Select a Database
Library Databases by Subject: History
| Database/Description | Guide |
|---|---|
| Academic Search Elite An EBSCO database that provides full text coverage of over 2,050 journals, including nearly 1,500 peer-reviewed titles in the social sciences, humanities, general science, multi-cultural studies, education and more. Full-text coverage back to 1985. |  |
| ACLS Humanities E-Book (formerly History E-Book) A project led by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the HEB project now includes the full text of over 1500 titles and is expanding to include most humanities disciplines and area studies. It includes books that remain vital to both scholars and advanced students and are frequently cited in the literature. Approximately 300 books are added annually to the collection. | |
| America's Historical Newspapers Series I offers more than 700 historical American newspapers from 23 states and the District of Columbia printed between 1690 and 1876 and is based on Clarence S. Brigham's "History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690-1820" and other authoritative bibliographies. | |
| America: History and Life Indexes and abstracts scholarly literature from journals, dissertations and book and media reviews on the history and culture of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. Indexing covers 1,700 journals from 1964 to the present. Strong English-language journal coverage is balanced by an international perspective on topics and events, including abstracts in English of articles published in more than 40 languages. | |
| The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries Includes detailed firsthand descriptions of historical characters, glimpses of daily life in the army and at home, anecdotes about key events and personages. | |
| American Decades (Gale) Cross-disciplinary source for those who need a single, consistent reference to document and analyze periods of contemporary American social history. | |
| American National Biography Offers portraits of more than 17,400 men and women -- from all eras and walks of life -- whose lives have shaped the nation. Updated quarterly with hundreds of new and revised entries, the ANB Online features thousands of illustrations, more than 80,000 hyperlinked cross-references, links to select web sites, and powerful search capabilities. Includes over 900 articles from The Oxford Companion to United States History, providing historical and social context to the biographies. | |
| Annals of American History U.S. history from 1493 to modern times in over 2,000 primary documents plus images, video and audio clips. Document types include historical accounts, speeches, memoirs, poems, editorials and cultural criticism discussing government, foreign relations, business, war, the arts, family life and religion. | |
| Art Full Text Wilson Art Full Text indexes and abstracts articles from from more than 480 periodicals, many of them peer-reviewed, published throughout the world. Subjects covered include advertising art, antiques, archaeology, architecture and architectural history, art history, computers in art, crafts, decorative arts, fashion design, folk art, graphic arts, industrial design, interior design, landscape architecture, motion pictures, museology, non-western art, painting, photography, pottery, sculpture, television, textiles and video. Coverage includes the full text of 160 journals beginning January 1997. | |
| Asian American Drama Asian American Drama brings together more than 250 plays, along with related biographical, production and theatrical information, providing a comprehensive overview of this growing field. The collection begins with the works of Sadakichi Hartmann in the late nineteenth century and includes contemporary playwrights, such as Philip Kan Gotanda, Elizabeth Wong, and Jeannie Barroga. The plays present the lives and struggles of Asians in North America and views of important historical events, such as the construction of the railroads in the nineteenth century, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, and the Vietnam conflict. The plays also address sociological issues, such as assimilation, integration, and cultural identity in a Western context. The effect of Western religion is also examined. | |
| Biography Resource Center Provides biographical information on more than 340,000 people from throughout history, around the world, and across all disciplines and subject areas. Besides biographical narratives, the database provides full-text articles from more than 300 periodicals and includes more than 26,000 images. | |
| Black Drama Contains the full text of 1,200 plays written from the mid-1800s to the present by more than 100 playwrights from North America, English-speaking Africa, the Caribbean, and other African diaspora countries. The database is composed of three parts. Part 1 covers key writings of the Harlem Renaissance, works performed for the Federal Theatre Project, and plays by critically acclaimed dramatists of the 1940s. The second part of the collection covers the Black Arts movement of the sixties and seventies and works performed by the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BARTS), The Negro Ensemble Company, and other companies. Part 3 focuses on plays that deal with the social and political ills stemming from colonialism, slavery, and apartheid; the struggle for independence; African history; and neo-colonialism. | |
| Black Thought and Culture Black Thought and Culture provides approximately 100,000 pages of monographs, essays, articles, speeches, and interviews written by leaders within the black community from the earliest times to the present. In addition to well-known works, when completed, the collection will feature unique, fugitive and never-before-published materials, including the first-ever complete full run of the Black Panther newspaper. The collection is intended for research in black studies, political science, American history, music, literature, and art. This ninth release of Black Thought and Culture includes approximately 1297 sources and 1100 authors (March 2007). | |
| British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries Spans more than 400 years of personal writings, bringing together the voices of women from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. The database includes approximately 100,000 pages of material assembled from numerous bibliographies and from newly conducted research as well as 4,000 pages of previously unpublished manuscripts. Extending back to 1500, all forms of diaries - religious, travel, and journalistic - enrich the content of the collection. | |
| Child Development & Adolescent Studies Produced by NISC, Child Development & Adolescent Studies includes references to the current and historical literature related to growth and development of children through the age of 21. Book reviews and abstracts from hundreds of journals and a bibliography of thousands of technical reports, books, book chapters, theses and dissertations covering biomedical and social sciences worldwide are indexed. More than 201,860 records are included with over 10,000 new records added each year. | |
| Choice Reviews Online The online version of the print magazine Choice, this database contains reviews of significant current books and electronic resources of interest to those in higher education. The database is updated monthly, generally at mid-month, with reviews that will be printed in the next monthly issue. Reviews published since 1988 are included. | |
| Dictionary of National Biography The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography features 56,000 articles on notable people who were born or lived in the British Isles and its former territories and who died before December 31, 2000. In addition to outlining a person's activities, character, and significance, each article also includes dates and places of key events, information on parents and spouses, and places of residence. One in five articles is accompanied by an image of the person who is the subject of the article. | |
| Digital National Security Archive The DNSA provides a collection of primary documents central to US foreign and military policy since 1945. Nearly 43,000 declassified documents are included in a group of 22 collections, each focused on a single topic. Each collection contains a range of policy documents including presidential directives, memos, diplomatic dispatches, meeting notes, independent reports, briefing papers, White House communications, email and confidential letters. Most of the documents in the DNSA collection were obtained through the use of the US Freedom of Information Act. | |
| Dissertations & Theses With more than 2 million entries, Proquest Dissertations & Theses (PQD&T) is the single, central, authoritative resource for information about doctoral dissertations and master's theses. Dissertations published from 1980 forward include 350-word abstracts written by the author. Master's theses published from 1988 forward include 150-word abstracts. | |
| Early American Newspapers, Series I Series I offers more than 700 historical American newspapers from 23 states and the District of Columbia printed between 1690 and 1876 and is based on Clarence S. Brigham's "History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690-1820" and other authoritative bibliographies. | |
| Early Encounters in North America: Peoples, Cultures, and the Environment Documents the relationships among peoples in North America from 1534-1850. The collection focuses on personal accounts and provides unique perspectives from all of the protagonists, including traders, slaves, missionaries, explorers, soldiers, native peoples, and officials, both men and women. The project brings coherence to a wide range of published and unpublished accounts, including narratives, diaries, journals, and letters. | |
| ebrary Academic Complete ebrary and Pepperdine University Libraries have partnered to bring you online access to over 32,000 authoritative titles with concentrations in Business and Economics, Computers and Technology, Humanities, the Social Sciences, and more. | |
| EBSCOhost databases EBSCOhost is a powerful online reference system accessible via the Internet. It offers a variety of proprietary full-text databases and popular databases from leading information providers. The comprehensive databases range from general reference collections to specially designed, subject-specific databases for public, academic, medical, corporate and school libraries. | |
| Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy (2d ed. 2002) Essays by subject experts treat concepts and doctrines, policymaking, commerce and science, human rights and arms control, with specific articles on topics ranging from anti-imperialism to environmental diplomacy, from refugee policies to terrorism and countermeasures. Also includes a chronology. | |
| The Encyclopedia of American Studies The Encyclopedia of American Studies brings together a wide range of disciplines related to the history and cultures of the United States, from pre-colonial days to the present. It features broad, synthetic articles covering areas such as history, literature, art, photography, film, architecture, urban studies, ethnicity, race, gender, economics, politics, wars, consumer culture, and global America; includes over 660 online, searchable articles and bibliographies. | |
| Essay and General Literature Index (Wilson) A bibliographic database that cites essays and articles contained in collections of essays and miscellaneous works focusing on the humanities and social sciences, with subject coverage ranging from economics, political science, and history to criticism of literary works, drama, and film. | |
| Gale Encyclopedia of Multicultural America (2d ed. 2000) Contains 8,000 to 12,000 word essays on specific culture groups in the United States, emphasizing religions, holidays, customs, and languages in addition to providing information on historical background and settlement patterns. Also covers ethnoreligious groups such as Jews, Chaldeans, and Amish. Each essay lists organizations and research centers; name, address, and contact information for periodicals, radio, and television stations; and a further readings section. | |
| Gale Virtual Reference Library A database of encyclopedias and specialized reference sources for multidisciplinary research. | |
| Google Scholar Search for relevant scholarly literature across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. | |
| Grove Art Online Covers all aspects of the visual arts worldwide from prehistory to the present day. All 45,050 articles from the print edition are accessible by keyword search and include over 40,000 links to important art images in galleries and museums around the world. | |
| HAPI Online The Hispanic American Periodical Index (HAPI) provides access to over 265,000 journal article citations about Central America, South America, the Caribbean, Mexico, Brazil, and Hispanics/Latinos in the United States from 1970 to the present. | |
| Historical Abstracts Reference guide to the history of the world from 1450 to the present (excluding the United States and Canada) includes over 600,000 annotated bibliographic citations to articles and book reviews in over 2000 journals, plus citations to abstracts of dissertations completed worldwide of particular interest for historical research. Available online articles are provided by J-STOR and Project Muse, to which Historical Abstracts provides a direct link. | |
| In the First Person In the First Person is an index to English language personal narratives, including letters, diaries, memoirs, autobiographies, and oral histories. Some are available on the Web, some through Pepperdine's subscriptions to Alexander Street Press collections, and some are held by repositories and archives around the world. Perform in-depth field and keyword searches across letters, diaries, oral histories, memoirs, and autobiographies within Alexander Street Press databases and more than one million pages of editorially selected materials spanning 400 years. | |
| JSTOR Includes an extensive archive of journals in 30 subject disciplines in the Arts and Sciences, including classical studies, ecology, economics, history, language and literature, mathematics, music, the history and study of art and architecture, cultural studies, film, folklore, performing arts, philosophy, political science, sociology, and religion. Records are presented in high-resolution page images in combination with full-text searching. | |
| LexisNexis Primary Sources in U.S. History Access to a variety of primary and secondary materials covering the colonial era to the present day. New documents are added to the service quarterly. | |
| Literature Resource Center The Literature Resource Center is a literature reference database that combines biographical, bibliographical, and contextual information to deliver a resource package on authors and their works (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, history, and journalism). It includes information from the following works: Contemporary Authors, Dictionary of Literary Biography, Contemporary Literary Criticism, Classical and Medieval Literature and Criticism, Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Shakespeare Criticism, Drama Criticism, Poetry Criticism, Short Story Criticism, and Literature Criticism 1400-1800. | |
| Los Angeles Times (Historic) Every issue from 1881-1985 includes the complete paper -cover-to-cover- with full-page and article images in downloadable PDF. | |
