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History

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

Think About Your Research Objective

Starting your research can feel overwhelming, but think of history in two ways:

1. "Macro" History- you want to research a large scale event/person/place, and tell an overarching story of what happened and why.
2. "Micro" History- you want to research a single specific event or person (generally something or someone more obscure) and give a specific account of your subject while tying your research to the "bigger picture". 

Macro-history is more common in lower division history courses, where students summarize an even like the US Revolution, WWII, etc. Whereas micro-history in more common in advanced history courses because it is more specific and smaller in scale, and therefore more difficult research.

Once you have decided your objective, whether it be a micro or macro history research project, the next step before actually doing any research is to come up with useful keywords

Mapping out your topic

One popular method of coming up with keywords for researching is to "topic map". You start with the most general term or concept related to your research topic, and from there branch out to more and more specific terms and concepts. Imagine your topic is "Women's History", so we start with that term....

Women's History

...

But now we can start specifying what we want to know more about. We add context. Maybe we are interested in a certain period of time, location, law or government policy, a particular figure, etc. That's when we start adding keywords to our phrase.

Women's History + United States + 20th century + Voting Rights + Leaders

...

Simply by writing out aspects of women's history we are interested in, we were able to create 5 keywords we could potentially use when database searching. Also remember that those 5 keywords we came up with can be mixed and matched depending on the search results you come up with. Maybe using all 5 is too specific, so only use 3 or 4. The few search terms you use, the more results you will come up with, because you are being broader with what you are looking for.  

Helpful "Starting Point" Databases

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).

CQ Researcher

CQ Researcher provides in-depth coverage of important issues, written by experienced journalists, footnoted and professionally fact-checked. Full-length articles include an overview, historical background, chronology, pro/con feature, and resources for additional research.

Biography Reference Center

A comprehensive collection of over 430,000 full-text biographies and unique narrative biographies.

Points of View Reference Center (POV)

Points of View is a full text database providing access to information & opinions on controversial and current topics. It includes topic overviews, viewpoint and counterpoint articles, and critical analysis guides.

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