J400: Writing Legal History
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Here's a selection of resources to help you get started on your research. They're divided roughly into primary sources and secondary sources, but as you'll see, some of these resources are useful for both, depending on the date of the trial you're researching. In fact, there's a fine line between primary sources and secondary sources: if you're confused about the difference, this guide to Identifying Primary and Secondary Sources might help.
Contact Celestina Savonius-Wroth, the history librarian, cewroth@indiana.edu, for help with your research or with questions about anything on this page.
Primary sources
Official documents Use LexisNexis Academic for US federal and state legal cases back to the 19th century.
Consult with staff in Government Information for help finding other official documents. They've also provided many useful links, such as this guide to citing government documents. Newspapers Early American Newspapers is a large collection of historical US papers, with coverage up to 1922.
LexisNexis Academic contains fulltext of hundreds of US and international newspapers, from the 1980s to the present. Try Factiva as well for topics after 1990.
Other smaller collections of digitized newspapers can be found on the Libraries’ Old News page (near the end of the page). If you’re having trouble finding news stories from small local newspapers, you may need to consult Newspapers in microfilm (print copy, which is easier to use, available in Microforms Reference, Wells Library East Tower 2, Z6951 .U54), then search IUCAT or WorldCat for the newspapers you identify.
Readers Guide Retrospective 1890-1982 is an online index to 100+ widely-read US magazines (including Time, Life, etc). (This isn’t a full-text resource –click on the IU-Link button to find online or paper copy.) See Academic Search (EBSCO), LexisNexis Academic and Factiva for the 1980s to the present.
Other media AP Images is the photo archive of the Associated Press. Most photographs that appeared in mainstream newspapers will be here.
LexisNexis Academic contains transcripts of television and radio news from the 1980s to the present.
You can search IUCAT (IU Libraries online catalog) and WorldCat (combined catalog of most major US libraries) for video and audio recordings. In IUCAT, use the DVD/Video search or the Sound Recordings search. In WorldCat, use the format limits. Use the Request materials on ILL link to borrow something you find in WorldCat from another library.
YouTube can be a good source for video coverage, but bear in mind that anyone can post anything there! Remember to look for important information such as the source and context of clips you find on YouTube.
Secondary sourcesBooks and journal articlesUse IUCAT or WorldCat to search for books about famous trials and related issues. In IUCAT, use the Advanced Keyword Search and search for the name of the accused as a subject. Use lastname, firstname (eg frank, leo) or use the Basic Search and search for the popular name of the trial as keyword. IUCAT includes links to Google Books and Hathi Trust if the book has been digitized.
Book reviews Search Academic Search (EBSCO) for reviews of recent books. Use the Advanced Search and select "Book review" as the Document type.
JSTOR is also a good source for book reviews, especially for books that were published at least 4 years ago, and were important books in their field. You'll find reviews in the key journals, by specialists in the field.
last updated 01/31/2010 |
