Library of Congress Classification

Online Catalog

Materials in Reference Collection

Indexes and Databases

Internet Resources

Introduction

History is the study of the human past and encompasses a vast diversity of academic fields and interests. More specifically, history studies the events of the past, how they were caused and how they influenced later events.

Historical resources are generally broken down into two categories:.

Primary sources are those from individuals who witnessed the event firsthand. The diary of a British officer fighting in the trenches during World War I would be an example of a primary source. Primary sources are good for giving one a detailed examination of an event that occurred in the past. Looking up older newspaper and magazine articles is an excellent way to understand an episode of our past and how it affected those living during that episode.

Secondary sources are those from individuals who did not witness the event and include most of the history materials published. Secondary sources, with the benefit of hindsight, are good at giving historical overviews, analyzing events and linking these events to previous and later episodes in history.

Because history is written by historians with biases, care must be taken to conduct one’s research as thoroughly as possible to achieve a balanced understanding of the subject.

This research guide focuses on World History. Research guides on biography, American history and Native American history also exist.

Library Of Congress Classification

Library materials are organized by a system created by the Library of Congress that groups materials based on what they are about. This LC system uses letters and numbers to determine the call number of a book, which serves as that book’s address within the collection. The advantage of this system is that books about the same subject, say the French Revolution, should be in the same area. Find a good book on your subject and you should be able to find others in the same area.

The Library of Congress system places most books on world history in Classes C and D. Additional materials may be found in Class F. These classes are further broken down into subclasses that define more specific subjects. Some important subclasses for world history study are listed below. Click here for a more complete look at Library of Congress Class C and Class D and Class F

Online Catalog

Specific books and other library materials can be found by searching the Online Catalog. This is a catalog that not only lists the collection of the Rockhurst University Greenlease Library, but can also be used to see the collections of the other MOBIUS libraries. For more information about the MOBIUS consortium, visit their website at https://mco.mobius.umsystem.edu/.

One can search by title, author, subject and keyword to find books owned by the library. Good first searches are subject keyword and title keyword searches. A good research strategy is called subject heading tracing. This strategy involves first doing a keyword search to find books relevant to a topic. Once a ‘good’ book is found, look at its subject headings. Then do a subject search and type in that subject heading. You should find other books on your topic this way.

Materials In Reference Collection

The library’s reference collection contains materials that are quite useful to students studying world history. These reference items include:

Chronology of World History
Ref. D 11 M39 1999

Dictionary of Concepts in History
Ref. D 13 .R49 1986

Dictionary of the Middle Ages
Ref. D 114 D5

Encyclopedia of African History 
Ref. DT 20 E53 2005
Contains some short essays in addition to longer articles that analyze broad topics such as regional general surveys ,

historigraphical essays and wide historical themes such as the African Diaspora, African political systems and Africa in world history.  Includes 100 maps and 1,100 articles from 330 authors.

Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World: Europe 1450-1789
Ref. D 209 E97 2004
The six volumes of this comprehensive set place Europe in the context of the rest of the world including art, exploration, biographical entries and customs along with economics and politics.  Many black and white as well as color illustrations,

Encyclopedia of the Renaissance
Ref. CB 361 B43

Encyclopedia of Russian History
Ref. DK 14 E53 2004
1500 articles cover 1000 years of Russian history, providing information on customs, politics, economics, art, literature, geography, military history, religion, science and notable biographies.  Academic specialists have produced articles covering history from the Kievan Rus’ through the reign of the tsars and Soviet republic to the post Soviet period.  Bibliography follows each article.

Facts on File
Ref. D 410 F3

Great Events from History, Ancient and Medieval Series
Ref. D 21 M344)

Great Events from History, Modern European Series
Ref. D 209 M29

Great Events from History, Worldwide 20^th Century Series
Ref. D 421 G7

Historian’s Handbook
Ref. Z 6201 P65

Historical Dictionary of the Renaissance
Ref. CB 361 N35 2004
This dictionary covers transalpine Europe from 1350 to the early 1600’s with entries on literature, education, music, art, politics and philosophy.

Historical Tables
Ref. D 11 S83

Larousse Dictionary of World History
Ref. D 9 L33

Middle East
Ref. DS 63.1 M484 2000
The ninth edition concentrates on current events in this region, placing them into a historical context.  Chapters on each country, sketches of leaders, chronology of events 1945-1999, bibliography and index.

New Penguin Atlas of Ancient History
Ref. G 1033 M17 2002
Spanning the time period of 40,000 BC to 362 AD, this compact chronological study covers literacy, towns and trade routes, population and early Christendom, including the cultures of the Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Indians, Greeks, Celts, Romans and many other peoples.

New Penguin Atlas of Recent History
Ref. G 1035 M3 2002
The text of this updated edition includes over 50 color maps to cover major events in Europe beginning in 1848 and moving on through the Franco-Prussian War, the First World War, the Second World War and the post-war era up until 2000.

Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt
(Ref. DT 58 O94 2001)

Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures
Ref. F1218.6 O95 2001

Penguin Atlas of World History
Ref. G 1030 K5525 2003
Chronology from prehistory to the present day summarizing the main cultural, scientific, religious, economic and political events of each period accompanied by detailed maps.

Penguin Historical Atlas of Ancient Egypt
Ref. G 2491 S2 M3 1996
A one volume handbook containing brief chronological articles accompanied by maps and color illustrations of art and architecture, this atlas mainly details the political and economic development of Egypt from 5000 to 305 BC.

Times Atlas of World History
Ref. G 1030 T54

Indexes And Databases

Indexes and databases are tools used to find journal articles about a particular topic. Indexes and databases can be useful in finding both secondary and primary historical research sources. For example, older newspaper indexes are extremely useful to find contemporary viewpoints during a particular past event. Some are available only in print, while others will be electronic and may even contain the full-text of the article. See our Electronic Resources page for a complete list of electronic indexes and databases.

Bibliographic Index, 1937-1983
(INDEX AREA Z 1002 B595)
A bibliography is a list of sources on a particular topic. Thus, this index is quite useful for finding sources to use for research.

Humanities Index, 1974- 2004
(INDEX AREA AI 3 R492)
This index covers many subjects in the area of the humanities.

New York Times Index, 1939-
(INDEX AREA AI 21 N44)
This is the most useful index for researching older newspaper articles. This publication is also available online through Lexis-Nexis Academic.

Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature, 1802-2007
(INDEX AREA AI 3 R48)
With coverage back to the beginning of the 19^th century, this is a great resource for finding contemporary viewpoints and reactions to past events.

Historical Abstracts
Citations and abstracts to scholarly journal articles covering history 1450 to the present, but excluding the US and Canada. Citations to books and dissertations. Covers approximately 1800 journals in over 50 languages. This database is updated monthly and coverage is from 1965 to the present.

Humanities E-Book Project
The American Council of Learned Societies provides this database which is the full-text of both in-print and out-of-print important books in the humanities, including the field of history. Due to copyright restrictions, the full-text cannot be printed or downloaded from the database. Some of the titles are available for purchase directly from the publishers through the database.

In the First Person
An index to diaries, letters, oral histories and personal narratives covering many subjects, all in the English language. The sources are repositories and collections which are available free on the web. Source formats include text, audio and video files.

Lexis-Nexis Primary Sources in History
This database offers full-text and images of primary sources in African American Studies, Presidential Studies and American Women's Studies. Document types include manuscripts, autobiographies, contemporary accounts, government documents, photographs and images, case law, chronologies, speeches and statutes. Secondary source materials include encyclopedic references and scholarly articles. Searches can be done by subject term or keywords, or each collection can be browsed by document type. More information about the product can be found on the Lexis Nexis website.

For information on how to cite sources retrieved from Lexis-Nexis Primary Sources in History, go to Citing Print and Electronic Sources in Research Papers.

JSTOR
This is an electronic archive of scholarly journals in a variety of disciplines, which have been digitally reproduced to provide access to the backfile of each title. Some titles go back to the 19^th century. JSTOR will not include the last 2-5 years of the journals.

Lexis-Nexis Academic
This database offers full-text of a variety of sources in business, law, government and other related disciplines.

A user's guide for this database is available in PDF format via Adobe Acrobat.

For information on how to cite sources retrieved from Lexis-Nexis Academic, go to Citing Print and Electronic Sources in Research Papers.

NewsBank
This databases provides the full text of the Kansas City Star (1991-present) and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (1988-present), as well as over 500 additional newspapers in the United States and over 700 newspapers from around the world.

EBSCOhost
This is a online service that includes several databases that offer full text articles from scholarly and popular periodicals in many subject areas. Academic Search Premier and MasterFILE Premier are the largest databases within EBSCOhost that identify articles from the social sciences, humanities, general science and more.

FirstSearch (password protected)
FirstSearch is actually a cluster of approximately 40 databases and requires a training session to access. But the training session is well worth it! Some of the databases useful to researchers of history include:

Clase and Periodica
News Abstracts (a newspaper index)
Periodical Abstracts (a general topic index

Internet Resources

EuroDocs: Primary Historical Documents from Western Europe
http://eudocs.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Main_Page
This site offers the text to numerous European historical documents arranged by region and historical period.

History Net
http://www.thehistorynet.com/
A vast collection of articles on all aspects of history.

World History Archives
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/index.html
A collection of resources to support the study and teaching of world history and history in general.

Internet Ancient History Sourcebook
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/asbook.html
Covers ancient Greece and the Hellenic world, Rome and the Near East. Includes numerous full-text primary and secondary documents.

Internet Medieval Sourcebook
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/sbook.html
This vast resource claims to be one of the largest online collection of medieval texts, including maps, primary and secondary sources and legal texts.

Internet Modern History Sourcebook
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/modsbook.html
Covering early modern Europe to the present, this site offers a large collection of information and numerous primary and secondary resources.