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History

General History subject guide for students and faculty to explore our resources.

Primary Source Databases

Historical Los Angeles Times

A digital newspaper archive for The Los Angeles Times‎ (1881-1993) with full-text and full-image articles.

New York Times

Register an account first at http://www.accessnyt.com or on the app. You will need your MySolano username and password credentials to complete this step. Once you have a NYT account, you can visit http://www.nytimes.com directly.

You also have access to the historic New York Times (1851-1980) and its archives (1981-present).

For articles 1851-1922: free, no limits
For articles 1923-1980: free, limited to 5 articles daily
For articles 1981-present: free, no limits

Slavery in America

documents key aspects of the history of slavery in the United States, from its origins in Africa to its abolition, including materials on the slave trade, plantation life, emancipation, pro-slavery and anti-slavery arguments, religious views on slavery, and other related topics.

American Revolution

A digital archive documenting the revolution and war that created the United States of America, from the Paris peace treaty in 1763 through the early protests in 1785 to the Paris peace treaty of 1783.

Civil War

This digital archive covers multiple aspects of the Civil War' and includes a variety of primary source documents -- personal narratives and memoirs, pamphlets and political speeches, sermons and songs, regimental histories and photograph albums, legal treatises, and children's books.

Secondary Source Databases

America: History and Life with Full Text

This full-text database covers the history and culture of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. With hundreds of full-text journals and books, this database is a key reference tool for students and scholars of U.S. and Canadian history.

Gale Virtual Reference Library (GVRL)

A great place to begin your research process: to narrow your topic, get background information and to gather keywords. Encyclopedias and reference books are not generally used as cited sources in college-level research papers (usually you'll need to take what you find in an encyclopedia and head out to the databases for more advanced sources).

Military & Government Collection

Partially full-text, offering information pertaining to all branches of the military and government via periodicals, academic journals and related content.

Academic Search Complete

A leading resource for scholarly research across multiple disciplines; contains journals, periodicals, reports, books, videos, and more.

Ethnic NewsWatch

Ethnic NewsWatch™ (ENW) is a current resource of full-text newspapers, magazines, and journals of the ethnic and minority press, providing researchers access to essential, often overlooked perspectives. The complete collection also includes the module Ethnic NewsWatch: A History™, which provides historical coverage of Native American, African American, and Hispanic American periodicals from 1959-1989.

Humanities Source

This database covers all aspects of the humanities (art, history, communications, culture, literature and philosophy). It includes articles, interviews, obituaries, bibliographies, original works of fiction, book reviews, and reviews of ballets, dance programs, motion pictures, musicals, operas, plays and more.

Recommended Books

Search for Books

When you're ready to dig deeper into your topic, or just need something good to read:

Internet recommendations (Google, etc)

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