- University Libraries
- Research Guides
- Subject Guides
- History
- Additional (mainly) secondary sources
History: Additional (mainly) secondary sources
Indexes to popular and specialist literatures
- C19: The Nineteenth Century Index: Periodicals (from ProQuest)C19 will shift to the more robust ProQuest platform in late 2022. Portal to citations in American and British periodical indexes from the "long" 19th century. Search individually or cross-search with several governmental and book indexes. Tech won't necessarily have online or physical access to every indexed item.
Currently on Chadwyck-Healey platform: linking to full-text can be flaky, even to other ProQuest databases; you may want to use the bibliographic information to search Discovery Search by author names or article titles to find in full-text online and/or by publication title for our print or microform holdings of the periodical.
- Readers' Guide Retrospective: 1890-1982 from EBSCOhostReader's Guide Retrospective indexes citations to articles published in popular magazines and newspapers published in the United States.
- Book Review Digest Retrospective from EBSCOhostCollecting nearly eight decades of H.W. Wilson's Book Review Digest, this archive database provides over a million book review citations from 1903 to 1982. It covers adult and juvenile fiction and nonfiction and provides at least one review excerpt per book.
- Humanities & Social Sciences Index Retrospective: 1907-1984 from EBSCOhost Humanities & Social Science Index Retrospective offers the ability to search a wide range of important journals in the humanities and social sciences as far back as 1907. Coverage also includes content from H.W. Wilson’s International Index.1907-1984.
- Index to Legal Periodicals Retrospective: 1908-1981 from EBSCOhost The Index to Legal Periodicals Retrospective indexes citations to articles and summaries in annual surveys of laws and courts, legal journals, and legal yearbooks. 1908-1981.
Academic journal archives (could be primary or secondary, depending on use)
- PAO: Periodicals Archive OnlineComplementing the better-known JSTOR with a more international orientation, PAO is a archive of more than 700 periodicals in the humanities and social sciences since their first issues. More than 150 are in languages other than English. Coverage is from volume 1, issue 1 of each journal, and all issues are digitized from cover to cover.
- JSTORan archive of academic journals in the humanities, social science, and sciences, back to their earliest issues. So for some purposes, it is a collection of secondary sources and for others, primary sources.
If you want to do a comprehensive search of the literature on a topic, don't start in JSTOR; use a discipline-specific database instead and/or Humanities & Social Sciences Index Retrospective: 1907-1984, a simple but historically deep index of academic articles that includes historical headings mapped to current ones:- Although a few journals in JSTOR include content up to the current issue, in most cases the latest content in JSTOR will be at least two years old.
- While JSTOR journals are among the most reputable in their subject areas, not all subject areas are included.
- JSTOR articles are presented as they were originally published: they will include terms and information that today could be regarded as inappropriate, incomplete, or worse. But if you want to know what scholars in, say, the 1930s said about controversial topics like race, some religious traditions, gender and sexuality, or mental or physical impairments, you will need to use search terms that match those of that time, even though they may offend you deeply.
- HeinOnline Portal Large and wide-ranging collections of historical and contemporary legal materials, including codes, treaties, constitutions, topical collections of historical documents, law reviews (resembling JSTOR), legal treatises from the US, Canada, and the UK. Not limited to narrowly legal topics: includes, for example, Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture & Law.
Temporary, trial access only -- use while you can
The University Libraries at Virginia Tech regularly secure short-term, trial access to online resources in order to gauge their appropriateness to our university's teaching and research missions. These trials run in October, February, and sometimes April. Most trials run 30 days.
This box highlights some of these opportunities as they come available. All active trials are listed in a sidebar in the main Databases A-Z directory and as a tab atop this libguide.
Each entry includes a link to a user survey. I and other subject librarians invite you to email us moredetailed assessments of trial resources. Responses from the Virginia Tech community are vital to the library's deliberations about whether and when to acquire or enhance databases and the like.
As appropriate I will list all currently active trials and user survey links in a resource trials tab in this and my other libguides. Entries for trials I may include in here as elsewher in the body of my libguides will go away when the trial period ends.
Streaming video collections: documentaries and drama
- Alexander Street PressStreamed video with complete, searchable transcriptions along with text and still images. Alexander Street’s all-text primary source databases (Oral History Online and Women & Social Movements) are not part of this package.
- American History in Video. Historical newsreels, archived news broadcasts as well as recent documentaries.
- Meet the Press Archive (1947-2013). Decades of interviews from the archetypal of the Sunday morning TV news “talking heads” show.
- Films on DemandFilms on Demand provides streaming documentaries and educational films on many topics, archival films and newsreels, and "world cinema." Includes public performance rights for non-commercial, educational purposes. Searchable and browseable.
- Kanopy Streaming VideosKanopy provides hundreds of streaming videos in a wide variety of subjects and genres, including documentaries, instructional videos, and dramatic cinema from around the world. Interface includes rich browse options. For videos not already part of our collection, you'll be presented a form requesting us to purchase them.
- Swank Digital CampusSwank offers over 1,000 streaming videos: popular movies, documentaries, and foreign films. The list of available titles is revised by the vendor near the beginning of every academic year.
- PBS Videos
This link opens in a new window
This curated collection of older streaming videos, originally broadcast on PBS, covers a broad range of disciplines in the sciences, humanities, arts, and social sciences, but is particularly strong in American history and American studies. The collection Includes several of Ken Burns' series, American Experience, Scientific American Frontiers, and many others. User access is available through UVA's Avalon Media System after signing in with 2-factor authentication at Virginia Tech.
