Cabrillo College Library

Primary sources

Books in the Library and Major reference books

Electronic books

Newspapers

Periodical articles

Maps

Statistics

Major Web resources

Finding Web resources on your own

Some thoughts on finding the perfect research topic

Citing resources

How to get to this page on the Internet

Images are from Corbis.com

 HIST 17 AH


________________________your name

How to get to this page on the Internet  

  1. Go to the Cabrillo College Library homepage <http://libwww.cabrillo.edu> 
  2. Click on Internet Links 
  3. Click on History
  4. Scroll down to Course-Related Materials and click on HIST 17 AH Honors United States History to 1865

Primary sources  
Historians distinguish between primary and secondary sources.  Primary sources are materials produced at the time the events that you are studying took place, or materials generated by the historical actors themselves. Examples include speeches, diaries, autobiographies, newspaper accounts written at the time, government records, and eyewitness reporting. A guide to using primary sources is Making Sense of Evidence (from CUNY and George Mason).

Secondary sources are accounts of the past written by non-participants. Examples include textbooks, most other books, biographies, encyclopedias, interpretive journal articles. 

Sources of primary documents useful for this course -- online

Explore one or more of these sources. What did you find?

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Source of primary documents useful for this course -- print

The Annals of America. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica. Reference E173.A793 10 volumes

Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents. New York: Bureau of National Literature, 1897. 20 vols. Main Stacks J81.B96g

Documents of American History, ed. by Henry Steele Commager. 2 vols. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973. Reference E173.C66 1973

Witness to America: An Illustrated Documentary History of the United States from the Revolution to Today, by Stephen Ambrose and Douglas Brinkley, eds. New York: HarperCollins, 1999. Main stacks: E173.W78 1999

Books in Cabrillo College Library

  1. Go to the Cabrillo College Library
  2. Click on Library Catalog

Look for books on your topic. Often a keyword search works best. What did you find?

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Major reference books for United States history -- There are too many to list here. Go to the Reference Stacks at either the Cabrillo College Library in Aptos, or in the Integrated Learning Center in Watsonville and browse through the books whose call numbers begin with E and F.

Electronic books: The library has over 18,000 electronic books (eBooks). The amazing thing is that you search for words used inside those books!

Suppose I were interested in learning more black and white women in the Old South and found the book Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese). I learn that, in part, the author drew upon journals kept by Sarah Gayle, who was married to John Gayle, who was governor of Alabama in the 1800s. Using NetLibrary eBooks, I can search for Sarah Gayle used as words inside 18,000 books. There are six!!

Your turn!

  1. Go to the Cabrillo College Library
  2. Click on Full Text Articles
  3. Under GENERAL (top left), click on NetLibrary eBooks

Look for a book on a topic of interest. What did you find?

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In order to read these from off campus, you just enter your library card number, when prompted.

Google Books Google is wildly digitizing books. They have just passed the 7 million mark! You get to them by going to books.google.com. Currently, there is a publishers lawsuit -- but it's being settled. Many books you can read cover to cover. Some you can only read chapters of, and some just sentences. I can't wait till all the books are free!!

Here is a search I did to explore a bit about how the Romans used slaves on plantations. I looked for limited view and full view books (i.e., those I could read partially, and those I could read cover to cover.)

Here's one I found:

When I click on the book title, it takes me inside the book to where the words are used.

Since the word plantation is not used on that first page, I can search within the book for its occurence. Is that cool or what?


 
Newspapers

  1. Go to the Cabrillo College Library
  2. Click on Full Text Articles
  3. Click on The Historical New York Times for coverage 1851-2005

I would recommend using the Advanced search more -- you can search on more than one variable at a time. The Advanced search mode lets you limit by time period. For example, John Gayle, Sarah's husband, died in 1859. Was there an obituary? There was!

Your turn. Look for newspaper articles on a topic of interest. What did you find?

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Periodical articles
EBSCOhost's Academic Search Elite provides access to information about articles published in approximately 8000 periodicals (both magazines and journals) for about the last 10 - 20 years. For about 4,500 of those periodicals, full text copies of the articles are in the database. For those of you for whom this is new, here's how you use Academic Search Elite.
  1. Go to the Cabrillo College Library
  2. Click on Full text Articles  [If you are coming in from off campus, your user ID is your library card number] 
  3. On the next screen, click on Academic Search Premier 
  4. On the next screen, click to switch to Advanced Search



  5. Click in the small box next to Full Text. This will limit your search to articles that are fulltext in the database. You might also want to click on Peer Reviewed; this will limit your search to more scholarly journals.


