National History Day in Iowa Workshops: Databases
This Guide is to help teachers and students prepare for their National History Day visit to the University of Iowa Libraries.
Database A-Z
-
Databases A-ZAlphabetical list of University of Iowa databases.
Databases - Secondary
-
America: History and Life This link opens in a new windowRECOMMEND USING CHROME; Covers the world's scholarly literature in United States and Canadian history. It includes article abstracts from 1700 journals and bibliographic citations of books and dissertations. The coverage is 1954- .
-
Historical Abstracts This link opens in a new windowHistorical Abstracts offers coverage of world history, from 1450 onward, outside the US and Canada. (The companion index for those countries is America: History and Life). Historical Abstracts provides citations with abstracts to articles in over 1,700 journals, published 1954 to the present. It also contains bibliographic citations to books and dissertations. Limited to 6 simultaneous users.
As of Sep 2023, we've received some reports from users encountering access issues while using Chrome. -
JSTOR (Journal Storage) This link opens in a new windowProvides image and full-text online access to back issues of selected scholarly journals in history, economics, political science, philosophy, mathematics and other fields of the humanities and social sciences. Consult the online tables of contents for holdings, as coverage varies for each titles. Journals may be searched across multiple titles as well as by the individual titles below
Note that this database comprises mostly back issues: for most titles the JSTOR database does NOT include full text of the most recent 3 to 5 years. -
Project Muse This link opens in a new windowWith full text for well over 300 journal titles from university publishers, Project MUSE covers the fields of literature and criticism, history, the visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, gender studies, and many others. Coverage begins in 1995.
-
SPORTDiscus This link opens in a new windowSPORTDiscus offers comprehensive, bibliographic coverage of sport, fitness and related disciplines. This database contains over 650,000 records with journal and monograph coverage going back to 1800. The content also consists of multi-disciplinary, international references from journal and magazine articles, books, book chapters, conference proceedings and more. SPORTDiscus is provided by the Sport Information Resource Centre.
-
Readers' Guide Retrospective This link opens in a new windowA comprehensive index to the most popular general-interest periodicals published in the United States. This database is available through WilsonWeb and covers the time period from 1890-1982. (Formerly on WilsonWeb)
Databases - Primary (selected)
UI Librarians have compiled a list of electronic resources to help with your research. Resources are only accessible in the UI Libraries with your Guest Access login and password.
-
American Indian Movement and Native American Radicalism This link opens in a new windowThe American Indian Movement and Native American Radicalism includes FBI documentation on the evolution of AIM as an organization of social protest, as well as valuable documentation on the 1973 Wounded Knee standoff. Informant reports and materials collected by the Extremist Intelligence Section of the FBI provide insight into the motives, actions, and leadership of AIM and the development of Native American radicalism.
-
Black Freedom Struggle (ProQuest History Vault) This link opens in a new windowThe first Black Freedom module of the ProQuest History Vault consists of 37 collections from the records of federal government agencies, covering The Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century from the perspective of the men, women, and sometimes even children, who waged one of the most inspiring social movements in American history.
-
Black Thought and Culture: African Americans from Colonial Times to the Present This link opens in a new windowBlack Thought and Culture is a single source for the published works of numerous historically important black leaders. Along with well-known works, the collection features approximately 5,000 pages of unique, fugitive, and never-before-published materials. When complete, Black Thought and Culture will provide approximately 100,000 pages of monographs, essays, articles, speeches, and interviews written by leaders within the black community from the earliest times to 1975. Black teachers, artists, politicians, religious leaders, athletes, war veterans, entertainers, and other leaders form the mainstay of this corpus. The collection is intended for research in black studies, political science, American history, music, literature, and art.
-
Periodicals Archive Online This link opens in a new windowCompanion to: Periodicals index online. Archive of hundreds of digitized journals published in the arts, humanities and social sciences.
-
Popular Culture in Britain and America, 1950 - 1975: Rock and Roll, Counterculture, Peace and Protest This link opens in a new windowRock and Roll explores the dynamic period of social, political and cultural change between 1950 and 1975. The resource offers thousands of colour images of manuscript and rare printed material as well as photographs, ephemera and memorabilia from this exciting period in our recent history. Topics include student protests, civil rights, consumerism, and the Vietnam War.
-
Sixties: Primary Documents and Personal Narratives, 1960 to 1974 This link opens in a new windowThe Sixties brings the 1960s alive through diaries, letters, autobiographies and other memoirs, written and oral histories, manifestos, memorabilia, and scholarly commentary. With 150,000 pages of material at completion, this searchable collection is the definitive electronic resource for students and scholars researching this important period in American history, culture, and politics. The database currently has over 34,000 pages.
-
U.S. Declassified Documents Online (formerly Declassified Documents Reference System) This link opens in a new windowU.S. Declassified Documents Online provides immediate access to a broad range of previously classified federal records spanning the twentieth and twenty first centuries. The collection brings together the most sensitive documents from all the presidential libraries and numerous executive agencies in a single, easily searchable database.
-
We Were Prepared for the Possibility of Death: Freedom Riders in the South, 1961 This link opens in a new window“We Were Prepared for the Possibility of Death”: Freedom Riders in the South, 1961 is a source for African American history, radical studies, civil rights, political science and more, including surveillance reports, chronologies, and witness statements. These materials provide unique (and in some cases recently declassified) insight into the Freedom Rides, the Kennedy administration and the segregated South.
-
Women and Social Movements, International— 1840 to Present This link opens in a new windowOnline archive of published and manuscript primary sources focusing on women’s international activism since the mid-nineteenth century. The archive includes proceedings of women’s international conferences, books, pamphlets, articles from newspapers and journals, as well as correspondence, diary entries, and memoirs. Also contains numerous online publications of contemporary Non-Governmental Organizations.
-
Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 This link opens in a new windowA set of learning modules in the form of mini-monographs, each of which is organized around a specific question about a single social movement. Each module contains fifteen to twenty documents that address the question.
Biographical Information
-
Biographical DictionaryThis dictionary covers more than 28,000 notable men and women who have shaped our world from ancient times to the present day.
-
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography This link opens in a new windowOxford DNB is a collection of 55,000 specially written biographies, which describe the lives of people who shaped the history of the British Isles and beyond.
-
Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History This link opens in a new windowThe Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History, edited by Bonnie G. Smith, captures the experiences of women throughout history in a far-reaching, four-volume work. With over 650 biographies of influential women and over 600 topical articles covering topics such as geography and history, culture and society, organizations, movements, and gender studies, Women in World History is the definitive reference work in the field.
-
University of Iowa Libraries Manuscripts and Manuscript CollectionsMore than 10,000 letters or manuscript pieces, principally from the 19th and 20th centuries: agriculture, labor, U.S. Vice President Henry A. Wallace and his era, journalism, popular culture, politics (especially Iowa), railroads, vaudeville, movies and television, and the American Civil War. Major literary manuscript collections relate to British writers Leigh Hunt, Edmund Blunden, Angus Wilson, and Iris Murdoch, and to over 100 Iowa authors.