LibGuides: History of the American West: Guide Summary

Find Subject Specialist Librarians

History Librarian: Celestina Savonius-Wroth.
- History, Philosophy, and Newspaper Library Collections and Services Specialist: Geoffrey Ross.
American Indian Studies Librarian: Cindy Ingold.
Map Librarian: Jenny Johnson.
Visual Resources Librarian: Sarah Christensen.
Environmental Sciences Librarian: Michael Dickinson.
Government Documents Librarian: Sanga Sung.

To find journal articles, we recommend beginning with America: History and Life:

America: History and Life The main article database for researching American history. Use to find journal articles, book reviews, and dissertations on all periods of North American history. Includes some links to full text. Complements Historical Abstracts. Indexes publications from 1964-present.

To find books, we recommend beginning with the Library Catalog:

University of Illinois Library Catalog Use the Library Catalog to identify books, journals (but not journal articles), microform collections, and digital collections owned by the University of Illinois. The Library Catalog is the primary tool for exploring the collections of the University of Illinois Library, the second largest academic library collection in the United States. In the Library Catalog you can search for books by subject, and you can identify the location within the Library of a particular book. If the book is an ebook, then you can link directly to the ebook.
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Books and journals are organized in the library by subject. Each item is assigned one or more subject headings and a unique call number. Subject headings are standardized terms from the Library of Congress. The call number is based on the Dewey Decimal Classification or Library of Congress Classification. Boolean operators must be capitalized if used: AND, OR, NOT. Interface automatically truncates some search terms unless Boolean operators are used within the same query line. You can also browse catalog records by call number, creating a "virtual shelf browsing" experience.

A good place to find digitized primary sources is on our Guide to Digital Collections for Historical Research:

Guide to Digital Collections (History, Philosophy, and Newspaper Library) Guide to digitized primary source collections, for the most part collections that are owned or licensed by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library. Organized by broad discipline (History, Philosophy, Religious Studies, and African American Studies). History is subdivided by region and time period.

The Library also has several special collections units relevant to research on this topic: