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History 200C: Children

Guide to finding library resources

1. Historical Abstracts

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. 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.

If you select the Easy Search tab on the Library Gateway, your search will be run in America: History and Life and Historical Abstracts, as well as several other multidisciplinary sources. In addition, you can click on “Easy Search” under Quick Links on that page to get the option to limit your search to articles on history.

Searching these databases directly, rather than through Easy Search, offers you more search options. Use the Subject Browser in these databases to select your subject term(s) by clicking on the open book icon to the right of the search box. You can narrow your search by adding a keyword or using more than one subject term. Your search results display as short records, which you can expand by clicking on “Expand Record” at the bottom of the record on the right. The full entry shows you an abstract or summary of the article. If a particular article is linked to full text, the link is highlighted.

2. Other Article Databases

There are many other specialized or multidisciplinary article databases that you could search, depending on the focus of your topic. The master list of article databases is available on the Library Gateway’s Online Research Resources page. You might find material in:

3. Collections of Full-text Online 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.
  • Periodicals Archive Online This link opens in a new window
    • Help & Support Information This link opens in a new window

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

  • Project Muse This link opens in a new window
    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,

  • Eighteenth Century Studies
  • Journal of Interdisciplinary History
  • History and Memory
  • Journal of Social History
  • Radical History Review
  • Journal of Women's History
  • Film and History
  • Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth

    • 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.

    Still other full text collections cover more popular periodicals.
  • American Periodicals This link opens in a new window
    Use for American periodicals published between 1740s and 1930s.
  • British Periodicals This link opens in a new window
    • Help & Support Information This link opens in a new window
    For British periodicals try this database (covers 1680s to 1930s).
  • 19th Century UK Periodicals This link opens in a new window
    Or this source for British periodicals. You'll find 19th Century U.K. Periodicals especially useful for its subcollection on "New Readerships", which includes children's periodicals.