SJSU Research Guides: History: Articles & Databases

Subject Guide

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Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library

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San Jose, CA 95192-0028

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Subjects: Anthropology, History, Justice Studies, Military Science

Off Campus Access

To use SJSU databases from off campus, you must have a University ID number and a Library PIN. To create your PIN, go to your Library Account.

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Research Tools

CitationLinker
If you already have a citation, CitationLinker will help you find it.
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CitationLinker works best if you enter the Journal Title or ISSN and the year or volume that you are looking for. If SJSU does not have the article online, CitationLinker should take you to our Illiad service to get the article from another library.
Electronic Journals Index
Find out if the library has access to a specific online journal.
Government Documents
Try this guide if you need to locate government information.

Zotero This link opens in a new window
A FireFox extension that makes it easy to create citations.

General Interdisciplinary Sources

Not sure which database to use for your specific project? Contact me for customized advice or Ask a Librarian
Need help accessing these resources? Get technical assistance from Student Computing Services

JSTOR Journals and Books This link opens in a new window
The journals archive consists of older (at least 2-5 years) issues of core scholarly journals across a wide range of subjects including the arts, humanities, and social sciences. The eBook collections are DRM-free and allow for unlimited concurrent use and unlimited chapter downloads and printing. Note: The following collections are complimentary through Dec 31, 2023 to current SJSU students and employees: 19th Century Pamphlets, Business IV, Ecology & Botany II, Hebrew, Ireland, Jewish Studies, Lives of Literature, Security Studies, Sustainability.
Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
Multidisciplinary full text, peer reviewed academic journals that support scholarly research in key areas of academic study.
academic search premier
Project Muse This link opens in a new window
Full-text scholarly articles in literature and criticism, history, visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, gender studies, social science, mathematics.
Web of Science (and InCites ESI & JCR) This link opens in a new window
Web of Science is a citation database that covers three major tools: Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index. The complete database covers thousands of scholarly journals from 1975 to the present across a broad range of disciplines. Included in the subscription: InCites Journal Citation Reports and Essential Science Indicators (ESI). Use the ESI Help Guide and JCR Help Guide to learn more.
OmniFile Full Text Mega Edition This link opens in a new window
Covers several core subjects, featuring full-text articles from more than 3,000 publications, many of which are peer-reviewed, dating back to 1994. Additional content includes indexing and abstracting for more than 5,100 publications and retrospective coverage dating as far back as 1982.
Directory of Open Access Journals This link opens in a new window
The Directory aims to cover all open access scholarly journals in various disciplines. History journals are included!

FindArticles
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Look Smart's free database contains some full text history articles. The full text is not always scholarly.

ARTstor This link opens in a new window
A digital library of 550,000+ images for art, architecture, the humanities, and social sciences. Includes a set of tools to view, present, and manage images for research and pedagogical purposes. Help guides available.
CQ Researcher This link opens in a new window
Covers 1923 to the present. This weekly publication gives background information on current and controversial issues. Unbiased coverage of health, social trends, criminal justice, international affairs, education, the environment, technology and the economy.
Accessible Archives This link opens in a new window
Diverse primary source materials reflecting broad views across American history and culture including eyewitness accounts of historical events, descriptions of daily life, editorial observations, commerce as seen through advertisements, and genealogical records. Collections include 18th & 19th century publications, African-American newspapers, the Civil War, World War I, Native Americans in History books and newspapers, and women's suffrage.

Specialized Comprehensive Sources

America: History and Life with Fulltext This link opens in a new window
Reference tool for U.S. and Canadian history and culture. With full-text coverage of hundreds of journals and books, and selective indexing for journals from 1863 to present. Limited to 6 simultaneous users
Historical Abstracts with Fulltext This link opens in a new window
Limited to 6 simultaneous users This database supports upper-division and graduate research on World History, Military History, Women's History, History of Education and many other related topics. It also provides indexing of historical articles from more than 3,100 journals in over 40 languages dating back to 1955. In addition, this database provides access to the full text of more than 380 journals and 140 books.

L'Annee Philologique: 1924/26 -
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Indexes book and journal articles on the Middle Ages. Interdisciplinary and very comprehensive. 1967-1998 are available on CD-ROM as the Database of Classical Bibliography.

Bibliography of Asian Studies This link opens in a new window
Online version of the Bibliography of Asian Studies (BAS), referencing principally western-language articles and book chapters on all parts of Asia published since 1971.

The HLAS Online
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Covers all areas of Latin America. Edited by the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress.

Air University Library Index to Military Periodicals This link opens in a new window
Index to U.S. military and aeronautical periodicals.
American Civil War: Letters and Diaries This link opens in a new window
Diaries, letters, memoirs, bibliography & other primary source material about the Civil War

Valley of the Shadow
This wonderful website details life in two communities, one Union and one Confederate, from John Brown's Raid through the Reconstruction era. Through it you may explore thousands of original letters, diaries, newspapers, census reports, etc., from the inhabitants of Augusta County, VA, and Franklin County, PA.. Also contains records on slavery and the Freedmen's Bureau.

