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University Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

History 495AH/498A: American Public Health and Health Policy, ca. 1865-1970

A course guide.

1. America: History and Life

The two main article databases for history are Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life. One or the other of these databases is usually the best starting place to search for scholarly articles in English on topics in history, and for this class you'll probably be using America: History and Life.

America: History and Life covers articles, book reviews, and dissertations on all periods of North American history published since 1964, and in some cases it provides links to the full text of the articles online. Historical Abstracts covers articles, book reviews, and dissertations published since 1954 on all aspects of world history, excluding North America, from 1450 to the present.

2. Other Article Databses

3. Digitized Journals

There are several major collections of full-text electronic journals. In these databases you can browse individual issues of journals, or you can do a search across the entire database.

For older journals, use JSTOR ("journal storage"). This is a digitized, fully searchable version of the full content of more than 700 scholarly journals from their inception (sometimes as early as the 18th century) up to the last 1-5 years (recent issues are excluded). To get to JSTOR, go to the "Quick Links" on the History, Philosophy and Newspaper Library web site, or go to Online Research Resources and type "JSTOR" in the search box. Some of the titles you will find in JSTOR:

  • Public Health Reports
  • Milbank Quarterly
  • American Journal of Nursing
  • Journal of Hygiene
  • Health and History
  • Journal of Infectious Diseases
  • Journal of American History
  • Journal of Social History
  • Agricultural History
  • Science and Society

Periodicals Archive Online is another full-text source of journal literature in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Coverage extends back more than 200 years.

For the full text of more than 300 recent scholarly journals, use Project Muse. These too are fully searchable. In most cases, only the issues from the last few years are available. Here you will find, for example,

  • Bulletin of the History of Medicine
  • Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
  • Journal of Interdisciplinary History
  • History and Memory
  • Journal of Social History
  • Radical History Review
  • Journal of Women's History
  • Oral History Review

To get to Project Muse, go to the "Quick Links" on the History, Philosophy and Newspaper Library web site, or go to Online Resources from the Library Gateway and type "Project Muse" in the search box.