Research Guides: History Research Guide: World History

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The Mansfield Library holds a large number of reference sources covering a range of topics. Consider using these keywords as part of your search: bibliography, biographical, dictionary, encyclopedia, cyclopaedia, companion to, and handbook of.

Library Databases

Use your NetID and password to access library databases off campus.

Burney Collection - Seventeenth & Eighteenth Century Newspapers This link opens in a new window
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Full text digitized newspapers, pamphlets, proclamations, and newsbooks from 17th and 18th century English news media. Mainly materials published in London, with some papers from provincial England, Ireland, Scotland, the American colonies, Europe, and India. Note: Access the collection from Gale Primary Sources to cross-search a wider range of digital collections.
Dissertations & Theses Global, ProQuest This link opens in a new window
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Index to dissertations and theses from over 3,000 institutions in 88 countries. Full text coverage spans from 1743-present, with citation coverage dating back to 1637. Note: Dissertations & Theses Global may also be searched and accessed via Web of Science, as well as OneSearch.
Early English Books Online (EEBO) This link opens in a new window
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From the first book published in English through the age of Spenser and Shakespeare, this collection contains more than 125,000 titles listed in Pollard & Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640) and Wing's Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700) and their revised editions, as well as the Thomason Tracts (1640-1661) collection and the Early English Books Tract Supplement.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) This link opens in a new window
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Based on the English Short Title Catalogue, this database offers searchable full text of over 180,000 books, tracts, and printed ephemera published between 1701 and 1800. Most works were published in English in the UK, but thousands are from elsewhere and some are in foreign languages.
Electronic Enlightenment This link opens in a new window
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Full text edited correspondence from the most eminent thinkers and writers of the early 17th to mid-19th century, linking people across Europe, Asia and the Americas. Access limited to 1 user at a time.
"Too many concurrent users" indicates that the database is already being used by the maximum allowable number of users. Try to access the database at a different time.

It is recommended that users of this database do the following to limit concurrency turnaways and to allow for other users to gain access to the database: 1) Ensure all browsers are set to enable cookies or the system may log each individual piece of content on a page as a new request and register it as a separate session; 2) Log out completely after finishing a session. If the log out button is not selected upon exiting the database, it may take up to 20 minutes for the session to expire; 3) Use only one open browser per session. Multiple browser windows may be logged as separate sessions.
Historical Abstracts with Full Text (EBSCO) This link opens in a new window
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This database provides citations and abstracts to history-focused articles, book reviews, dissertations and some book chapters on countries around the world EXCEPT the United States and Canada. Access is limited to six concurrent users.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
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Scholarly full-text journals in the arts, humanities, social sciences, business, and sciences. Excellent depth of research. Searches can be limited to a specific discipline.
ARTstor on JSTOR
Existing ARTstor logins automatically work on JSTOR. The separate artstor.org platform will be available until Aug 1, 2024, when it is scheduled to be retired.

Open Access books on JSTOR
More than 10,000 open access (OA) books from 125+ publishers, including Brill, Cornell University Press, University College of London, and University of California Press.

19th Century British Pamphlets
Nearly 26,000 pamphlets from collections in seven universities spanning more than one million pages. Brings together a corpus of primary sources for the study of sociopolitical and economic factors impacting 19th-century Britain.

New Collections Added Aug 2023
Thematic Collections
Three collections focusing on emerging areas of research and containing multiple types of content, including journals and open research reports. Collections include:
•Lives of Literature - Academic journals devoted to the deep study of writers and texts associated with core literary movements.
•Security Studies - Academic and open policy research on international and national security problems and foreign policy issues.
•Sustainability - Academic and open policy research on environmental stresses and their impact on society. Looks at sustainability and resilience through a broad lens spanning more than 30 disciplines.

Primary Sources
Global Plants
A growing collection of nearly three million high-resolution type plant specimens and related materials from over 300 community contributors around the world.

Struggles for Freedom: Southern Africa
27,000 objects and 190,000 pages of documents and images related to the liberation struggles and end of Apartheid in Southern Africa during the 20th Century, with an emphasis on Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.

World Heritage Sites: Africa
More than 86,000 objects of visual, contextual, and spatial documentation of African heritage and rock art sites.
Making of Modern Law: Legal Treatises, 1800-1926 This link opens in a new window
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Full text of nearly 22,000 legal treatises on U.S. and British law including casebooks, local practice manuals, form books, works for lay readers, pamphlets, letters, speeches, and other works from the influential writers and legal scholars of the era. Note: Access the collection from Gale Primary Sources to cross-search a wider range of digital collections.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography This link opens in a new window
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An illustrated collection of more than 57,000 specially written biographies of the men and women from around the world who shaped all aspects of Britain's past.
"Too many concurrent users" indicates that the database is already being used by the maximum allowable number of users. Try to access the database at a different time.

It is recommended that users of this database do the following to limit concurrency turnaways and to allow for other users to gain access to the database: 1) Ensure all browsers are set to enable cookies or the system may log each individual piece of content on a page as a new request and register it as a separate session; 2) Log out completely after finishing a session. If the log out button is not selected upon exiting the database, it may take up to 20 minutes for the session to expire; 3) Use only one open browser per session. Multiple browser windows may be logged as separate sessions.

Web Resources

British History Online
BHO is a digital library of key printed primary and secondary sources for the history of Britain and Ireland, with a primary focus on the period between 1300 and 1800.
Court of Chivalry, 1634-1640
The aim of this site is to make available to scholars, researchers, local historians and genealogists the records of the Court of Chivalry during its heyday between 1634 and 1640. Over this period the court dealt with well over a thousand cases of which it has been possible to recover details of 738.
Proceedings of the Old Bailey, London 1674-1834
A fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London's central criminal court.
Scottish Archive Network
Internet access to the written history of Scotland.