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HF 231/232 : Western Civilization I & II: Secondary Sources

This is a course guide for Western Civilization I & II.

Introduction

Secondary sources provide second-hand information and commentary from researchers. These are the books and articles that you find in the library and in the databases that tell you about something that happened in history. This page provides an overview of the types of secondary sources you can access through the library, as well as a peek at some of the items in our collection that may prove useful as you research your topic of choice.

Reference Items

The library has many reference resources. These include items such as encyclopedias or dictionaries and may be multi-volume sets. When trying to locate topics in reference books you will either look through the body of the book alphabetically, or the index by topic. When searching the catalogue for reference books enter the time period or geographical location or general topic and the term encyclopedias or dictionaries in a general keyword search. For example, middle ages encyclopedias produces the Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages. Here are just some examples of other reference items in our collection.

From our Collection for HF 231

A sampling of resources from our collection relevant to topics in HF 231:

Library Databases for History

Although not all of these databases are history focused, they provide a sizeable collection of secondary sources within the discipline. For example, searching French Revolution in Academic Search Complete produces over 1600 full text, peer reviewed hits. We encourage to explore our full A-Z database list as others may also prove useful to your specific topic.

From our collection for HF 232

A sampling of resources from our collection relevant to topics in HF 232: