History 460: Seminar in World History

Many of our books are now in ebook format, meaning you can read it online or download to your computer.

If a book you need is not available, we can get it for you through CSU+ for free.

• The page on primary source texts covers searching the library catalog for books. Some clues to help you determine if the book you are looking at is scholarly by just looking at the catalog record:
• Look for the statement "Bibliographical references included"--that means the work is based on research and the sources have been cited.
• Look at the author information. Are they actually the editor? They will have acted as a gatekeeper to allow only better research to be published. If not edited, look this person up online and see who they are and what else they have published.
• Look at the publishing institution, if it is a well-known university (Harvard, University of California), that is a good sign.
• How recent is the publication? Even historical thinking and analysis undergoes change, so don't use something more than 10 years old if possible.

Articles

There are a number of history-focused databases and I strongly advise searching individual databases rather than using the Articles+ search. Articles+ searches ALL of our full text databases and will return a lot of irrelevant hits. Since you are doing history research, use the specific history tools!

GET IT is the link to try if you find an article citation but not the full text. GET IT will search for that specific article through all our databases and link to the full text if we have it.

No full text? We can get it for you through Interlibrary Loan which should be an option offered if the text is not available. Free and amazingly quick as it comes through your campus account.

Databases to search:

    Historical Abstracts to start. This database allows you to focus your search to a specific time period (that is not a feature offered by non-history databases).

    JStor is a wide-ranging database on a variety of topics. Many of the articles are older, so watch for getting something a bit too old.

    Project Muse is more current articles and covers a smaller collection of titles than JSTOR.

    Handbook of Latin American History (HLAS) is slow and a bit clunky due to the number of resources it has to search. No full text but if something looks interesting and we don't have it, we can likely get it for you.

    Military & Government Collection is a more focused historical topic and but is very focused on US history.