| MLA International Bibliography MLA International Bibliography is an index of journal articles, books and dissertations. Produced by the Modern Language Association, the electronic version of the Bibliography dates back to the 1920s and contains over 1.8 million citations from more than 4,400 journals and series and 1,000 book publishers. Coverage is international and subjects include literature, language and linguistics, folklore, literary theory and criticism, dramatic arts, as well as the historical aspects of printing and publishing. Listings on rhetoric and composition and the history, theory and practice of teaching language and literature are also included. The MLA Directory of Periodicals and the association's proprietary thesaurus are included. | |
| netLibrary A collection of recent books in electronic format; some older books in the public domain are also available. Note for Mac users: to view netLibrary books properly, you will need to install a browser plug-in found at http://www.schubert-it.com/pluginpdf/. | |
| New York Times (Historic) Includes not only news, editorials, letters to the editor, obituaries, and birth and marriage announcements, but also historical photos, stock photos, and advertisements. Every issue from 1851-2003 includes the complete paper -cover-to-cover- with full-page and article images in downloadable PDF. | |
| North American Immigrant Letters/Diaries North American Immigrant Letters/Diaries consists of personal narratives such as letters, diaries, pamphlets, autobiographies, and oral histories, including several thousand indexed and searchable pages of Ellis Island Oral History interviews. The materials begin around 1840 and extend to the present, focusing heavily on the period from 1920 to 1980. People from many countries are represented, including more recent waves of immigrants from Latin America and Asia. IMLD provides perspectives both on North America and on the immigrants? countries of origin. | |
| North American Women's Letters and Diaries Spanning more than 300 years, the database presents the personal experiences of some 1325 women. The collection includes approximately 150,000 pages of letters and diaries from Colonial times to 1950, including 6,000 pages of previously unpublished manuscripts and 1,500 bibliographies. The material is drawn from more than 600 sources, including journal articles, pamphlets, newsletters, monographs, and conference proceedings and represents all age groups and life stages, a wide range of ethnicities, many geographic regions, the famous, and the not so famous. | |
| Oxford African American Studies Center Contains over 7,500 articles by top scholars and hundreds of primary source documents, images, maps, and charts and tables. | |
| Oxford English Dictionary The accepted authority on the evolution of the English language over the last millennium: the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over half a million words, both present and past. It traces the usage of words through 2.5 million quotations from a wide range of international English language sources. | |
| Philosopher's Index Provides indexing and abstracts from books and journals of philosophy and related fields. Covers the areas of ethics, aesthetics, social philosophy, political philosophy, epistemology, and metaphysic logic as well as material on the philosophy of law, religion, science, history, education, and language. | |
| Primary Sources in African American History (LexisNexis) LexisNexis African American History is a collection of documents pertaining to African American history and women's studies, including guides to microforms. Using either the keyword search, subject search or browse option, users are able to access primary sources such as pictures and images, government documents, manuscripts, speeches, autobiographies and more. | |
| Project MUSE Provides online access to the full-text of over 300 scholarly journals in the arts and humanities, social sciences, and mathematics covering the fields of literature and criticism, history, the visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, gender studies. Includes hypertext links for efficient navigation among article bibliographies, citations, endnotes, author biographies and illustrations Project MUSE is a powerful research tool, allowing users to perform keyword and Boolean searching; search full text across all journals in the database, selected journal titles, or in just a single title; search the tables of contents of articles and book reviews by author and title as well as by Library of Congress subject headings. | |
| ProQuest databases ProQuest is organized into databases of related newspapers, magazines, and academic journals that you can use to find articles. The information in each database varies, depending on its focus. There are three types of ProQuest databases: non-historical databases, historical databases, and standalone databases. Non-historical databases, such as Research Library contain general reference information. These databases are cross-searchable, meaning you can search across multiple non-historical databases at the same time. Historical databases, such as New York Times (Historic), contain historical information. You can search multiple historical databases, but you cannot search historical and non-historical databases together. | |
| ProQuest Religion Religious news and commentary, details on doctrines and philosophies, and reports on religious history and related archeology; includes both formal theological studies and commentary on topics of general interest from the perspectives of specific religions. Citations and abstracts for nearly 120 titles; full-text, full-image or Text+Graphics available for most. | |