Images of the American Civil War This link opens in a new window
The collection is drawn from archives around the country, documenting the lives of Union and Confederate soldiers. Includes photographs, posters, and ephemera of nineteenth-century Americana as experienced from social, military, and political perspectives.
North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries and Oral Histories This link opens in a new window
A full-text database including over 10,000 pages of primary source material written by over 2000 different authors, all dealing with the experience of immigrating to the United States and Canada between 1800 and 1950.
North American Women's Letters and Diaries: Colonial to 1950 This link opens in a new window
This resource contains 150,000 pages of materials drawn from the letters and diaries of 1,325 women beginning with early Colonial period through to the 1950’s.
Women and Social Movements in the United States 1600-2000, Scholar's Edition This link opens in a new window
This collection seeks to advance scholarly debates and understanding about U.S. women’s history and currently includes 124 document projects and archives with more than 5,100 documents and 175,000 pages of additional full-text documents, written by 2,800 primary authors. It also includes book, film, and website reviews, notes from the archives, and teaching tools.

European Views of the Americas: 1493 to 1750
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Based on the authoritative bibliography "European Americana: A Chronological Guide to Works Printed in Europe Relating to the Americas, 1492-1750," this database contains over 32,000 entries of early published accounts of the New World.

American Indian Experience This link opens in a new window
Features scholarship and reference content, hundreds of primary documents, and images of the indigenous peoples of the United States.
North American Indian Thought and Culture This link opens in a new window
The database represents the largest compilation ever created of biographical information on indigenous peoples from all areas of North America. Included are biographies, auto-biographies, personal narratives, speeches, diaries, letters, and oral histories.
Gilded Age This link opens in a new window
This collection brings together approximately 40,000 pages of full text, photographs, songs for listening online, and other primary materials, along with video interviews and twenty-five critical documentary essays covering issues that came to the fore in the Gilded Age such as immigration and migration, racism and civil rights, labor and industry, women and universal suffrage, American Indians, and the environment. Each documentary essay poses an interpretive question and then illuminates it with dozens of annotated primary documents, introductions, and essays.
Japanese American Incarceration Records of the War Relocation Authority 1942-1946 This link opens in a new window
Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entry into World War II in December 1941, the Roosevelt administration decided that for reasons of “military necessity,” the government would evacuate all persons of Japanese heritage from the West Coast states. The Records of the War Relocation Authority document the day-to-day running of the 10 relocation camps from 1942-1946. Records include reports and correspondence on issues such as security, education, health, vocational training, agriculture, food, and family welfare.
CSU Japanese American History Digitization Project This link opens in a new window
The collections represent approximately 300 linear feet of archival materials that focus on some of the most striking events related to the treatment of minorities in U.S. history. The topics cover an enormous range of subjects central to Japanese-American life before, during and after World War II, including immigration, the California Alien Land Acts of 1913 and 1920, the War Relocation Authority (WRA), organizations supporting Japanese Americans, redress, Japanese Peruvians, hostage exchanges on the S.S. Gripsholm, sports, and the U.S. Army's 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Camps represented include Jerome, Gila River, Rohwer, Manzanar, Tanforan, Poston, Amache/Granada, Heart Mountain, Crystal City and more. Among the archives are letters, photographs, oral histories, camp publications, papers of camp administrators and counselors, poetry, art works, leases, certificates and other documents to prove citizenship, and school yearbooks. The project tends to focus on the digitization of paper, photographs, and media such as audio and video.
American State Papers This link opens in a new window
Search and browse legislative and executive documents of the first 14 U.S. Congresses. This collection covers such historical events as Lewis and Clark’s Expedition, Burr’s Conspiracy and Arrest, the Treaty of the Creek Indians made by Andrew Jackson and much more. Also includes speeches and messages of Presidents Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison. Note: Please refer to the U.S. Congressional Serial Set, 1817-1980 database for post 1816 documents.
Bibliography of Asian Studies This link opens in a new window
Online version of the Bibliography of Asian Studies (BAS), referencing principally western-language articles and book chapters on all parts of Asia published since 1971.
Brazilian and Portuguese History and Culture This link opens in a new window
Originally the personal library of the Brazilian diplomat, historian, and journalist Manoel de Oliveira Lima--the Oliveira Lima Library is a collection of Luso-Brazilian pamphlets covering topics such as colonialism, the Brazilian independence period, slavery and abolition, the Catholic Church, indigenous peoples, immigration, ecology, agriculture, economic development, medicine and public health, international relations, and Brazilian and Portuguese literature.
Vietnam War and American Foreign Policy, 1960-1975 This link opens in a new window
Primary source material (from the CIA, USIA, NSC, EPA), personal papers of U.S. presidents) related to the war in Southeast Asia as well as a wide spectrum of other material (MAC-V) dealing with American foreign policy in this tumultuous period.
Sixties: Primary Documents and Personal Narratives 1960 - 1974 This link opens in a new window
Documents the key events, trends, and movements in 1960s America—vividly conveying the zeitgeist of the decade and its effects into the middle of the next. Alongside 75,000 pages of letters, diaries, and oral histories, there are more than 75,000 pages of posters, broadsides, pamphlets, advertisements, and rare audio and video materials—150,000 pages total upon completion. The collection is further enhanced by dozens of scholarly document projects, featuring richly annotated primary-source content that is analyzed and contextualized through interpretive essays by leading historians.

Declassified Documents Reference System
Also known as U.S. Declassified Documents Online. A multi-disciplinary, comprehensive source which includes previously classified government documents from the White House and a variety of U.S. government agencies during post World War II through the 1970s. Also explores the political, economic, and social conditions during domestic and foreign events. Includes documents from presidential libraries.

Newspapers, Journals and Magazines

Electronic Journals
San Jose State subscribes to several electronic journal databases. Here you can search for a journal by name, or browse the databses by subject.
Melvyl
This Union Catalog for University of California libraries provides information on journal holdings in libraries such as UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley. Search by journal title.

America's Historical Newspapers This link opens in a new window
Offers exact reproductions of 700+ historical American newspapers from the period 1690-1900.

ProQuest Historical Newspapers: New York Times
Provides full-text, full image, cover-to-cover access to the New York Times
from 1851 through 2008.
New York Times (Current)
Members of the SJSU community are given free access to the New York Times. This link will show you how to go about doing so.

American Indian Newspapers This link opens in a new window
Digital collection of print journalism from Indigenous peoples of the US and Canada over more than 9,000 individual editions from 1828-2016. This collection provides research opportunities into subjects including the self-determination era and American Indian Movement (AIM), education, environmentalism, land rights and cultural representation from an Indigenous perspective. The 45 unique titles also include bi-lingual and Indigenous-language editions, such as Hawaiian, Cherokee and Navajo languages.
ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Los Angeles Sentinel This link opens in a new window
The oldest and largest black newspaper in the western United States and the largest African-American owned newspaper in the U.S., covering issues concerning the African-American community and its readers. Note: Coverage includes May 17, 1934 - Dec 30, 2010 with exceptions (Jan 1, 1941 - Dec 31, 1945 not available)
New York Times Online This link opens in a new window
Access and personalize the New York Times website with your SJSU email address. Here are instructions to create your NYTimes account. Once you have created your account, use it to sign into the NY Times website from anywhere. Includes interactives, video, and audio, plus digital images of the newspaper back to 1851.
California Digital Newspaper Collection This link opens in a new window
A collection of significant historical California newspapers published from 1846-1922. Includes the first California newspaper, the Californian, and the first daily California newspaper, the Daily Alta California. It also contains issues of several current California newspapers that are part of a pilot project to preserve and provide access to contemporary papers.
Early American Historical Newspapers, Series 2, 1758-1900 This link opens in a new window
Also known as America's Historical Newspapers. This collection focuses on 18th- and 19th-century newspapers.
Early American Newspapers, Series 1, 1690-1876 This link opens in a new window
Also known as America's Historical Newspapers. This collection provides images and full-text content access to historic newspapers listed in Clarence Brigham's authoritative bibliography, History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690-1820.

Retrospective Indexes (Print)

Combined Retrospective Index Set to Journals in History: 1838 - 1974
Enables researchers to find in a single place scholarly history articles in English appearing over a long period of time. The keyword indexing provides a unique approach but also has some limitations.
D1 .C18 - PERIODICALS LOWER LEVEL

Humanities Index 1974 -
Provides author and subject index to leading scholarly journals in the humanities, including the most widely read scholarly journals in history. After 1995, selected full text is available electronically as Humanities Full Text.
AI 3 .H8X - REFERENCE 2ND FLOOR

International Index: 1907-1965
A useful index to find scholarly literature published in the early part of the 20th Century.
AI 3 .R49 - REFERENCE 2ND FLOOR

PAIS International in Print: 1915-1998
The Public Affairs Information Service (PAIS) provides a subject index to English language materials. Of particular interest to historians because of coverage of foreign relations, labor history and economics.
H1 .P92 - REFERENCE 2ND FLOOR

Poole's Index to Periodical Literature 1802-1904
Main volumes provide a subject index only. A good source for Nineteenth Century American history. A separate author index is also available.
A13 .P7 1963X: AI3 .P72X - REFERENCE 2ND FLOOR

Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature: 1890-
Provides author and subject indexes to popular general interest magazines. Of particular interest to historians are news magazines which report historical events shortly after they occur and often contain excellent photographs.
AI 3 .R48 - REFERENCE 2ND FLOOR

Social Sciences and Humanities Index: 1966 - 1974
A good index for scholarly articles published in the late 1960's and early 1970's.
AI3 .R49 - REFERENCE 2ND FLOOR

Social Sciences Index: 1974-
Author and subject index to scholarly journals in social sciences. Includes political science, public administration, law, sociology, anthropology. Post 1995, selected full text is available electronically in Social Sciences Full Text.
H 1 .S64X - REFERENCE 2ND FLOOR

History