Western Carolina University

WCU is a University of North Carolina Campus

History Databases

America: History & Life (1964-present)
The premier index to journals covering the history and culture of the United States and Canada. Covers 2,000 journals, identifying articles, book reviews, media reviews, and dissertations. Includes links to full-text articles.

Academic Search Premier (1980-present, with a scattering of pre-1980)
Search over 8,000 journals, most of them scholarly. Over 4,000 journals are full-text. Covers all topics, with a strong showing in history. An excellent starting point for any search for articles. Very useful for finding reviews of books published from 1980 to the present.

Humanities & Social Sciences Retrospective Index (1907-1984)
Search nearly 1,200 scholarly journals as far back as 1907. Indexes over 100 core history journals. English-language, as well as French and German. Continued by Humanities Index, a print index described below.

JSTOR
Search for your topic in the full text of over 500 scholarly journals, 60 of them history journals. JSTOR’s strength is its archival nature, with cover-to-cover full text back to most journals’ first issues: The American Historical Review back to 1895; Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 1838-2001; The English Historical Review, 1886-2001. Very useful for reviews of scholarly history books.

American Periodical Series Online
American magazines and journals published from colonial days to the dawn of the 20th century. APS Online includes searchable digitized images of the pages. All full-text.

HeritageQuest Online
Intended for genealogical research, but also valuable for researchers of local history. Includes PERSI, an index to genealogy and local history journals.

Military & Government Collection (indexing:1984-present, full-text:1989-present)
Designed to offer current news pertaining to all branches of the military, this database offers a thorough collection of military titles, trade publications, and news weeklies. It also includes abstracts and indexing for nearly 400 titles providing cover-to-cover full text for nearly 350. The database also includes full text for 245 pamphlets.

Print Indexes

C.R.I.S.: Combined Retrospective Index Set to Journals in History, 1838-1974.
Selective indexing of more than 900 journals; provides topical arrangement within geographical areas. Also includes author index.
REF/Index Table

Poole's Index to Periodical Literature (1802-1906)
Subject access to about 590,000 articles from 479 American and English periodicals.
REF/Index Table

International Index to Periodicals (1907-65), Social Sciences & Humanities Index (1965-75), Humanities Index (1974-2001)
These three titles index articles in scholarly journals, including core history titles. The database Humanities & Social Sciences Retrospective Index is the online version, but stops coverage in 1984.
REF/Index

Newspaper Databases

America's Historical Newspapers (1690-1922)
Available from NewsBank through Hunter Library
Search or browse the full-text of over 1,000 early American newspapers published between 1690 and 1922. This database includes titles from all fifty states and there are nine titles for North Carolina alone. Also included are several early newspapers in languages such as French and German.

New York Times Index (1851-present)
Subject index to the New York Times, a prime source for U.S. history. Use in conjunction with the New York Times Historical database.
REF/Index Shelf

New York Times Historical (1851-2003)
Available from ProQuest through Hunter Library
Search every word on every page of every issue of the The New York Times from its first issue, in 1851, through the last day of 2003: articles, editorials, captions, classified, and display ads. Articles are in the original format.