensive research, search America: History and Life. Beginning in 1964, it indexed over 2000 journals and has more than 450,000 entries in its database.

Try also: 19th Century Masterfile. This is an electronic index to articles published in the 1800's.

Another good database is: JSTOR - This database provides full-text coverage of more than 40 major history journals. The journals have been digitized from their first volume. Each year another volume of recent issues is added to the collection.

The Making of the Modern World: Digital images of 61,000 primary sources covering material on commerce, finance, social conditions, politics, trade and transport.

ProQuest Historical Newspapers
Full-page images and article images of The New York Times from 1851 to three years before the current date.

Scholarly Websites to Pursue

For a guide to locating, using and citing primary historical materials on the internet, see Using Primary Sources on the Web.

Try searching GoogleScholar for scholarly literature across many disciplines and identify resources available from Mossey Library.

See also the U.S. History section of the Librarian's Guide to the Internet

For additional information, see the Hillsdale College History Department Homepage.

Digital Historical Collections
National Archives Film
American Memory Project
Historical Voices
Making of America
Perry-Castaneda Library Map Collection
New York Public Library Digital Gallery of Maps
Avalon Project