You can save time and stay organized by using a Research Organizer to plan and keep track of your research. Take a few minutes to fill in the first two boxes of the organizer.
HIST 1100 Research Organizer - open and make a copy in your own Google Drive.
Tertiary sources provide overviews and background information, including key facts, dates, people, place and issues associated with historical topics.They are often known as background or reference sources.
You can find tertiary sources on the Background Sources tab of this guide, or by searching in LibrarySearch and filtering by Resource Type: Reference Entries
Scholarly secondary sources in the discipline of History:
Types of scholary secondary sources
Try improving your searches by:
Still looking for information or overwhelmed by LibrarySearch results? Use one of history-specific journal article databases on the ARTICLES tab of this guide.
America History and Life: An important resource for American history research. Try the advanced search function, which allows you to search for articles discussing specific historical time periods, or use the side filters to narrow results by date, subject or type of publication.
Try searching within a relevant journal for article on your topic:
You can find tertiary (also known as background or reference) sources:
When searching, use keywords that represent only the important aspects of your topic, and avoid sentence fragments
Good search:
"nuclear anxiety" "cold war" America
Poor search:
the effects of nuclear anxiety on Cold War America
Finding too much?
Finding too little?
For better searching, think of multiple ways to describe your topic and switch terms occasionally e.g. Atomic Age vs. Nuclear Age, World War II vs. Second World War
To find tertiary / background sources
Primary sources are documents or other items created at the time in history under study, generally by a person or group that witnessed, participated in or contributed to the events of the day in some way.
Primary sources take many forms, and the most appropriate or helpful type of primary source will depend on your topic. Some types of primary sources that are broadly helpful in undergraduate History courses, and relatively easy to find, include:
Visit a primary source collection relevant to this course:
Other ways to find primary sources
Dates: If the search tool offers the option to limit by date, use it. Be very specific to the time period you are studying, especially with newspapers
Search terms: Use terminology from the time period and perspective you are studying - e.g., Great War vs. World War; Cuba Crisis vs. October Crisis; experiment with different terms, e.g. nuclear vs. atomic
Advanced search tools: Try going to the advanced search and searching for your terms in the title of the articles, or look for the option to search in only specific types of documents (e.g., only front page news articles)
Call Number: This is the address for a physical library item, so you can find it on the shelf. In MRU's LibrarySearch, it is displayed below the title of the book. You can follow the locate icon for a map to the book on its shelf.
MRU Chicago Style Citation Resources: Includes a guide for using Chicago style, examples, and instructions for inserting footnotes.