J400: Social Movements in Western Europe
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--street art from Paris 1968 |
Here are some resources that will help you get started on your research paper.
Need more suggestions? Contact the history librarian, Celestina Savonius-Wroth, cewroth@indiana.edu, use the Ask a Librarian service, or check the Resources by Subject pages for other experts who can help.
Did you get to this page from Oncourse? Link directly to it by copying and pasting this URL into your browser: http://www.libraries.iub.edu/index.php?pageId=1002841 (some resources won't work correctly inside Oncourse).
On this page: Background information - Secondary sources - Primary sources: Books - Primary sources: newspapers, etc - Other primary sources - Topic-specific digitized collections
Best of luck on your research! |
I. Background information
You might find these two collections of basic reference works useful: Oxford Reference Online and Blackwell Reference Online. They include books like Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World, and Blackwell Companion to Europe 1900-1945, where you'll find overviews of important issues and events, along with good suggestions for further reading. There's also the Encyclopaedia Britannica (this is the complete version, not the free online version).
For biographical information, try Biography and Genealogy Master Index and Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (for individuals with some connection to the UK). Of course you'll probably start with Wikipedia, but you'll need to check what you find there against other sources, especially if you're researching a controversial person.
II. Exploring the existing scholarship on your topic
Use IUCAT to find scholarly books on your topic. Tip: start with a book from your assigned reading or from the bibliography of a relevant entry in one of the online reference books above. Search for it in IUCAT, then look at the subject headings and other pointers in the record to find more books on the same topic. Take your search further in WorldCat, a super-catalog of hundreds of libraries. Anything you find in WorldCat that we don't have at IU can be requested on loan --look for the "ILL" (interlibrary loan) link.
Historical Abstracts, an online index to scholarly books and journals in history, is another good place to start. Tip: use the Advanced search and search by Time Period. You can also limit by language, if you want materials in English only.
JSTOR is an online digital archive of scholarly journals. Use it to find book reviews, or search for a very specific keyword to find journal articles that discuss more obscure topics or individuals.
Peace Research Abstracts covers scholarly research on many topics related to this course. Gender Studies Database provides access to research on gender issues, with coverage back to 1972 (so depending on your topic, you could use it to find both primary and secondary sources.)
You might want to look for a review essay on your topic --an essay by an expert in the field, discussing recent scholarship. Here's how to find one.
Another way to find recent scholarship is to browse or search individual journals*, such as:
American Historical Review
Journal of Modern History
Social History
Past & Present
Central European History
French Historical Studies
Journal of Modern Italian Studies
(*if you have trouble with these links, go to the Online Full-text Journals page and search for the journal title)
III. Locating Primary sources
Books (and other sources published in books)
There are many primary source materials available in the library. When you search IUCAT for primary sources, use the Advanced search, and experiment with some of these subject words:
| anecdotes diaries pictorial works archives documentary films portraits biography public opinion |
interviews songs and music case studies manuscripts sources speeches comic books, strips notebooks, sketchbooks |
correspondence caricatures and cartoons statistics |
Remember that you can search by date of publication and language. You can use an individual's name as an author (to find his/her own writings) or a subject (to find materials about him/her).
Take your search further: try WorldCat.
Search the full text of many out of copyright books: try HathiTrust Digital Library and Google Books Search. (You'll also see links from IUCAT and WorldCat to Google and Hathi.)
Newspapers, journals and magazines
Many British newspapers and magazines from the 19th and 20th centuries have been digitized. Depending on your time period, try Times Digital Archive (The Times, London) (1785-1985), 19th Century British Library Newspapers, Illustrated London News Historical Archive, 1842-2003, 19th Century UK Periodicals, British Periodicals (1680s-1930s).
For access to continental European journals and magazines for your period, try searching Periodicals Index Online ("highbrow" journals from earliest issues to 1995). For late 20th-century topics, IBZ - Internationale Bibliographie der Zeitschriftenliteratur and FRANCIS, both starting in 1984, cover German and French magazine/journal articles (but mostly in their original languages.) We also have a collection of European women's magazines on microfilm (see description) if you can read French, German or Dutch.
Many international organizations publish their own journal or newsletter. To find this kind of publication in IUCAT or WorldCat, use the name of the organization as the author in your search.
The Underground Newspaper Collection is a collection of more than 700 alternative publications from the 1960s and 1970s, including many European publications. It is only available on microfilm: consult the guide the collection, located in Wells Library Microforms Reference, AN123, for more information.
Other sources
For official documents, also mostly in the original languages, check the Princeton University Library's Primary sources for historical research: Modern Europe. Note: use this to find out about materials you might want to use, then search IUCAT for IU Bloomington holdings --the guide is based on Princeton's collections. Ask our librarians in International Studies and Government Information for help. (Great Britain's House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, 1902-2004 are available online; most other European governments' official records for your period are not.)
Foreign Broadcast Information Service Daily Reports 1941-1996 is a collection of news reports from all over the world, compiled and translated into English by the US Government. (World News Digest, 1940-present, is similar, except that it is a summary of news, rather than translations of actual broadcasts --so not a primary source for European history in quite the same way, since it reflects the point of view of US observers.)
Topic-specific digitized collections
Women and Social Movements International is a large collection of digitized primary source materials relevant to this course. We have a trial subscription which ends on November 19, so be sure to take good notes if you use materials in this collection!
Mass Observation Online is a truly "mass"ive collection of field research conducted on ordinary people in Britain from 1937-1965.
AltPressIndexArchive provides access to the alternative press from 1969-1990. (A different collection from the microfilm collection described above.)
You'll also find some valuable primary sources freely accessible on the internet, such as Modern History Sourcebook, a collection of primary sources pertaining to modern Europe.
