History Pathfinder
Library research guide from the Meyer Library Reference & Government Information Department

Find Articles and Basic Reference Information
Magazine and journal indexes and other reference databases.

Online Indexes to Articles
America: History and Life
America: History and Life is a complete bibliographic reference to research on the history of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. Published since 1964, the database comprises over 490,000 bibliographic entries for periodicals dating back to 1954, providing an incomparable research tool for students and researchers of U.S. and Canadian history. This extensive database covers over 1,700 journals published worldwide. In addition to covering all key English-language historical journals, America: History and Life coverage includes selected historical journals from major countries, state and local history journals, and a targeted selection of hundreds of journals in the social sciences and humanities. Over 90% of the articles included are published in English-language journals. In addition to articles, each year America: History and Life includes approximately 6,000 citations of book and media reviews from a selection of over one hundred key journals in U.S. and Canadian history and related fields. The database also includes citations to abstracts of dissertations published in these areas. In 2006, America: History and Life began adding retrospective coverage for the most important historical journals in JSTOR. By project's end, coverage for these journals will extend back to the late-19th century.

American National Biography (5 user limit)
The American National Biography (ANB) contains over 18,300 signed biographies of deceased persons "whose significant actions occurred during his or her residence within what is now the United States or whose life or career directly influenced the course of American history." You may search by name, gender, occupation, birth or death date, or full text (words and phrases). New biographies and revisions are added three times per year, including articles on recently deceased notables. Over 2,500 illustrations are included in ANB, and each entry has a descriptive bibliography. ANB Online also includes over 900 articles from the Oxford Companion to United States History, which provide historical and social context to the biographies. Researchers can search across broad research topics, including American literature, the Civil War, the Civil Rights movement, Women's history, Native American heritage, and Hispanic American heritage.

Biographies Plus Illustrated (4 user limit)
Biographies Plus Illustrated encompasses biographical coverage from a host of high quality Wilson biographical resources, including Current Biography, the World Authors Series, and the Junior Authors & Illustrators series. With more than 147,000 substantial narrative profiles, Biographies Plus Illustrated includes over 80,000 profiles licensed from a number of respected reference publishers. The database contains over 36,000 photo images, and over 1,000 profiles are added annually. The majority of the full-text profiles are over 1,500 words in length, and this database contains links to abstracts, book review excerpts, and more from the thousands of periodicals covered by other Wilson databases.

Book Review Digest Plus
Book Review Digest Plus brings together the rich data of Book Review Digest, which includes descriptive summaries of books as well as excerpts of book reviews, with all the book review citations and some full-text book reviews from eleven other H. W. Wilson indexes. Those indexes are: Applied Science & Technology Index, Art Index, Biological & Agricultural Index, Education Index, General Science Index, Humanities Index, Index to Legal Periodicals & Books, Library Literature & Information Science, Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature, Social Sciences Index, and Business Periodicals Index. Retrospective coverage is provided back to 1983, with excerpts from book reviews for more than 150,000 books (and citations to thousands more). Entries currently encompass some 1,300,000 reviews covering over 550,000 books and grows with daily updates. Every book in Book Review Digest Plus appears with all its review citations together. Reviews must meet a length requirement to be cited, but no attempt is made to control the critical opinion they express. Books in all languages and from all countries qualify to be included if they are reviewed in one of the review sources indexed. The database includes children's books as well as book for adults and young adults.

Daily Life Online (5 user limit)
Daily Life Online's suite of social history products (over 430 titles) is comprised of four separate modules: Daily Life through History, Daily Life Premium, World Folklore and Folklife, and Daily Life America. Combined, these four databases provide a comprehensive, cross-disciplinary resource that supports history, social studies, English, and language students. All aspects of daily life are covered: religion, domestic issues, economy, government, recreation, food, clothing, travel, music and dance, tales, myths, urban legends, and other subject areas. Daily Life through History provides content from a vast number of reference works, monographs, and primary source documents. Covering all time periods and aspects of world history, this database contains 44 volumes from the Daily Life through History series, as well as six volumes from the Greenwood Encyclopedia of Daily Life. Daily Life Premium contains an additional 131 titles, including 41 volumes from the Culture and Customs series, as well as over 45 country history monographs, along with other series on food culture and teen life. World Folklore and Folklife contains over 90 monographs, from general overviews of folklife and folklore to specific folktales. Organized by subject and region/country, World Folklore and Folklife allows users to research topics from scary stories to gender roles with ease. Thousands of folktales have been specially indexed to be searchable by subject and tale type, region or country. Finally, Daily Life America, comprised of 125 monographs, highlights such topics as crime, food, music, and other social and cultural aspects of life in America.

