LibGuides: History: Secondary Sources: Articles

Finding Articles

America: History and Life and Historical Abstracts are the two major databases in history research. Your search should start with these resources.

America: History and Life (1964 - Present)
Indexes over 2,000 scholarly journals to find citations for appropriate articles on your topic in American or Canadian history, from prehistory to the present. Allows you to search by historical period. For other parts of the world, use Historical Abstracts.
Historical Abstracts (1954 - Present)
Index, with abstracts, to research in world history (excluding North America) from 1450 through the 20th Century. For North American history use America: History and Life.

Other databases can be useful in historical research, especially for Interdisciplinary topics.

JSTOR
Full text archive of scholarly journals and primary sources in various disciplines. As of August 2024, the interdisciplinary library of images once known as Artstor has been completely incorporated within the JSTOR platform. Artstor images will appear in all searches, or you can use the Browse Images function.
Project MUSE (1958 - Present)
Full text access to over 400 scholarly journals in the humanities and social sciences. All parts of the journals are scanned, including any images. A good source for current articles on a variety of subjects.
ProQuest Central
Multidisciplinary database that provides some full text and some citations for thousands of journals. A good starting place for beginning research and quickly finding articles for a variety of topics.
HAPI (Hispanic American Periodical Index)
Indexes journal articles, book reviews, documents, literary works about Central and South America throughout the world.

Getting Journal Articles

Library databases can be full-text where PDFs are included in the article citation or Indexes where need to locate articles other ways since the PDF is not linked.

The library offers services to help you make the connection from these Index databases to the article you need:

Reed full-text link in the database. Look for the "Check Reed full-text" link and click to check Reed's holdings for the article.
LibKey is another system that integrates into the catalog to provide instant access to PDFs. You can also install LibKey Nomad in your browser to access library content on the open web.
If the library doesn't provide access the article you're looking for, try Interlibrary Loan (ILL). Log in with your Reed network ID and password to request articles that are not available through Reed's print or electronic collections. You'll be notified by e-mail when your article is ready.
***Always remember to look up the Journal Title in the library catalog before requesting something via ILL.***