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The University Library offers history students substantial collections of books, periodicals, U.S. and Massachusetts government publications, and Massachusetts microform sets of primary sources. More importantly, the library provides access to a wide variety of reference sources and the reference librarians, to help you find and use them. The reference staff can also provide assistance in locating sources of information beyond the library's own holdings using bibliographies and indexes in various formats electronic formats. Current students are invited to schedule an appointment with the history librarian.

General Sources

Some important and widely useful reference sources in history available in the library include:

American Historical Association's Guide to Historical Literature.
REF D20 A55 1995
This recent two-volume annotated bibliography provides expert guidance to books and important articles in all areas of history. Each chapter includes a long bibliographic essay and a bibliography, arranged by sub-topic with helpful annotations. Recent works and works in English are emphasized. This is a useful and highly recommended starting place for any research project in any area of history!

Sources of Information for Historical Research.
REF D20 S52 1994
Reference Sources in History.
REF D20 F72 1990
Both are annotated guides to reference works-bibliographies, specialized encyclopedias and dictionaries, statistical sources, atlases--in all areas of history.

The library subscribes to the two most important current periodical indexes in history: America: History & Life, which covers the history of the United States and Canada and Historical Abstracts, which covers the history of all other parts of the world since 1450. Coverage begins with articles published in the late 1950s. Both indexes are available through the University Library's E-Resources Web page. CRIS: Combined Retrospective Index to Journals in History IND REF D204 C6 provides indexing to 900 journals in history, some back as far as 1838.

Web sources in history

Among the many Web sites in history, some are particularly well-done and useful:

Humbul Humanities Hub - This ambitious British project provides searching and complete cataloging for a very large and growing selection of sites and projects in all areas of history. Describes strengths and weaknesses of each site.

Virtual Library: History is a very extensive listing of sites in history, arranged geographically and chronologically. Nothing is comprehensive but this comes close! Its great value is its size: links to over 1700 sites are provided. This site is managed by the University of Kansas History Department, a pioneer in using the Internet for research and communications in history.

The Voice of the Shuttle History Page, part of a larger humanities project, is "woven" by Alan Liu at the University of California Santa Barbara. It is a large, but very selective site and is updated frequently. Sites are identified and described well and clearly. The arrangement is geographic and chronological.

The Tennessee Tech History Web Site, created by that university's history department, is designed for undergraduate history students. It offers resources for career choices for history majors and financial aid, as well as links to well-chosen sites, arranged by category. Categories include: Why Study History?; Studying and Teaching History; Internet Resources in History, and Electronic Documents in History.

Sources in Specific Areas

There are many sources, in every format, for research and reading in the history of specific regions and time periods, and topics. Brief library research guides have been prepared for courses in some of these subject areas. Web sites in many subject areas can be located using the general history sites. Here are some links to particularly interesting or useful sites in ancient, African, Asian, medieval, Latin American, modern European, and U.S. history.

African and African American History

African American Mosaic. Texts and images drawn from the Library of Congress' collections in African-American history on four selected subjects: Colonization, Abolition, Migration, and the Works Progress Administration (WPA)

African Studies WWW. The University of Pennsylvania African Studies program's site provides an organized guide to African studies sites on the Web.

Black History Database of African American history. Fully searchable; the "this week in Black history" section is also browsable.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project. The Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers project at Stanford University provides access to King's papers, as well as biographical and bibliographical materials.

African & African-American Studies: Subject Guide & Resources - For additional resources in African-American Studies see our specialized study guide.

Ancient History

Exploring Ancient World Cultures (EAWC) is a hypertext college-level textbook on the cultures of the Near East, India, China, Egypt, Greece and Rome, in ancient times and Christian and Islamic medieval cultures. The site is under construction, but already includes some primary texts in translation, maps and images, chronologies, and a selection of essays.

The Perseus project is a very rich resource in the history and culture of ancient Greece. It includes texts, in the original Greek and in English translation, plans and photographs of archeological sites, images of Greek artifacts, secondary sources, and search tools, and links to other sites. Perseus is constantly expanding and now contains considerable content about Latin language and literature and Roman civilization.

TOCS-IN is a table-of-contents index to 150 classics journals.

Asian History

Asian Studies WWW Virtual Library. This large-scale project, based at the Australian National University, collects, classifies and describes Internet-based sources in all areas of Asian studies.

AsiaSource. A service of the Asia Society, an organization whose purpose is to foster understanding of Asia and communication between Americans and the peoples of Asia and the Pacific. AsiaSource includes substantive information on all areas of Asian studies, many links and a limited area search engine for Web sites about Asian topics.

Association for Asian Studies. "Links to Asian Studies Organizations and Asia WWW Resources." This extensive list is compiled from current columns published in the association’s newsletter.

Internet Archive of Texts and Documents: East Asia is a collection of primary documents arranged by period. The documents are selected for use by undergraduate history students.

Latin American History

Handbook of Latin American Studies (HLAS Online), based at the Library of Congress, is a comprehensive, searchable, bibliography of books and articles on all aspects of Latin American studies.

Hispanic American Periodicals Index (HAPI). An international index to journal articles in all areas of Latin American studies as well as Hispanics in the United States.

Internet Resources for Latin America is based at the New Mexico State University Library. It offers links and guidance.

LANIC (Latin American Network Information Center) arranges its links to other sites by country, subject, and type of source.

Medieval History

Labyrinth consists of organized links to texts and tools for the study and teaching of medieval studies. It also hosts and archives "virtual conferences" on various interdisciplinary medieval topics.

Netserf provides links to an enormous range of sites in medieval studies, arranged topically. Links to many sites (of varying quality) in medieval studies.

ORB. This Online Reference Book for Medieval Studies combines an encyclopedia-in-progress for medieval studies with links to medieval texts, in translation and in original languages, and other sites in medieval studies. ORB has an editorial board; the articles it includes represent reliable scholarship.

Modern European History

Cybrary of the Holocaust is a large, well-organized and annotated collection of texts and images documenting and commemorating the Holocaust. It includes links to many other projects.

Eighteenth Century Resources: History. Part of an extensive collection of substantial resources in eighteenth-century studies.

EuroDocs is a collection of transcriptions, translations, and facsimiles of significant documents in the history of Europe and European nations.

Internet Archive of Texts and Documents is a collection of primary documents arranged by period. The documents are selected for use by undergraduate history students.

Trenches on the Web is a site devoted to documenting the first World War.

U. S. History

American Memory. Selected collections, images and texts, from the Library of Congress.

Avalon Project. Fully-searchable digital archive of important documents in American political and constitutional history.

Eighteenth Century Resources: History. Part of an extensive collection of substantial resources in eighteenth-century studies.

Historical, Social, Economic and Demographic Data from the U.S. Decennial Census. Searchable data, at state and county levels, for the censuses of the first eight decennial censuses.

Making of America. A growing searchable digital archive of representative 19th-century American books and periodicals.

NEBib (New England Bibliographies)

NEBib is an electronic version of volume 9 of the Bibliographies of New England History (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1995). It contains 4,231 citations to books, dissertations, pamphlets, and magazine and journal articles, most of which were published between 1989 and 1994, on the history of New England as a region or on any aspect of New England state and local history.

This database should be used in conjunction with the other volumes in the Bibliographies series. This series contains nearly 67,650 citations on the history of New England or its component states, counties,and towns. They are shelves in the library's reference collection: REF F4 B5.

The Valley of the Shadow: Living the Civil War in Pennsylvania and Virginia. Hypertext arrangement of history and source documents of two communities during the Civil War, a project of the Virginia Center for Digital History.