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History Course Guides: History 465, Latin American Visual History

Course Guides Used for Library Instruction in History Research

Latin American Visual Culture

History Research, Library Resources (Spring 2024)
Chloe Pascual, History Librarian, Chloe.Pascual@csulb.edu
  

University Library PAGE Is the place to start. It contains an overview of library research services available.

FINDING PRIMARY CONTENT IN  BOOKS

To find CSULB Books, use OneSearch Advanced Search 

Search for pioneers, politicians and historians as an AUTHOR or SUBJECT or KEYWORD ANYWHERE. Then sort or limit your results by date to locate items published at the same time as the historical event or written during the person's life. These items MAY be primary. 

Search Tips

  • If you are looking for a phrase "slavery in the american south" put  your terms in "quotation marks". It will force word  adjacency.
  • If you want word variants, use an asterisk * at the end of a word. Entering histor* will produce history, histories, historians, historiography, historical, etc.

To get results with higher relevancy to you topic, use subject keyword searches. These may produce results with higher relevancy to your search.

These subject keywords will tend to find content  with emphasis on material culture, visuals

architect*    art*    film*    cinema    motion picture*    painting*     sculpture*    clothing    costum*     dress    performing arts    pictorial    photograph* 

Combine one of these terms above with a country or geographical region of Latin America:

Example: Clothing and Peru    or    Clothing and Inca*

If you want to find more results on any of your topics, check the box that reads Books & Media (all CSU) and you will find many more relevant items loanable from other CSU's. 

Book and Journal Loaning Options from other libraries

  • CSU+ To rapidly get books that we don't have,  (within 2-4 days) from other libraries.
  • BEACH REACH To rapidly get journal articles and some books we don’t have, from other libraries.

These 2 services described here 

  • WORLDCAT Enormous "worldwide catalog" of books cataloged in libraries Worldwide. Comprehensive resource for identifying and locating obscure topics and titles.

Research Databases

To find articles in many of our databases, look for the SFX icon in each citation. It may look like this  get it at csulb It’s a shortcut to finding the article online.

Academic Search Complete  Accesses nearly 6000 full text interdisciplinary journals. Coverage: 1990 to date.

America History & Life (for U.S. History) and  Historical Abstracts (for World History).  These are the two premier scholarly periodical indexes for historical content published since the mid 1950s.  Both databases may be searched simultaneously. See this example..

ARTstor  is a digital library of more than one million images in the arts, architecture, humanities, and social sciences. Content ranges from prehistoric times to the present.

Dissertations and Theses  Provides full text access to thousands of PhD dissertations back to the 1960s

Essay and General Literature Index Retrospective, 1900-1984  Identifies articles within books and selected serials. Covers a wide array of subjects: classics, history, folklore, political science, religion and other topics.

Getty Images. Contains thousands of journalistic and artistic images that can be viewed for free. Great for primary visual sources

Handbook of Latin American History Online. Produced by the Library of Congress, contains links (no full text) to scholarly journal articles and books, and book chapters..

Hispanic American Newspapers, 1808-1980. Full text historic newspapers in Spanish and a few in English.  

Historical Los Angeles Times, 1881-1991 Complete full text online coverage of every article, ad, comic, classified, editorial, photograph.

Historical New York Times, 1851-2007  Complete full text online coverage of the NYT.

Humanities and Social Sciences Index Retrospective 1907-1983 Covers 1200 scholarly journals. Use it for finding coverage of worldwide events in the 20th Century.

JSTOR Journal Archive  An archive of core scholarly full text journals going back to the 1800s. Contains selected journals in the social sciences and humanities.

LatAm-Studies; Estudios Latinamericanos Wide array of scholarly social science and humanites topics from 46 Latin American countries. 

Latino American Experience. Online research, articles and journals regarding Latin America.

Project Muse Contains over 200 full text, scholarly, frequently used journals in the humanities and social sciences journals from the 1960s to date.

Readers’ Guide Retrospective, 1890-1983. Covers popular magazines from 1890-1983. Good for finding popular coverage of historic events in the 20th Cent.

FINDING ARCHIVES, RARE MATERIAL

ArchivesGrid includes over 4 million records describing archival materials, historical documents, personal papers, family histories, from over 1000 different archives. 

Citing Historical Materials

Google tips and techniques

  • To search for phrases, put your topic in quotation marks 

Example nation of Georgia 

  • The asterisk* (truncation) does not work in GOOGLE.  To get word variants you must use capitalized OR. See below.
  • To search for synonyms capitalize OR between each word and enclose in parenthesis 

Example  (maps OR cartography OR charts OR atlases) 

  • Combine to get both concepts in a single search

Example  nation of Georgia” and (maps OR cartography OR charts OR atlases) 

  • To get primary documents, try these techniques 

Example  (“primary documents" OR "primary sources”) and “world war”

Example  “civil rights” and south and (documents OR sources)

Note: No need to put quotation marks around single word terms, only for phrases.

  • to find sites at types of domains:

site:edu (to find sites located at colleges, universities)

site:org (to find sites at nonprofit organizations)

site:gov (to find government sites, government documents)

site:ru (stands for Russia. Use two letter country codes for domains in a country. 

Example: (documents OR texts) and "great war" and site:ru

  • Use Google Scholar to find wide array of scholarly journal articles.
  • Use Google Books to find research snippets in scanned books. If the book reads PREVIEW you are in luck! You may be able to read entire chapters.
  • Use Google News Archive to find original newspaper articles across the nation.