Discovering Collection (3 user limit)
The Discovering Collection, a Gale Research Group publication, is a comprehensive database to retrieve in-depth reference content for the core curriculum areas of literature, history, geography, science and social studies. Included in this full-text database are 25 reference databases/titles, 16,000 biographies, over 13,000 photographs, illustrations, images, audio and video files, over 16,500 Timeline Events, 3,200 plot summaries, 13,000 criticisms, and 18,000 essays and overviews.

Historical Abstracts
Historical Abstracts provides coverage of the published scholarly research on the history of the world from 1450 to the present (excluding the United States and Canada, which are covered in America: History and Life). This database contains annotated references to journal articles and other publications on world history, military history, women's history, history of education, and more - essential for libraries supporting upper-division and graduate research. The database contains over half a million citation entries from more than 1,700 periodicals dating from 1954 to the present. In addition, Historical Abstracts includes citations to historical books in the field and citations to abstracts of dissertations completed worldwide of particular interest for historical research. In 2006, Historical Abstracts began adding retrospective coverage for the most important historical journals in JSTOR. By project's end, coverage for these journals will extend back to the late-19th century.

International Medieval Bibliography
International Medieval Bibliography contains some 300,000 citation records, deriving from articles published in periodicals and in miscellany volumes (conference proceedings, collected essays, Festschriften and exhibition catalogues) published world-wide. All subjects are related to the Middle Ages, defined as the period from 400-1500 AD., and cover the geographical areas of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Each record contains searchable bibliographical and classification fields relating to the content of the publication itself: general subject, geographical area, chronological range, as well as detailed indexing concerning places, persons, texts, manuscripts and specific subjects treated in the article.

JSTOR
Our JSTOR database offers two multidisciplinary collections: 1) Arts & Sciences I-IV is an umbrella journal collection containing four sub-units, but which is searched as one collection. Its contents are: 119 core journals in economics, history, political science, and sociology, mathematics, and statistics; 124 journals in archaeology, classics, and Latin American, African, Slavic, and Middle Eastern Studies; 150 journals in language, literature, theatre, music, art, and architecture; and, 112 journals in education, management, marketing, political science, and public administration; 2) Biological Sciences, which is a collection of 98 journals in science fields such as conservation, plant sciences, cell biology and zoology. One of the distinct characteristics of JSTOR is that its coverage is "rolling", i.e., all of the journals provide full text of articles beginning with volume 1 of each title up to about the past three to five years. The Libraries have individual subscriptions to about 80% of these titles to provide coverage of current issues of most of the journals.

Oxford African American Studies Center (5 user limit)
The Oxford African American Studies Center (AASC) is a comprehensive collection of over 7,500 articles on the lives and events which have shaped African American and African history and culture. Comprised of five major encyclopedias, as well as content from 18 additional sources from Oxford University Press, AASC contains over 5,000 biographies and 3,000 articles on a variety of subjects. This database also includes around 100 primary source documents, 1,000 images, and over 200 charts, tables, maps, etc. Oxford plans to update AASC three or four times a year.

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (1 user limit)
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, or DNB, contains 55,000 detailed biographical essays and over 10,000 pictures or portraits of people no longer living who have had some significant connection to British history, including individuals from Great Britain as well as individuals such as Mahatma Gandhi, from current or former British territories, or people such as poet T.S. Eliot, who migrated to Great Britain. New material is added three times per year.

Philosopher's Index
The Philosopher's Index "features author-written abstracts covering scholarly research published in journals and books, including contributions to anthologies and book reviews. The database covers the fifteen fields of philosophy: aesthetics, axiology, philosophy of education, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of history, philosophy of language, logic, metaphysics, philosophical anthropology, metaphilosophy, political philosophy, philosophy of science, social philosophy, and the philosophy of religion. The Philosopher's Index contains research published since 1940 including nearly 570 journals from 43 countries with content representing a variety of languages," most notably English, French, German, Spanish and Italian.

Project Muse
Project Muse provides access to 383 searchable full text journals in a broad range of disciplines, particularly in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, and has significant strengths in literature, history, political science and sociology. Retrospective full text access typically ranges back to 2000.

Readers' Guide Retrospective, 1890-1982 (5 user limit)
Reader’s Guide Retrospective contains more than 3 million citations to articles in 375 general interest periodicals published between 1890-1982, making it an ideal tool for primary and secondary source material ranging from the dawn of the 20th century through two world wars and the Great Depression up to the 1980’s. A large number of the magazines indexed by the Reader’s Guide Retrospective are held by Meyer Library in print or microformat. This is the online version of the well-known and respected Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature from H.W. Wilson up to 1982.

World News Connection (WNC)
World News Connection (WNC) is an online foreign news service that offers an extensive array of translated and English-language news and information. Particularly effective in its coverage of local media sources, WNC provides you with the power to identify what really is happening in a specific country or region. Compiled from thousands of non-U.S. media sources, the information in WNC covers significant socioeconomic, political, scientific, technical, and environmental issues and events. Most of the articles included in WNC are in full-text format, and coverage ranges from 1996 to present. The information is obtained from full text and summaries of newspaper articles, conference proceedings, television and radio broadcasts, periodicals, and non-classified technical reports. New information is entered into WNC every government business day. Generally, this information is available within 24-72 hours from the time of original publication or broadcast. The material in WNC is provided to the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), a U.S. government agency.

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Online Reference Databases (e-Reference Books)
Facts.com
"World News Digest brings together and enhances nearly seven decades of news from the renowned Facts On File World News Digest in print. This archival record of domestic and international news is updated weekly and contains more than 1 million internal hyperlinks and convenient new features such as tabbed search results. It covers all major political, social, and economic events since November 1940." It also includes World News Digest of current (including Today's News) and historic events (1940 to present), a searchable "What Happened on That Day" feature from 1940 to present, obituaries (1980 to present), maps, photos, historic documents, country profiles, biographies, heads of state, and more.

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, or DNB, contains 55,000 detailed biographical essays and over 10,000 pictures or portraits of people no longer living who have had some significant connection to British history, including individuals from Great Britain as well as individuals such as Mahatma Gandhi, from current or former British territories, or people such as poet T.S. Eliot, who migrated to Great Britain. New material is added three times per year.

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Print Indexes in the Meyer Library Reference Collection
The title links here will show you the SWAN library catalog record which gives the Meyer Library holdings of the print title.

Arts & humanities citation index
MSU Meyer Ref AI3 .A63

Biography index
MSU Meyer Ref CT213.Z1 B5
Covers biographical information from English-language periodicals and books for all subject areas covered by H.W. Wilson indexes. The database indexes articles, books, and autobiographies for biographical subjects from antiquity to the present and includes individual and collective biographies from all fields and nationalities. Online Version of Biography Index is available ONLY to current Missouri State University students and faculty at the Meyer Library Reference Desk with assistance from librarian.

Humanities index
MSU Meyer Ref AI3 .H85

International index: a guide to periodical literature in the social sciences and humanities 
MSU Meyer Ref AI3 .R49

Social sciences citation index
MSU Meyer Ref Z7161 .S65

Social sciences index
MSU Meyer Ref AI3 .S62

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General/All Purpose Indexes & Full Text Databases:
The following indexes and databases do not provide the in-depth coverage for studying History as the indexes above. They do cover a variety of subjects and topics across multiple disciplines and provide good general indexing of magazines, newspapers, and core academic journals. In addition they provide full text articles from many of the sources cited.

EBSCOhost. Enter EBSCOhost Web and select the appropriate database for your research.
FirstSearch. Either jump to the database you need to search, or under Databases on the menu bar to the left click “List All” and select the appropriate database for your research.
LexisNexis Academic. Full-text newspapers! Also includes business, legal research, and reference areas.
Oxford Reference Online. An e-reference book collection of over 175 of Oxford University Press’s central English and bilingual dictionaries, usage, quotations, and subject reference books.
CQ Researcher, FACTS.com, SIRS Researcher, JSTOR, Project Muse

Selected Journals in the Library
The title links will take you to TDNet which is the Libraries' tool for locating journals regardless of their format—electronic, print, or microform. Once in TDNet, click on the links to locate journals online, or click on the check box to locate journals in print and microform. This is NOT a complete list of all relevant journals in the Missouri State University Libraries’ collection for this field. If you are looking for a particular title, then use TDNet as your starting point.

American Historical Review

China Quarterly

History in Africa

International Journal of Middle East Studies

Journal of Medieval History

Middle Eastern Studies

Modern Asian Studies

Russian Studies in History

Slavic Review

William and Mary Quarterly

Yearbook of German-American Studies

Recent Books in the Meyer Library Collection
The title links will take you into SWAN, the Missouri State Libraries catalog, to view publishing information and complete citation. The citation record will also display the Library of Congress call number used to arrange many of the books in this subject area. You can use the call number to browse the shelf for similar materials.

Alexander, Michael. Medievalism : the Middle Ages in modern England. New Haven : Yale University Press, c2007.
MSU Meyer General DA110 .A44 2007

Brown, Cynthia Stokes. Big history : from the Big Bang to the present. New York : New Press : Distributed by W.W. Norton, 2007.
MSU Meyer General D20 .B77 2007

Burke, Jason. On the road to Kandahar : travels through conflict in the Islamic world. New York : Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, 2007.
MSU Meyer General DS63.1 .B87 2007

Burkholder, Mark A. Colonial Latin America. New York : Oxford University Press, 2008.
MSU Meyer General F1412 .B96 2008

Connelly, Joan Breton. Portrait of a priestess : women and ritual in ancient Greece. Princeton : Princeton University Press, c2007.
MSU Meyer General BL795.W65 C66 2007

Haufler, Hervie. The spies who never were : the true story of the Nazi spies who were actually Allied double agents. New York, N.Y. : NAL Caliber, c2006.
MSU Meyer General D810.S7 H37 2006

Hunt, Michael H. The American ascendancy : how the United States gained and wielded global dominance. Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, c2007.
MSU Meyer General E183.7 .H855 2007

MacCormack, Sabine. On the wings of time : Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru. Princeton : Princeton University Press, c2007.
MSU Meyer General F3429 .M164 2007

MacMillan, Margaret. Nixon and Mao : the week that changed the world. New York : Random House, c2007.
MSU Meyer General E183.8.C5 M313 2007

O'Brien, Thomas F. Making the Americas : the United States and Latin America from the age of revolutions to the era of globalization. Albuquerque : University of New Mexico Press, 2007.
MSU Meyer General F1408.3 .O27 2007

Palermo, Joseph A. Robert F. Kennedy and the death of American idealism. New York : Pearson Longman, c2008.
MSU Meyer General E840.8.K4 P265 2008

Rethinking environmental history : world-system history and global environmental change / edited by Alf Hornborg, J.R. McNeill, and Joan Martinez-Alier. Lanham : AltaMira Press, c2007.
MSU Meyer General GE149 .R49 2007

Roudik, Peter. The history of the Central Asian republics. Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press, 2007.
MSU Meyer General DK856 .R68 2007

Saliba, George. Islamic science and the making of the European Renaissance. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, c2007.
MSU Meyer General Q127.I742 S35 2007

Silver, Peter Rhoads. Our savage neighbors : how Indian war transformed early America. New York : W.W. Norton, c2008.
MSU Meyer General E77 .S573 2008

Westheider, James E. The African American experience in Vietnam : brothers in arms. Lanham, MD : Rowman & Littlefield, c2008.
MSU Meyer General DS559.8.B55 W46 2008

Reference Books at Meyer Library
The title links will take you into SWAN, the Missouri State Libraries catalog, to view publishing information and obtain the Library of Congress call number used by Meyer Library to arrange reference materials. Reference materials are non-circulating items.

Atlas of the medieval world
MSU Meyer Ref D117 .M35 2004

Blackwell encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England
MSU Meyer Ref DA152 .B58 1999

Chronological history of U.S. foreign relations
MSU Meyer Ref E183.7.B745 2003 3 volumes.

Colonialism : an international, social, cultural, and political encyclopedia
MSU Meyer Ref JV22 .C65 2003 Vol. 1-3

Columbia guide to america in the 1960s
MSU Meyer Ref E841.C575 2001

Conspiracy theories in American history : an encyclopedia
MSU Meyer Ref E179 .C66 2003 Vol. 1-2

CQ’s state fact finder 2004
MSU Meyer Ref HN60.C68 2004

Daily life in the Roman city : Rome, Pompeii and Ostia
MSU Meyer Ref DG78 .A53 2004

Encyclopedia of American History
MSU Meyer Ref E174.E53 2003

Encyclopedia of American Indian contributions to the world
MSU Meyer Ref E54.5.K46 2002

Encyclopedia of American war heroes
MSU Meyer Ref E181.N882002

Encyclopedia of Greece and the Hellenic tradition
MSU Meyer Ref DF757.E53 2000

Encyclopedia of Latin American history and culture
MSU Meyer Ref F1406 .E53 1996

Encyclopedia of the American Civil War : a political, social, and military history / David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler, editors ; David J. Coles, associate editor ; Gary W. Gallagher, James M. McPherson, Mark E. Neely, Jr., editorial board
MSU Meyer Ref E468 .E53 2000

