For more research options, go to United States History Research Guide
FINDING OLDEST BOOKS ON A TOPIC
We have the OneSearch inventory of books and other materials. You can use it find books chronologically, or you can limit your publication dates to particular years to find materials occurring at the time of your historical event. See this graphic on how to find items concurrent with your historical event
SUBJECT SEARCH TERMS
Certain words, if searched as subjects, are very productive. Try some of these words in conjunction with a secondary topic:
America Discovery and Exploration
Indians of North America-First Contact
Indians of North America-Colonial Period
United States, History, Revolution 1775
Indians of North America, Wars 1750
These subject terms tend to bring up original, primary accounts.
sources personal narratives interview* letters correspondence
diaries oral history biograph* facsimiles pictorial
RESOURCES BEYOND CSULB AND CSU+
WORLDCAT for hard to find books and archival material around the world. It identifies over 100 million titles.
ARCHIVESGRID will find archival repositories around the U.S.
KEY DATABASES (note red date ranges for primary content)
Academic Search Complete Comprehensive interdisciplinary access to nearly 3000 scholarly journals.
American Periodicals 1700-1940 Full text online scholarly and popular articles.
America’s Historical Imprints 1600-1900 Contains full text pamphlets, broadsides, advertisments.
America’s Historical Newspapers, 1690-1876 Searchable, cover-to-cover reproductions from more than 650 historical American newspapers. Northern and “Old Northwest” papers are covered up until 1876. Southern newspaper coverage stops by the 1820s. Also see this link for library holdings of early papers in the library
American Antiquarian Society, Historical Periodicals 1684-1912
American Journeys: Eyewitness Accounts of Early American Exploration and Settlement Up to 1844
Archive of Early American Images (1492-1825) John Carter Brown Library, Brown University
ArtStor historical archive of photographs, images, artwork, pictures, paintings from ancient times to the present.
Colonial America 1606 - 1822 Original documents from British Archives relating to North America.
Dissertations and Theses (Full text access to book length PhD writings. Good for original research.)
Early English Books Online 1437 - 1700 Full text collection of nearly 100,000 early English books: a pivotal period in British colonization of North America
Eighteenth Century Collections Online 1700-1800. Full text books, pamphlets, broadsides.
Eighteenth Century Journals, 1685-1835
European Views of the Americas 1492-1750. 32,000 entries and is a comprehensive guide to printed records about the Americas written in Europe before 1750.
Handbook of Latin American Studies Online is a scholarly multidisciplinary bibliography of Latin American studies covering the social sciences and humanities. Articles date back to 1936.
Historical Abstracts (For scholarly articles on World History published since the 1950s) and America History and Life (for U.S & Canadian History).
Historical Hartford Courant, 1764-1992. Full text newspaper.
Historical New York Times, 1851-2010 (Full text content to newspaper).
JSTOR (Full text online archive to hundreds of scholarly journals dating back to the 1800s.)
Retrospective Indexes, three databases:
1) Humanities & Social Sciences 1890-1983 (for scholarly articles)
2) Readers Guide, 1900-1983 (for popular magazine articles)
3) Essay and General Literature Index 1900-1983 (for scholarly chapters in edited works, books, anthologies).
Slavery and Antislavery: A Transnational Archive 1600-1900. Original documents, books, testimonies, court records.
Times of London, 1785-2010. (Excluding Sunday Times.) Full text
Transatlantic Slave Trade Database Voyages 1600-1850 Primary research material, documents, texts, narratives on slave trade.
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Newspaper Collection (Burney) 1600-1800. Full text British newspapers and pamphlets.
HISTORIC U.S. GOVERNMENT DOCUMENTS, PRINT, MICROFILM, ONLINE AT CSULB
GOOGLE TIPS
site:edu (for U.S. academic sites)
site:gov (for government sites
site:org (for nonprofit organizations, museums, institutes)
site:int (for international organizations such as UN
Use Google Books to identify a wide array of books that might exist on your topic. You can then check our OneSearch to see if we have it, or it is loanable from CSU+
See these google books search results for the EARLIEST Denmark Vesey title
See these google book results for (slave OR slavery OR servile) (insurrection OR uprising OR revolt) (Carolinas OR "South Carolina")
