History 498B: Political Movements in U.S. History

When looking for secondary sources, you will use the Library Catalog primarily to find books. Much of this information will be familiar to you from History 200.

To broaden your search beyond the University of Illinois Library's collection, search in the I-Share Catalog:

To broaden your search even further, search in WorldCat:

If you find a book in WorldCat that you would like to use for your research, you can request it through Interlibrary Loan:

Also consider searching the catalogs of specialized libraries: this strategy is often an easy way to find publications (both secondary sources and primary sources) relevant to your topic. Two specialized library catalogs to consider for this class:

Use article databases primarily to find journal articles. Some article databases also include magazine articles and other types of periodical literature.

Other article databases that might be relevant to research in this course include the following:

Probably soon to be superseded by Artificial Intelligence, if that event has not yet come to pass already, citation indexes can help you identify the most frequently cited work on a topic (as well as the least cited works), and thereby give you some insight into historiographical trends.

For decades the main citation indexes used by historians have been the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, and, to a lesser extent, the Social Sciences Citation Index. Both are searchable through Web of Science.

A drawback to the Web of Science citation indexes is the very clunky subject searching they support. Also, Web of Science is, as the name suggests, heavily tilted towards STEM fields.

As you will have learned in History 200, encyclopedias attempt to summarize, as concisely as possible, the state of knowledge in a field of inquiry. Use encyclopedias to find background information on your topic, and to familiarize yourself with what is already known on the topic. A good encyclopedia will have entries that are signed by their authors, and include suggestions for further reading. 

Currently, the single best reference work for American history is the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History: Coverage is not as close to complete as it could be, but it remains a work-in-progress and hopefully will attain a scope more nearly-encyclopedic

Other encyclopedias, though not nearly as fine as the Oxford Research Encyclopedia, tend to be closer to traditional encyclopedias in that they summarize the secondary literature on a subject, trying as far as possible to represented the general consent among scholars, without trying to delineate the various historiographical trends.

Even encyclopedias that fall short as encyclopedias sometimes include auxiliary apparatus like chronologies or systematic arrangement of entries. Chronologies especially can be useful if you decide to use newspapers as primary sources.

A bibliography is, in its most literal sense, a list of books. Many students are familiar with bibliographies from writing research papers, where a list of works cited is sometimes called a bibliography. In libraries, bibliographies serve an additional, important function in helping patrons identify books, journal articles, and other library resources. These bibliographies are usually centered on sources about a particular subject, and are often book-length themselves. Some bibliographies run to several volumes. For more information on bibliographies, please see our guide to Bibliography and Historical Research:

Two bibliographies especially relevant to this course:

For more of these Oxford bibliographies, see the collection Oxford Bibliographies Online:

A handbook is similar to a bibliography in that its main concern is the presentation of sources. Handbooks tend to comprise essays that will guide you through the literature on a subject; many of these essays are historiographical.

There is a digital collection of Oxford handbooks. We don't have access to all the handbooks on the collection, but you can still search the entire collection and discover articles from volumes for which we own the print version:

If we do not have online access to a chapter you wish to read, check the Library Catalog to see if we own the book in print. If we do not have a print copy, you can request the chapter through interlibrary loan: