Library: History Guide: Start Here

Welcome to the History Research Guide

Start Here with Our Top History Sources

This guide has been designed to assist you in finding resources for research in History and related fields. Feel free at any time to use our Ask Us Anything chat, email, or instant answers service for additional assistance, or contact Christy Fic, cmfic@ship.edu.

When accessing library databases, if you see the prompt displayed in the screenshot below, select "Use your Shippensburg University account" and login with your SU username and password.

America: History & Life with Full Text
America: History & Life with Full Text is the definitive database of literature covering the history and culture of the United States and Canada, from prehistory to the present. With selective selective indexing for 1,700 journals from 1955 to present, this database is without question the most important bibliographic reference tool for students and scholars of U.S. and Canadian history. America: History & Life with Full Text also provides full-text coverage of more than 200 journals and nearly 100 books.

Access from on campus or off campus with Ship ID.
Historical Abstracts with Full Text
Historical Abstracts with Full Text covers the history of the world (excluding the United States and Canada) from 1450 to the present, including world history, military history, women's history, history of education, and much more. This authoritative database provides indexing of historical articles from more than 1,800 journals in over 40 languages back to 1955. Contains over 800,000 records and access to the full text of more than 349 journals and more than 120 books.

Access from on campus or off campus with Ship ID.
JSTOR
JSTOR is our most comprehensive interdisciplinary archive of scholarly journal articles. For each journal included in JSTOR, it includes the full-run of the journal, from its beginning up until the most recent 3-5 years. Covers a wide variety of subjects such as history, literature, biology, business, and African-American studies.

Access from on campus or off campus with Ship ID.

Helpful Web Tools for History Researchers

Transkribus
Transkribus is a platform for the automated recognition, transcription and searching of historical documents. The main objective of Transkribus is to support users who are engaged in the transcription of printed or handwritten documents. Transkribus offers a number of tools for the automated processing of documents, such as: Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR), Layout Analysis, Document Understanding, Keyword Spotting, and Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Free download.
Tropy
Take control of your research photos with Tropy, a tool that shortens the path from finding archival sources to writing about them. Tropy provides researchers with a common-sense way to organize and describe their research. Use Tropy to create an adaptable organization system where it’s easy to find any photo.
BigDIVA
BigDIVA (Big Data Infrastructure Visualization Application) is a dynamic environment for browsing, searching, and interacting with the Advanced Research Consortium catalog.This interface allows users to view all their search results at once rather than paging through endless lists of returns and hoping the search engine has put the most relevant items towards the top. BigDIVA is a force directed graph that uses color and node (or circle) size to provide information about the items being visualized. Colors represent different facets within the catalog: Resource, Genre, Discipline, and Format. Most nodes are sized according to the relative number of items each represents.
myHistro
Watch and read thousands of fascinating timelines, or create your own. Complete with text, video and pictures to create a dynamic timeline mashup. Using myHistro, you can combine maps and timelines seamlessly into one presentation, convert any public timeline into a personal pdf file, or export it into Google Earth format for offline storage.
MapInSeconds
Mapinseconds.com turns your spreadsheet data into maps. The site automatically chooses your map, from its database of 600 regions around the world, based on the district names you provide in your data. If it guesses wrong, you can manually select a different regional map. The smart legend adjusts to account for outliers and categorical vs numerical data. You can pick from a number of map-safe color schemes and with one click download your image. Use Google Chrome for best results.

History Guide

Instant Answers

Ask Us Anything

Archivist & Special Collections Librarian

Welcome to the History Research Guide

Helpful Web Tools for History Researchers

Contact the Ezra Lehman Memorial Library