Reference sources can help you to begin your research and find and nail down definitions and foundational information. Encyclopedias and biographical dictionaries can help learn more about a topic or a person, and place them in wider historical and cultural contexts. Browse online reference material below after looking over the brief descriptions. You can also search for online sources using the Advanced Search screen in CONSORT, by limiting the location to KEN Reference.
- Biography Reference Bank This link opens in a new window
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Biographical information on approximately half a million people, from antiquity to the present.
- Credo Reference This link opens in a new window
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Full text general subject database of reference titles
- Gale Virtual Reference Library This link opens in a new window
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Collection of encyclopedias, handbooks, and other reference sources
- Oxford Reference This link opens in a new window
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Oxford’s Dictionaries, Companions and Encyclopedia spanning 25 different subject areas.
- HeinOnline: Government, Politics & Law This link opens in a new window
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Full text documents on legal history, case law, world trials, U.S. government, congressional reports, and other government documents.
- OhioLINK Electronic Book Center This link opens in a new window
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Thousands of scholarly and reference e-books covering the humanities, sciences and social sciences.
- Oxford Very Short Introductions This link opens in a new window
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Concise and original introductions to a diverse range of subjects written by experts in the fields.
Online Historical Dictionary Series
Search for dictionaries in CONSORT from the below and other countries and continents by doing a Title search for "Historical Dictionary of ... " and insert the country or region of your choice to see if your topic area is covered. Or just do a broad search for a region to see if you can narrow down to an area of interest for your research.
Historical Dictionaries of Peoples and Cultures Series
- Historical Dictionaries of Religions Philosophies and MovementsThis series of over 50 dictionaries covers a wide range of topics including and not limited to: Chan Buddhism, Catholicism, Native American Movements, Islamic Fundamentalism, Marxism, Witchcraft, and so much more
Historical Dictionaries of War, Revolution, and Civil Unrest Series
- Historical Dictionaries of War, Revolution, and UnrestChechen conflict, the crusades, Arab-Israeli conflict and more
Historical dictionaries of Cities, States, and Regions
Useful Websites
- HathiTrust This link opens in a new window
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The HathiTrust Digital Library is a collaborative of academic and research libraries that has preserved 17+ million digitized items for scholarly purposes. The HathiTrust offers you reading access to these materials to the fullest extent allowable by U.S. copyright law (~26% of the collection is in the public domain).
- Wellcome LibraryThe Library's digital collections cover a wide variety of topics, including asylums, food, sex and sexual health, genetics, public health and war. Materials include primary source documents (such as the 'Ticehurst House Hospital Papers'), films and audio recordings (including a recording by Florence Nightingale), and a wide range of personal papers & manuscripts.
- American Journeys: Eyewitness Accounts of Early American Exploration and SettlementAmerican Journeys contains more than 18,000 pages of eyewitness accounts of North American exploration, from the sagas of Vikings in Canada in AD1000 to the diaries of mountain men in the Rockies 800 years later.
- PhotogrammarPhotogrammar is a web-based platform for organizing, searching, and visualizing the 170,000 photographs from 1935 to 1945 created by the United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI).
- Two PlantationsThis website displays research into the lives of 431 enslaved people in seven multi-generational families at Mesopotamia plantation in Jamaica and Mount Airy plantation in Virginia. These family histories have been gathered from two sets of slaveholders' annual inventories.
- Spanish Civil War Memory ProjectOn this site, visitors can listen to dozens of recorded
testimonies in English and Spanish of militants, witnesses, and victims of the Spanish Civil War and the Francoist repression. - Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United StatesHere you will find one of the greatest historical atlases: Charles O. Paullin and John K. Wright's Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, first published in 1932. This digital edition reproduces all of the atlas's nearly 700 maps.
- Encyclopedia of Jewish WomenThousands of biographic and thematic essays on Jewish women around the world
- Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761This animated thematic map narrates the spatial history of the greatest slave insurrection in the eighteenth century British Empire.
- Viking Society for Northern Research Web PublicationsThe organization's publications1893 to the present are freely available on this website, although recent titles may not be released until three years from the date of publication.