  6. Type in your search terms.  Then click on Search 

    Here, for example, is a search for scholarly journal articles about black and white southern women:


    Click an article title to get to the screen with full information about it. Note how you can click to print, to email, even to cite the article!



Maps

Statistics

  • Black Americans: A Statistical Sourcebook. Palo Alto, CA: Information Publications, 1999. Reference E185.86 .B5238 1999
  • U.S. Bureau of the Census. Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970. U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1975. Reference HA202 .B87 1975
  • Historical Census Browser covers U.S. Census data 1790-1960.

Major Web resources

Finding Web Resources on Your Own

Since anyone can publish on the Web (and since it seems as though everyone does), it's important to critically evaluate the Web resources you run across. Here are some hints for doing that:

Some useful criteria to use for evaluative purposes are:
Accuracy Authority Objectivity Currency Coverage

Evaluating Internet Resources

Some "tricks" to use in evaluating Web sites
1. Frequently, authors of Web pages include a date to indicate when the page was last updated. Look towards the bottom of the Web page to see if there's a date.

2. Examine the domain name carefully. Usually, but not always, domain names in the U.S. that end in .com are commercial, those that end in .gov are governmental, .edu is for educational institutions, and .org is for nonprofits and other organizations. Compare these sites: here's a .com for U.S. history; here's a .edu that covers U.S. history.

3. Frequently, but not always, a tilde (the symbol ~) prior to a file name indicates that it is someone's personal Web page. Some places on the Web are in the business of hosting personal Web pages. When a domain name has geocities, angelfire, tripod, or aol in it, the Web page is probably a personal one. Here, for example, is a site posted at tripod.

4. If a site has a long file name, try taking off the last part of the URL to see the Web page or site to which it is hooked. For example, this site is posted at what educational institution?

5. If you're curious as to who owns a Web site, go to register.com and find out!

When using a search engine

  • Use quotation marks (" ") to keep words in phrases together
  • If you want the search engine to recognize a letter as a capital, capitalize it. Otherwise, use lower case
  • Most search engines have an Advanced search mode which can help you do better, more precise searches
Getting to a list of Internet Search Engines
  • Go to the Cabrillo College Library homepage
  • Click on Search the Internet
  • Click on Search Engines

Explore the Web using Google. You might want to try Google's Advanced Search mode. What did you find?

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Some thoughts about finding the perfect research topic Research is an iterative process -- you search, and then you re-search. Oftentimes, you know what you want to write a paper on, at least in a general way. But then, as you get into it, you soon realize that topics have to be the "right size." If a topic is too broad, you get lost in generalizations. If a topic is too narrow, sufficient information isn't available.

If you have sort of a broad topic in mind, there are various ways you can narrow it. You could think about applying one or of these as a limiting factor:
  • Location
  • Time Span/Era
  • Particular Event
  • Specific Group

Or, think about different questions you could ask. In general, there are several kinds of questions of the who, what, where, when, and how variety. (The who, what, where, and when are usually easy; the how questions are often hard.)

Fact questions For example: What were living conditions like for slaves on a plantation?

Probing questions For example: You've read that "...cotton and slavery marched in lockstep across the South." [Unto a Good Land by Harrell et al.,p. 342] Why cotton instead of some other crop?

Contrasting questions For example: The Romans used slaves on plantations. What differences are there, if any, in the way slaves were treated when you compare what happened in Roman times to what happened in the American South?

Background sources help you narrow and focus your interests. Refer to the Major Reference Books section, above.

Citing your resources  

For information about citation styles use Style Guides. Remember that when you are using full text databases like Academic Search Premier, you can click to get an already formatted citation.

You should be familiar with how to write citations for books, but you can also get already formatted citations for books at WorldCat.org. You search for your book, and then bring up the record for it. This record will also tell you which libraries have the book in relation to a Zip code. But the really cool think about WorldCat.org is that you can click to have it cited!! Sweet!

Resources generally about researching and writing academic papers:

You can use Google Books to look up chapters in books about researching and writing papers. Here are some suggestions:

How to get to this page on the Internet

  1. Go to the Cabrillo College Library homepage <http://libwww.cabrillo.edu>
  2. Click on Internet Links
  3. Click on History
  4. Scroll down to Course-Related Materials, and click on HIST 17 AH, Honors United States History Since 1865, M. Pebworth


M. Pebworth and T. N. Smalley 3/09