History Course Guides: History 499 Los Cerritos Rancho

 

FOR ADDITIONAL CSULB OPTIONS

• Long Beach and Local History Research Guide
• Long Beach and Local Newspapers (available in m'film, print and online at CSULB
• Historic U.S. Government Documents (print, microfilm and online at CSULB)

SEARCH TIPS

• By placing an asterisk* at the end of a search word, you will catch all word variants. So if you type in word*, it will find all subject headings using the terms: word or words or wordiness or wordy or wordsmith, etc. (Don't use the asterisk in a google search. It does not work)
• If you want to force word adjacency or find a phrase, such as "los cerritos ranch";  "bixby land company" but your words in quotation marks as shown. 
• If you want synonyms in a search, use OR. The OR should be capitalized. ("rancho los cerritos" OR "rancho los alamitos* OR "rancho los nietos")

FINDING HISTORY BOOKS (print and online)

• Use OneSearch Book Search to find books and we have on "Rancho Los Cerritos" OR "Rancho Los Alamitos".
• If you want higher relevancy in your results, try a OneSearch Subject Keyword Search for terms within a subject (or descriptor) heading, and will result in more highly relevant books.
• Try some of these subject keyword combinations in different databases, as well as OneSearch. 

• For finding primary materials, use some of these subject keywords below with another topic of interest:

sources      personal narrative*     interview*      diaries      oral histor*       biograph*     correspondence      papers      letters

• Using any of the above techniques, also conduct the exact same search using CSU+ to find even more materials at nearby CSU libraries. See how to borrow from another library.
• Use WORLDCAT for hard to find books and archival material around the world. It identifies over 100 million titles. 

KEY DATABASES TO USE (ONLINE AND PRINT)

Academic Search Complete Comprehensive interdisciplinary access to nearly 3000 scholarly journals. 

America History and Life U.S & Canadian History. Scholarly research last 60 years.

American Periodical Series Online 1700-1940 

America's Historical Newspapers Online 1680-1870 

California Digital Newspaper Collection 1850s to date. Full text California newspapers up to the 1920s, some later.

California Newspaper Archive 1800s to date. Covers some Long Beach and Southern California newspapers up to the 1970s

Daily 49er CSULB newspaper back to1949. May have local stories.

Dissertations and Theses Full text access.

Hispanic American Newspapers 1800-1980.

Historical Los Angeles Times 1881-1993

Internet Archive 1800s to date. Conduct a "text search" to find thousands of historic full text publications.

JSTOR (Full text online archive to hundreds of scholarly journals dating back to the 1800s.

19th Century US Newspapers Digital Archive 1800-1900

NEWSBANK Includes Long Beach Press Telegram after 1990 and other Southern California publications.

VOAHA: Virtual Oral/Aural History Archive. Local oral history interviews. Listen carefully. Summaries available but no transcripts.

CSULB SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

• Has access to Bixby Family Papers

NON-CSULB WEBSITES FOR RANCHO RESEARCH

 

• Use ArchiveGrid will find archival repositories around the U.S.
• Long Beach Public Library History Page Includes an index to old newspaper articles in print or microfilm, and  online photography collection. Also see their Special Collections for local historical documents.
• California Index at LA Public Library Covers local, sometimes obscure articles
• Historical Society of Long Beach
• Rancho Los Cerritos Historical Site
• Rancho Los Alamitos Historical Site
• UCLA Library Digital Archive includes "Changing Times: Los Angeles in Photographs, 1920-1990"

 

GOOGLE TIPS​

Search only within certain Internet domains:

site:edu (for U.S. academic sites)

site:gov (for government sites, city, county, state, federal)

site:org (for nonprofit organizations, museums, institutes)

site:int (for international organizations such as UN

 

See thie pre-formatted Google Scholar Search to find a range of interdisciplinary scholarly journals. You may be able to open many of these articles if searching on our campus (since it knows our IP address and what we subscribe to.)

 

Use Google Books to identify a wide array of books that might exist on your topic. You can then check our OneSearch service to see if we own it, or if it can be borrowed quickly.

 

• See these google books results for the EARLIEST items mentioning "Cerritos Ranch".
• There is a subset of newspapers in Google Books. Note sub-menu options selected below search box. These newspaper results relate to "Rancho Los Cerritos OR Cerritos Ranch OR Rancho Los Alamitos OR "Alamitos Ranch" OR  Jotham Bixby".