History Department Research Guide  Tags: history reference databases primary_sources  

Search new books purchased by Manhattanville College Library. History subjects typically fall in Library of Congress Classifications D, E, and F. not. Click here and enter your search terms.

If Manhattanville does not own the book you need, consider placing an Interlibrary Loan.

Use WorldCat to obtain holdings information in North American libraries and beyond.

Phrase Searching: Enter multiple search terms (a.k.a. keywords) into CastleCat's default keyword anywhere search. Results privilege records containing the entered terms as a phrase (e.g. British Empire, Manifest Destiny, etc.). However, lower down in the results list CastleCat also returns records containing the search terms in any field, any order (this is the Boolean "AND" search). To eliminate the latter from the results list use quotation marks. Doing so will force CastleCat to return only records containing the phrase exactly as entered. 

Boolean Operators: Three important Boolean operators: 1) AND; 2) OR; and 3) AND NOT. Use AND to require the presence of multiple search terms in any field, any order. Use OR to group synonymous or like search terms in parenthetical expressions. Use AND NOT to exclude search terms.

Example 1: Lincoln AND Copperheads

Example 2: (Aztec OR Maya) AND writing

Example 3: genocide AND NOT (Holocaust OR Shoah)

Note: Search terms and operators may be capitalized if you wish -- for example, America vs. america; AND vs. and -- but this makes no difference to the outcome of the search.

Wildcards: Find all variants of a search term based on its root. This ensures that no relevant results will be missed. Search terms can be right-hand truncated using a question mark.

Examples: politic?; wom?n

Search CastleCat, the Libraries' online catalog, to find books owned by Manhattanville.  Use a Subject Keyword search and put set terms in quotation marks ("Bill Clinton") for greater accuracy.

Search in CastleCat for "electronic book" history to get a list of all electronic books in history.  We have several eBook databases, including NetLibrary and ACLS History EBooks. 

The following Mville databases provide full-text access to eBooks of interest to history researchers.

• American Memory: Books, Other Printed Texts (The Library of Congress) - American Memory provides access to 56 distinct book collections. Highlights include:

• Nineteenth Century Books 1850-1877
• Puerto Rico Books & Pamphlets 1831-1929
• Traveling in America 1750-1920
• Woman Suffrage Books & Pamphlets 1848-1921

• Bartleby.com - Nonfiction - "Bartleby.com publishes a diverse and intelligent nonfiction corpus, including many works of political and social history." Find such classics as Thomas Paine's Common Sense, Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives, and Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women, among others.

• Cornell University Library: Historical Monographs - "The Cornell Historic Monograph Collection consists of digital surrogates for materials that were part of a joint study involving Digital Preservation between Cornell University and the Xerox Corporation." The collection currently offers access to 456 out-of-copyright monographs digitized from the collections of Cornell University.

• Documenting the American South (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) - "Documenting the American South (DocSouth) is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes ten thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs."

• Gutenberg-e - An open-access project jointly developed by the American Historical Association and Columbia University. Currently Gutenberg-e provides full-text online access to 22 scholarly history monographs with a post-2000 copyright date. Eventually 36 titles will be available from the site, as well as from ACLS Humanities E-Book Project (see above).

• Google Books - Google Books offers online access to thousands of titles published prior to 1900. The Advanced Book Search, while not as flexible as Diamond or OCLC's Worldcat, nevertheless permits a researcher to limit by title (e.g. intitle:philadelphia) and year (e.g. date:1880-1900). Click on the following links for books published between...

• 1500-1600 CE
• 1600-1700 CE
• 1700-1800 CE
• 1800-1900 CE

• Internet Text Archive - "The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an ‘Internet library,’ with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format."

• Making of America Books (University of Michigan) - "Making of America (MOA) is a digital library of primary sources in American social history primarily from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. The book collection currently contains approximately 10,000 books with 19th century imprints."

• Million Book Project (Carnegie Mellon University & select international universities) - See also the Open Content Alliance.

• The Online Books Page (University of Pennsylvania) - "The Online Books Page is a website that facilitates access to books that are freely readable over the Internet. It also aims to encourage the development of such online books, for the benefit and edification of all" (About Us). Particularly useful is the Archives and Indexes page, which links to large-scale book repositories, foreign language repositories, and smaller-scale archives.

• Project Gutenberg - "Project Gutenberg is the first and largest single collection of free electronic books, or eBooks." The project currently offers over 20,000 classic works in the public domain, most of which are literary in nature. Nonfiction titles can certainly be found. An Advanced Search for the subject History returned 652 titles. It is possible to view an alphabetical list by author of all titles within a given Library of Congress Classification. For example, view just the 283 books classed under "E" and "F" (history of the the Americas), or the 18 under "DT" (history of Africa).

The core history journal databases — America: History & Life (Ebsco), Historical Abstracts (Ebsco), and JSTOR — are all excellent tools for locating scholarly book reviews, as are ProQuest and Academic Search Premier. The "best of the rest" include: