The main search tools for finding books, articles, databases, archival collections, and more at Yale (and beyond) can all be found on the "Find, Request, and Use" page of the library's website. Here are a few quick refreshers, but be sure to visit the page for a full overview:
Background or "reference" sources are a great place to start your research. Reference works include bibliographies, scholarly encyclopedias, dictionaries, handbooks, and other sources that provide overviews of topics and suggestions for further reading.
A large collection of annotated bibliographies, often with citations to both primary and secondary sources. Includes the article "Witchcraft in the Atlantic World" and other articles relating to witchcraft.
Includes The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America.
The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History
A scholarly encyclopedia, often really useful for a variety of U.S. history research topics. Each article has a discussion of the literature, including primary sources -- a great starting point for finding more sources. The articles are arranged into subfields such as Colonial History and Cultural History. Includes, for instance, the article, "The Salem Witch Trials."
Includes key reference sources from Cambridge University Press like the Cambridge Companions and Cambridge Histories. Individual titles include The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West.
American National Biography Online
A helpful resource for biographical information on prominent historical figures.
Get It @ Yale brings together three services of the Yale Library that greatly facilitate research work: Borrow Direct, Interlibrary Loan, and Scan & Deliver. Borrow Direct will furnish rapid delivery of titles from a small group of partner libraries if the book isn't available at Yale. Interlibrary Loan (ILL) is a larger library partnership that can provide scans of journal articles that aren't available at Yale as well as loans of physical items such as books and microforms. Scan & Deliver will fulfill requests to have journal articles, book chapters, and limited pages from microforms held in the Yale Library scanned by members of the library staff and provided to you electronically. All of the Get It @ Yale services help to make your research more efficient, so please don't hesitate to use them or to reach out with any questions about them as you work on your essay!
Subject-specific databases are a key resource for finding secondary literature, including the latest scholarly journal articles in the field, and the main subject databases for finding historical literature are:
Searching these databases will allow you to check for the latest scholarly articles, reviews of books, citations to book chapters, and more in a wide array of historical journals. Please note: the full text of articles will not always be available in these databases. If you see the "YaleLinks" icon instead of a PDF, click on the icon to discover whether we have online access to the article.
Another potentially useful subject database for scholarly literature in religious studies is:
And, don’t forget, the library catalog -- i.e., Orbis and Books+ -- is always a useful tool for locating secondary sources!
James Kessenides, Kaplanoff Librarian for American History