Databases for Legal History
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America: History and Life
Indexes over 2,000 journals published worldwide on the history of the US and Canada from prehistory to the present. Includes all key English-language historical journals; selected historical journals from major countries, state, and local history journals; and a targeted selection of hundreds of journals in the social sciences and humanities.
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Historical Abstracts
Indexes over 2,000 journals, as well as historical book reviews and dissertations, published worldwide about all aspects of world history (excluding US and Canada) from 1450 to the present. Articles covered were written from 1954 to the present
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Making of Modern Law: Legal Treatises, 1800-1926
A collection of 19th and 20th century legal treatises, casebooks, local practice manuals, form books, pamphlets, letters, speeches, and other historical legal works, covering a wide range of topics of US and British law. Includes approximately 10 million pages and over 21,000 works.
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Index to Legal Periodicals and Books/Index to Legal Periodicals Retrospective
Index to Legal Periodicals and Books (1981 - present) indexes approximately 1000 legal journals, yearbooks, institutes, bar association journals, university publications and law reviews, and government publications from the United States, Puerto Rico, Great Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Also indexes some 1,400 monographs per year. Index to Legal Periodicals Retrospective (1918-1981) indexes over 500 legal periodicals back to 1918.
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Hein Online
Provides full text to the early issues of many legal journals and law reviews, the Federal Register (1936-six months ago), US Supreme Court Library (1754-present) and treaties and agreements.
Where's the PDF?
Many article databases contain information about articles (citations or abstracts), not the entire text of the article. Once you've used an article database to find articles on your topic, you may need to use this button:
in order to locate and read the full text of the article. The UC-eLinks button appears in nearly all the databases available from the UCB Library website.
UC-eLinks will link you to the online full text of an article if UCB has paid for online access; otherwise, UC-eLinks will help you locate a print copy on the shelf in the library. If UCB doesn't own the article in print or online format, UC-eLinks can also help you order a copy from another library.
For more information, watch this video tutorial (about 4 min.)
You can also set up UC-eLinks to work with Google Scholar. For more information, watch this video tutorial (about 2 min.)
18th & 19th Century Journals
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C19: The Nineteenth Century Index
Comprehensive coverage of nineteenth-century books, periodicals, official documents, newspapers and archives. C19 Index draws on the Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue, The Wellesley Index, Poole's Index and Periodicals Index Online to create integrated bibliographic coverage of over 1.4 million books and official publications, 64,891 archival collections and 15.6 million articles published in over 2,500 journals, magazines and newspapers.
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Making of America (Cornell University)
Access to 267 monograph volumes and over 100,000 journal articles from 22 journals with 19th century imprints. The collection is particularly strong in the areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. Making of America is a collaboration between the libraries of Cornell University and the University of Michigan to document American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction by drawing upon the primary materials at these two institutions. The Michigan site is available at: http://www.hti.umich.edu/m/moagrp/
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Making of America (University of Michigan)
Access to 9,500 books and almost 2500 digitized issues of 12 journals published in the 19th century. The collection is particularly strong in the areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. Making of America is a collaboration between the libraries of Cornell University and the University of Michigan to document American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction by drawing upon unique primary materials held at each institution. The Cornell site is available at: http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/index.html
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Periodicals Archive Online (formerly PCI Full Text)
An online periodical archive that provides access to some 475 digitized journals in the humanities and social sciences. A sister database, Periodicals Index Online, provides additional indexing for articles in over 4,700 periodicals.
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Periodicals Index Online (formerly PCI)
Indexes millions of articles published in over 4,700 periodicals in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. A sister database, Periodicals Archive Online, provides a full-text archive of some 475 journals published between 1802 and 1995.
General Article Databases
Now that you know the types of articles you need, you can choose a database, also known as a periodical index, to find them. Databases are collections of thousands of articles organized by subject. The Libraries have hundreds of databases covering every academic discipline. Some are multi-disciplinary, covering a broad range of subjects and including popular and scholarly sources, and others are subject-specific, and include scholarly and specialized articles. A complete list is available at Find Articles.
The following multi-disciplinary databases are good places to start your research:
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Academic Search Complete
A multidisciplinary index to articles in more than 10,900 journals and other publications in English, Spanish, German, French, Italian and Portuguese; full-text is available for over 5300 journals.
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Google Scholar
Lists journal articles, books, preprints, and technical reports in many subject areas (though more specialized article databases may cover any given field more completely). Some listings include links to related articles and to other sources that cite the item. Includes content from free resources (such as ArXiv.org and university websites) as well as subscription resources (such as electronic journals from selected publishers). Use the UC-eLinks option, when available, to find the UCB access to a publication.
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JSTOR
Includes over 1000 scholarly journals with access to more than 2 million articles. JSTOR is an archive which means that current issues (generally the most recent 3-5 years) of the journals are not yet available.

