Places to start
IUCAT is the online catalog of the Indiana University Libraries. Use the Basic Search to look up authors or titles mentioned in your other readings, or use the Advanced Keyword Search to search for both primary and secondary source materials on your topic. Hint: try some of these terms as subjects:
Denazification
German reunification question (1949-1990)
Germany History 1945-1955
Germany History 1945-1990
Germany history unification 1990
Germany Social conditions 20th century
Germany Social conditions 1990-
Germany Politics and government 1945-1990
Use WorldCat to expand your search to other libraries besides IU's. Use the Request materials from ILL link to borrow items you find in WorldCat.
Academic Search (EBSCO) is an online index to journals and magazines in many fields of study. Use the peer reviewed limiter to find articles in scholarly journals only.
Historical Abstracts covers scholarly journals in history. This is the core resource for secondary sources (= what historians have written about your topic).
International Political Sience Abstracts and PAIS International are good places to go for secondary sources in political science and related fields of study.
For resources in other subject areas, check Library Resources by Subject.
Journal, magazine and newspaper articles as primary sources
Try AltPressIndex and AltPressIndexArchive for non-mainstream (for example, socialist) views of recent German history (1969-present).
British Humanities Index is a online index of newspapers and other publications from the UK (1962-present).
IBZ - Internationale Bibliographie der Zeitschriftenliteratur covers a range of German and other European publications but note that the search interface and most of the results are IN GERMAN.
JSTOR and Periodicals Index Online are two resources on the fuzzy line between primary and secondary sources. Use them either to find recent scholarly research on your topic, or, by setting date limits, find out what issues were debated in the time period you're writing about.
Lexis-Nexis Academic and Factiva can be used for up-to-the minute news but also for contemporary news coverage back to the 1980s, including some German publications. The historical New York Times (and other historical US newspapers available through the same link) and the [London]Times Digital Archive are digitized archives of major English-language newspapers covering all of the 20th century.
Collections of primary source materials
German History in Documents and Images (GDHI) is a collection of translated primary source documents, plus images and maps, published online by the German Historical Institute. (It is still under development, but some sections, such as 1961-1989 have quite a bit of information).
US Government publications are a rich source of English-language primary sources. You'll be able to find many of these through your searches in IUCAT. For example:
Reports of the military government for Germany, U.S. Zone, 1945-53
(Wells Library GIMSS, DD257 .R46 1983) MICROFILM
Records of the United States Information Agency. Research reports, Part 2, German public opinion, 1945-1970
(Wells Library, GIMSS, DD257.4 .R43 2006) MICROFILM
Declassified Documents Reference System (DDRS) and Digital National Security Archives are two digitized collections of government materials.
There are also all sorts of digitized collections on specific topics on the internet, such as the German Propaganda Archive and a collection of GDR Photos--but please be alert for Holocaust-denial sites like this. Any source you find on a web site needs to be carefully investigated...remember that anyone can use the internet to express his or her views, no matter how hateful or bizarre.
January 23, 2008
Feel free to contact Celestina Savonius-Wroth, history librarian, cewroth@indiana.edu for help at any point in your research. |
