HIS4300 Microhistory - History - Guides de recherche · Research guides at University of Ottawa

Search tips

Before starting your search, take a moment to write down your keywords. If my subject is the trial for the murder of Emmett Till, for example, I might choose:

Murder
Emmett Till
Civil Rights

But once I've decided on the keywords, what else does one have to do to start research in bibliographic tools like databases? Make sure you use common operators between the keywords so that search engines understand the relationships between terms.

Here is a list of the most common operators

Operator	Usage	Example
AND	Ensures all search terms are included in results.	"Emmett Till" AND murder AND "civil rights"
OR	Retrieves related words	Lynching OR murder
NOT	Excludes the term after NOT	"Emmett Till" AND murder NOT (poetry OR drama OR novels OR songs)
" "	Searches all words within the quotation marks as a phras	"American civil rights"
*	Searches different endings of a root word	murder*

Secondary Sources

OMNI
Omni is an academic search tool that gives you access to resources from 14 Ontario university libraries, but importantly, from University of Ottawa.
How to use Omni
America history and life
Articles on North American historical topics.
Historical abstracts
World history (1450 -), excluding the U.S. and Canada.
JSTOR
Multidisciplinary database for archival access to scholarly journals in arts, sciences, humanities and social sciences. Note that Jstor does not typically provide access to current issues.

Primary sources

The Making of Modern Law: Trials, 1600–1926
Describes the courtroom dramas that rocked society in America, the British Empire and the world. Includes more than 10,000 titles and nearly two million pages of fully searchable content from the law libraries of Harvard and Yale as well as The Library of the Bar of the City of New York.
World Trials Library
The World Trials database contains trial transcripts and other critical court documents, but also trial-related resources such as monographs that analyze and debate the decisions of famous trials. It also includes biographies of many of the greatest trial lawyers in history.

American Indian Movement and Native American Radicalism, 1968-1979 » Ce lien s'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre / This link opens in a new window
Archives Unbound - American Indian Movement and Native American Radicalism, 1968-1979. FBI files illustrate the evolution of AIM as an organization of social protest and the development of Native American radicalism.
Cold War: Global Perspectives on East-West Tensions, 1945-1991 (The) » Ce lien s'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre / This link opens in a new window
Beginning in the 1940s, a U.S. government organization that became part of the CIA monitored, recorded and translated any item related to the Cold War from foreign mass media and government publications. The collection brings together primary source documents from around the world to shed new light on this crucial period in world history. This digital archive spanning five decades is fully searchable.

Digital Public Llibrary of America
Millions of items from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions in the US available in a one-stop discovery experience.

Historical newspaper sources

Historical Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal (1889 - 1992)
Historical New York Times (1851-2007)
Globe and Mail (1844-2012)
The complete text and images of a national newspaper, the Globe and Mail. Dates: 1844-2012.
Chronicling America
Search America's historic newspapers pages from 1836-1963.

History: HIS4300 Microhistory

Search tips

Secondary Sources

Primary sources

Historical newspaper sources