| PsycINFO PsycINFO contains nearly 2.3 million citations and summaries of journal articles, book chapters, books, dissertations and technical reports, all in the field of psychology. Journal coverage, which spans from 1887 to present, includes international material selected from more than 2,100 periodicals in over 25 languages. More than 60,000 records are added each year. It also includes information about the psychological aspects of related disciplines such as medicine, psychiatry, nursing, sociology, education, pharmacology, physiology, linguistics, anthropology, business and law. | |
| Readers' Guide Retrospective Readers' Guide Retrospective, produced by The H. W. Wilson Company, is a database containing comprehensive indexing of the most popular general-interest periodicals published in the United States and reflects the history of 20th century America. Current coverage for this database includes the years 1890 through 1982. | |
| RefWorks RefWorks is a Web-based bibliography and database manager that allows users to create their own personal database by importing references from text files or online databases. Users can use these references in writing their papers and automatically format the paper and the bibliography in seconds. As a web-based product, RefWorks is available to users across various platforms including Windows, Mac, and Unix. Pepperdine users also have access to Write-N-Cite, which is a utility which allows Windows, Mac, and Linux users to run an abbreviated version of RefWorks in their word processors and RefShare, which allows the sharing of RefWorks folders with others. | |
| Religion periodicals (ProQuest) Religious news and commentary, details on doctrines and philosophies, and reports on religious history and related archeology; includes both formal theological studies and commentary on topics of general interest from the perspectives of specific religions. Citations and abstracts for 109 titles; full-text, full-image or Text+Graphics available for most. | |
| Research Library Research Library provides access to popular and scholarly journals in the social sciences, humanities, business, health, education and general science. It includes citations and abstracts for over 3,820 journals from 1972 forward. Full-text and/or full-image is available for over 2,500 journals from 1972 forward. | |
| Richmond Daily Dispatch Full-text searching of all issues of the American Civil War-era newspaper, the Richmond Daily Dispatch from November 1860 through December 1865. | |
| Sage Journals Online Provides online access to the full text of individual SAGE journals. SAGE Publications publishes over 460 journals in Business, Communication, Humanities, Social Sciences, and Science, Technology and Medicine. | |
| The Times Digital Archive (1785 - 1985) Search through the complete digital edition of The Times (London), using keyword searching and hit-term highlighting to retrieve full facsimile images of either a specific article or a complete page. The entire newspaper is captured, with all articles, advertisements and illustrations/photos divided into categories to facilitate searching. | |
| Vanderbilt Television News Archive The Archive focuses on creating, preserving and providing access to the news broadcasts from the U.S. national television networks since August 5, 1968. The core of the collection consists of regularly scheduled newscasts from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and Fox News. The database currently includes 835,000 records, including abstracts at the story level of regular evening news programs and catalog records for each special news program. Streaming video is available to a limited part of the collection (CNN News). | |
| Women and Social Movements Scholar's Edition Women and Social Movements currently includes 76 document projects with more than 2,200 documents, 30,000 pages of additional full-text documents, and 1,640 primary authors. It includes as well book, film and website reviews, notes from the archives, and teaching tools. The Scholar?s Edition will include The Women's Commission Reports, an archive of the publications and documents of local, state, and federal Commissions on the Status of Women from 1963 to the present. At this time, the database includes the full text of 590 reports and publications issued by commissions in more than thirty states. When complete this collection will contain 75,000 pages of publications from commissions in all fifty states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Virgin Islands. The publications include reports, pamphlets, posters, and ephemeral materials. | |
| WorldCat OCLC's Online Union Catalog contains bibliographic records of all types of materials owned by libraries around the world. WorldCat covers materials dating back to the 11th century, includes holdings information from libraries in 45 countries and is updated daily. | |
| Worldmark Encyclopedia of the Nations (12th ed. 2007) Presents information on 200 countries and dependencies from around the world. Entries discuss a variety of topics in detail, from banking and securities to climate, from government data to demographic statistics. Also includes biographical essays on national leaders. | |