Encyclopedia of the American Constitution
MSU Meyer Ref KF4548.E53 2000 Vol. 1-6

Encyclopedia of the Ancient world
MSU Meyer Ref CB311.E535 2000

Encyclopedia of the enlightenment
MSU Meyer Ref B802 .E53 2003

Encyclopedia of the new American nation : the emergence of the United States, 1754-1829
MSU Meyer Ref E301 .E53 2006 Vol. 1-3

Encyclopedia of the Renaissance and the reformation
MSU Meyer Ref CB359 .B47 2004

Encyclopedia of world history
MSU Meyer Ref D21 .E577 1998

Famous first facts : a record of first happenings, discoveries, and inventions in American history
MSU Meyer Ref AG5 .K315 2006

Global encyclopedia of historical writing
MSU Meyer Ref D13 .G47 1998

Historic documents
MSU Meyer Ref E839.5H57 2003

Historical dictionary of Afghanistan
MSU Meyer Ref DS356 .A27 2003

Historical encyclopedia of American labor
MSU Meyer Ref HD8066 .H57 2004 Vol. 1-2

History of women in the United States : state-by-state reference
MSU Meyer Ref HQ1410 .H58 2004 Vol. 1-4

Immigration in U.S. history
MSU Meyer Ref JV6450 .I565 2006 Vol. 1-2

Key events in African history : a reference guide
MSU Meyer Ref DT20 .F35 2002

Landmark supreme court cases : the most influential decisions of the supreme court of the United States
MSU Meyer Ref KF8742 .H37 2004

Native Americans
MSU Meyer Ref E93 .N32 2002

Oxford encyclopedia of the reformation
MSU Meyer Ref BR302.8 .O93 1996

Propaganda and mass persuasion : a historical encyclopedia, 1500 to the present
MSU Meyer Ref HM1231 .C85 2003

Scribner encyclopedia of American lives
MSU Meyer Ref CT213 .S37 1998

World history of tax rebellions : an encyclopedia of tax rebels, revolts, and riots from antiquity to the present
MSU Meyer Ref HJ2250 .B87 2004

Government Sources & Publications
Key government departments and agencies and publications in the Meyer Library Government Documents Department.

DocLinks - directory of national, state, local, and international government web sites from the Reference and Government Department at Missouri State University Libraries.
http://library.missouristate.edu/reference/govinfo.htm

USA.gov - the United States government's official web portal.
http://www.usa.gov

GPO Access
GPO Access disseminates official information from all three branches of the U.S. Government. It indexes government publications and offers core documents of U.S. democracy (Constitution, Bill of Rights, Gettysburg Address, etc.) along with a variety of other Federal-wide resources.

Central Intelligence Agency's The World Factbook
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/index.html

U.S. Department of State Background Notes
http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn

Library of Congress Country Studies
http://memory.loc.gov/frd/cs/cshome.html

Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970
MSU Meyer Gov Docs C 3.134/2: H62/789-970/ pt.1-2

Associations
Organizations of experts, policy makers, and researchers.

General Directory
Scholarly Societies Project from the University of Waterloo Library
http://www.scholarly-societies.org/

American Historical Association
http://www.historians.org/

Historical Association
http://www.history.org.uk/

National Council for History Education
http://www.nche.net/

Organization of American Historians
http://www.oah.org/

Society for History Education
http://www.thehistoryteacher.org/

World History Association
http://www.thewha.org/

Web Sites
Selected web directories to sources and a variety of information on the Internet.

American Memory: Historical Collections for the National Digital Library. "American Memory is a gateway to rich primary source materials relating to the history and culture of the United States. The site offers more than 7 million digital items from more than 100 historical collections."
http://memory.loc.gov/

Best of History Web Sites
http://besthistorysites.net/

Google Directory: Society: History
http://directory.google.com/Top/Society/History/

HyperHistory Online
http://www.hyperhistory.com/online_n2/History_n2/a.html

Internet for Historians
http://www.vts.rdn.ac.uk/tutorial/history/index.htm

Internet History Sourcebooks Project
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/

Missouri State University Department of History
http://history.missouristate.edu/

Student's Guide to the Study of History
http://www.historyguide.org/guide/guide.html

World History Center at Northeastern University
http://www.h-net.msu.edu/~envision/interact/history.html

compiled by Crystal Gale | Meyer Library
Missouri State University Libraries | Updated: January 2008