Research Guides: History Resources: Reference Books & Websites

Getting Started

Reference sources can help you to begin your research and guide you in your approach to a new topic. Encyclopedias and biographical dictionaries can help you to learn more about a topic or a person, and to place them in wider historical and cultural contexts. Browse reference materials in the Reference section, on the second floor of Chalmers near Helpline. You can also search for online sources using the Advanced Search screen in CONSORT, by limiting the location to KEN Reference.

Oxford Reference Online
Search across Oxford Reference Encyclopedias, or search by subject.
Dictionary of American History
Ten-volume set. Articles include bibliographies. Older editions are located in the Main stacks under the same call number.
Encyclopedia of American Historical Documents
Europe 1450 to 1789 : encyclopedia of the early modern world
The first volume in this six-volume set includes a chronology of Europe. Maps and bibliographies are included, as well as some full-color illustrations.
Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia
From the Jewish Women's Archive. The encyclopedia is extremely thorough and international in scope.
Look at the Jewish Women's Archive page as well for primary sources, historical timelines, and more.
The New Cambridge Modern History
This fourteen-volume work covers the period from 1493 through 1945. See the original Cambridge Modern History set [KEN Main D208 .C17 ] for extensive bibliographies that were not included in the new edition.
New Dictionary of the History of Ideas
This encyclopedia clarifies the intellectual history of more than 750 complex ideas of concern to people today.

Online Historical Dictionary Series

Historical Dictionaries of Peoples and Cultures Series

Historical Dictionaries of War, Revolution, and Civil Unrest Series

Historical dictionaries of Cities, States, and Regions

Useful Websites

HathiTrust This link opens in a new window
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 Library
The 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 Settlement
American 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.
National Archives (United States)
National Archives Digital Vault
Create an account and collect documents relating to your research.
National Archives (United Kingdom, formerly the Public Records Office)
Photogrammar
Photogrammar 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 Plantations
This 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 Project
On 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 States
Here 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.
Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761
This animated thematic map narrates the spatial history of the greatest slave insurrection in the eighteenth century British Empire.
Viking Society for Northern Research Web Publications
The 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.