HIST 101: Early America, before 1877

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As a Berkeley student you are eligible to use books and articles from other libraries around the United States. 

Check OskiCat  to make sure UC Berkeley does not own the material you want.

Provide a full and accurate bibliographic citation, including author, title, place and date of publication, and series.  You can get citations from professors, from Melvyl, from other articles, from Google scholar.  Verify your citations before submitting them for ILL.

• The full story on interlibrary borrowing

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Your instructor wants you to use scholarly [or 'peer reviewed'] sources.  What does she mean?

• Authoritative- written by a recognized expert in the field.  How do you know?  The PhD is one sign; employment by a university is another.
• Peer reviewed- before publishing, the article was vetted by other scholars in the field. How do you know? Try searching the journal title in Google and read the publisher's blurb.
• Audience- written for scholars and experts in the field. How do you know?  The level of the language is usually a give away.  It will be technical and formal.
• Includes a bibliography and/or footnotes with citations of sources used.

Scholarship is always changing. Try to find the most recent scholarly sources you can.

Other features of the 'best' research

• Has been cited by other scholars.  This can take time, so the newest articles might not be heavily cited yet.  How do you know?  Try searching the article citation in Google Scholar, which indicates the number of citations in Google Scholar [not comprehensive however]
• Proves the point with sufficient evidence, rather than opinion statements.

Want to know more? Here's our tutorial on scholarly sources.

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Primary sources can be found in a variety of library tools:

• Catalogs:  OskiCat and Melvyl
• Online book and text collections
• Primary Source databases provided by the Library
• Vetted sites on the web:
  
  • Library of Congress
  • Online Archive of California
  • History Matters
  • Internet History Sourcebooks project
    • Travellers' Accounts

For specific search strategies, see the Library's Guide to Finding Historical Primary Sources

Newspapers are among the best sources for historians.  How do you find out which ones Berkeley has?

• Search Oskicat by city.  Ex: newspapers san francisco
• Limit the search to Newspapers & Microfilm collection
• Sort by date
• 1 minute video demo

What about other local libraries-- what newspapers do they have?

• Use Melvyl for searching other UC campuses
• Use Worldcat for searching beyond UC.
• Remember, borrowing microfilm from other libraries takes several weeks!

Newspaper Databases:

• Archive of Americana has a couple of newspapers from 1802 on.  Full text & searchable
• Accessible Archives has several digitized newspapers from the pre-1877 period
• California Digital Newspaper Collection Daily Alta California, 1849-1891 and the Sacramento Daily Union, 1859-1890; Full text browsable and searchable database
• Historical Newspapers [Proquest]
  • Use this link to see the newspapers available for browsing

Because of their fragility as they age, newspapers have traditionally been preserved by microfilming them.

Microfilm must be read on microfilm reader/printers.  The Newspaper and Microfilm Room in 40 Doe Library has them.  So does Bancroft Library. Newspaper films are arranged geographically within the News|Micro collection [floorplan.pdf]

Reader/printers allow you to read the films and those in News|Micro allow you to save pages to flash drives in .jpg and .pdf format.

Most newspapers do not have indexes.  How do you find articles by subject? By knowing the approximate date of the event you are studying.  If you don't know the date, you can use the index to a different newspaper as a way to find out.

Newspaper indexes you might want to use:

• Black Literature 1827-1940
• San Francisco Chronicle
• Daily Californian

There are others.  Ask the Newspaper Microfilm staff for help.

Early American Imprints is a major digital collection of American publications, 1639-1800.  You can search by subject words, or browse by genre, subject, author, place of publication, or language.

American State Papers A collection of more than 6,000 government publications including congressional and Executive Department materials. These papers cover the following broad subject areas: foreign relations, Indian affairs, commerce and navigation, military and naval affairs, the post-office department, and more.

American Periodical Series Online Contains digitized images of more than 1,100 periodicals. Includes special interest and general magazines, literary and professional journals, children's and women's magazines and many other historically significant magazines.

Harper's Weekly [aka Harpweek] Full-image reproductions of Harper's Weekly from its beginning in 1857 to 1912. Provides access to information about 19th and early 20th century advertising, illustrations, culture, history, literature, and notable figures.

Historical Annual Reports [of US businesses]

Of course, the library itself is full of pre-1877 US publications that you can find in Oskicat.

• Oakland Public Library's Local History collection
• San Francisco Library history collection- printed materials
• San Francisco Library history collection- manuscript materials
• Online Archive of California- on online directory of archives in California, with some digital content, but mostly archival finding aids

In order to avoid plagiarism, you must give credit when

• You use another person's ideas, opinions, or theories.
• You use facts, statistics, graphics, drawings, music, etc., or any other type of information that does not comprise common knowledge.
• You use quotations from another person's spoken or written word.
• You paraphrase another person's spoken or written word.

Recommendations

• Begin the writing process by stating your ideas; then go back to the author's original work.
• Use quotation marks and credit the source (author) when you copy exact wording.
• Use your own words (paraphrase) instead of copying directly when possible.
• Even when you paraphrase another author's writings, you must give credit to that author.
• If the form of citation and reference are not correct, the attribution to the original author is likely to be incomplete. Therefore, improper use of style can result in plagiarism. Get a style manual and use it.
• The figure below may help to guide your decisions.
  
  

This content is part of the Understanding Plagiarism tutorial created by the Indiana University School of Education.

If you've never used Zotero before, use the QuickStart Guide to get started.

Change your preferences if you want  Zotero to

• set your default citation style
• search the full text of pdfs you save
• Automatically attach associated PDFs and other files when saving items

To use Zotero to find specific articles in our library's databases, set up the Open URL resolver with this link: http://ucelinks.cdlib.org:8888/sfx_local? 

An in-depth discussion of the relative virtues of Endnote and Zotero,

Here's a citation for an article...how do you find the whole article?

Gaultney, J. F. (2010). The Prevalence of Sleep Disorders in College Students: Impact on Academic Performance. Journal of American College Health, 59(2), 91-97. 

This citation is for an article published in 2010 in the Journal of American College Health, a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal. There are several ways of determining if the article you're looking for is available at Berkeley:

Option 1: Use Google Scholar to locate a citation for the article, and UC-eLinks to retrieve the full text.

Paste or type the citation into Google and pull down the Google Scholar tool. Here's how:

Remember to set up off-campus access if you're off-campus. Here's what to do if you don't see UC-eLinks in your search results.

Note: Google Scholar does not cover all publishers, and many journals indexed by Google Scholar have partial coverage only (some years/volumes missing). Also, not all articles found through Google Scholar will be available online. If you can't find the full text of your article this way, read on for more options!

Option 2: Look up the journal title in OskiCat or Melvyl.

You can also search for the title of the journal (NOT the article title!) in either OskiCat or Melvyl.  They will tell you:

• if we subscribe to the journal you're looking for
• which years we have
• whether our subscription is print ("hard-copy") or online
• what the call number is (for print journals)
• where to find the journal online (for online journals)
• what's the latest print issue we've received (OskiCat only)

Click this link for a 45-second demo.

"I'm writing a paper on World War II." 

Often students start their research with a very general topic, even though they may realize the topic is too large to deal with in a 10-15 page paper.  Faculty and librarians tell them, "You have to narrow this down."  But how do you narrow a topic?

Ask yourself--

• What discipline am I working in?  If you are in a sociology class, ask a sociological question about World War II, like "How did WWII affect women?"  If it's a political science class, your question might be something like "How did WWII affect presidential elections in the US?"

• What are some subsets or aspects of your topic.  Some good aspects are:
  • by place, such as a country or region
  • by time period, such as a century, decade or year 
  • by population, such as men, women, ethnic group, youth, children or elderly

You can combine these ideas, "What were the major impacts of WWII on women in France, in the decade after the war?"

More ideas in our brief tutorial on topic selection and narrowing. 

• Reading, Writing, and Researching for History: A Guide for College Students
  A comprehensive but easy-to-skim web guide to writing history papers. Recommended by History Dept faculty.

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You can type your question directly into this chat window to chat with a librarian. Your question may be answered by a reference librarian from Berkeley, from another UC campus, or another academic library elsewhere in the US.  We share information about our libraries to make sure you get good answers.

If the librarian can't answer you well enough, your question will be referred to a Berkeley librarian for follow-up.

Have fun chatting!

Research Advisory Service for Cal Undergraduates

Book a 30-minute appointment with a librarian who will help refine and focus research inquiries, identify useful online and print sources, and develop search strategies for humanities and social sciences topics (examples of research topics).

Schedule, view, edit or cancel your appointment online (CalNetID required)

This service is for Cal undergraduates only. Graduate students and faculty should contact the library liaison to their department or program for specialized reference consultations.

Finding a citation in a bibliography (online or in print) is a great way to find more resources on your topic.

However, you have to be able to read the citation in order to find the item in the UCB Library.

The most common citations are for books, articles, and book chapters. Can you tell which citation below is for a book?  For a chapter?  For an article?

• Orbe, Mark P. "Representations of Race in Reality TV: Watch and Discuss." Critical Studies in Media Communication 25.4 (2008): 345-352.

• Winters, Loretta I., and Herman L. DeBose. New Faces in a Changing America: Multiracial Identity in the 21st Century. Thousand Oaks:  Sage Publications Inc., 2003.

• Fine, Michelle, and Adrienne Asch. “Disability Beyond Stigma: Social Interaction, Discrimination, and Activism.”  The Culture and Psychology reader. Eds. Goldberger, Nancy Rule; Veroff, Jody Bennet  New York:  New York University Press. 1995. 536-558

Unsure how to start a paper or research project? Think maybe you could stand to brush up on search strategies?

If this sounds familiar, Library Workshop: Research 101 has you covered. This interactive tutorial explores six stages of the research process. You can view it from start to finish, or focus on specific sections as needed:

1: Begin Your Research

Starting strategies, from choosing a topic to finding the right keywords.

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