U.S. History and American Studies 

Finding secondary source materials relevant to your project - what is called conducting a "literature review" - is an essential part of any research project. Unfortunately, students often pay too little attention to this crucial step. The importance of locating secondary sources is not simply to find background information for your project, though this is undoubtedly important. The purpose of the literature review is to identify a scholarly conversation in which you are going to situate your research. This is called positioning your argument.  Historical scholarship is an ongoing conversation among scholars and original essays represent an effort to participate in a scholarly conversation. 

For more on this, read Chapter 3, "From Topics to Questions" and Chapter 4, "From Questions to Problems," in The Craft of Research (3rd edition, Chicago, 2008)

Putting together a high-quality list of books and journal articles on a subject (doing a literature review) usually starts with a book recommendation from an adviser, something you came across on a syllabus, searching amazon.com, or talking with friends. All of this is fine.  But there are more systematic things you can do to supplement this organic and sometimes unwieldy process.

One thing you can do is to find a high-quality reference source on the topic you are researching. The Yale University Library subscribes to several reference databases that allow you to search hundreds of reference articles. When you find relevant entries in encyclopedias, handbooks, dictionaries, or any other reference book, you are interested in the pointers to further reading in the entries every bit as much as you are interested in the article itself. The best reference databases for historians are:

• Blackwell Reference Online

This database contains nearly all of the volumes in Blackwell's excellent Companion series. Having it in a database is extremely helpful, because it allows you to search the entire Blackwell collection at once. To give you an idea of the quality of essays in this database, consider this contribution from Yale professor Matthew Frye Jacobson essay on ethnicity from A Companion to Post-1945 America (a volume edited by another Yale professor, Jean-Christophe Agnew). Blackwell publishes companion books on nearly every period and subfield of U.S. history.

• Gale Virtual Reference Library

This database provides access to a number of high-quality reference books, and allows you to search the entire database at once.

• Oxford Reference Online

The works just like the Gale Virtual Reference Library above, but includes access to the whole range of reference books published by Oxford University Press.

In addition to reference databases, also search the following two databases in order to find scholarly journal literature on your topic:

• JSTOR

You probably already use JSTOR, a popular database that provides full-text access to hundreds of important journals in an easy-to-use interface. But JSTOR is almost always out-of-date (on an average of five years) and you will want to supplement JSTOR searches with America History and Life, more of which below.

• America History and Life

American History and Life is fabulous. It indexes far more journals than JSTOR, and also includes books and dissertations. It's the essential database for historical literature reviews.

Assuming you have done your literature review and have found books related to your topic, you should have some idea as to what primary source materials should be available to you. That is to say, chasing down footnotes and looking at bibliographies in the back of books to see what other authors have used is a great way to find primary source collections. That said, here are some more ideas for when you don't know where else to turn.

A good overview of the types of tools to find primary source material, both at Yale and beyond, is found on this Primary Sources at Yale website. All of the sources listed have their relative strengths and weaknesses. Here are my favorites:

• Orbis is one of the best tools for finding primary sources at Yale.  Use the "more limits" feature to find primary sources.



• Yale Finding Aid Database is another tool for finding archival collections at Yale. 
  

• Worldcat is the most complete source for finding collections around the world.

• Archive Grid is also a great tool for finding collections, both at Yale and beyond, though it's not as complete as Worldcat.

• Archive Finder is another tool for finding manuscript collections.  The best use of Archive Finder is the repository search, which you can use to find archives in specific geographic locations.

Keep in mind that a very good - and often overlooked - source of primary source material at Yale can be found in the Microfilm Reading Room in the basement of Sterling Memorial Library. This link brings you to a list of major microfilm collections available in the Microfilm Reading Room.