HIST H217: Nature of History  

Welcome to H217! This guide points you in the direction of some great library resources for completing assignments and writing research papers on historical topics. Many of these resources are available from the library's homepage at http://www.lib.ipfw.edu/, so you may want to bookmark both the homepage and this guide.

Here are some resources to get you started:

Helmke Library self-guided tour

Doing Library Research

Foraging for Information Worksheet (PDF)

When conducting historical research:

FIRST. Use specialized encyclopedias, handbooks, guides, and textbooks to identify who, what, when, where, how and why.

SECOND. Use the references cited at the end of chapters or articles in textbooks, specialized encyclopedias, handbooks, and guides, and specialized bibliographies to identify the core scholarly research on your topic or research problem.

THIRD. Use databases and indexes to update core scholarly research with current scholarly material.

FOURTH. Identify and obtain as much primary source material as possible. A primary source documents first-hand accounts or first recordings of events. The historian using a number of such primary sources produces a secondary source. Examples of primary source materials include letters, diaries, memoirs, speeches, contemporaneous newspaper accounts, government documents, statistics, photographs, etc. Consult the History librarian for help in locating primary source materials.