History Databases
- America: History and Life -- database that covers the history of the United States and Canada. It includes key English-language historic journals, selected historic journals from major countries, state and local history journals, and selected relevant journals in the social sciences and humanities.
- Historical Abstracts -- this database includes key history journals from major countries, as well as relevant selected journals from the social sciences and humanities. Covers world history outside of the United States and Canada. All abstracts are in English.
Important Archival Databases for Doing Historical Research in IR
- American State Papers, 1789-1838 -- this collection includes over 6,000 publications, including every legislative and executive document of the first fourteen U.S. Congresses, in addition to materials such as speeches and messages of Presidents Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison. Covers historical documents prior to the U.S. Congressional Serial Set [see below].
- Archives Direct -- site contains a suite of collections sourced from The National Archives, Kew - the UK government's official archive. Includes collections on the Middle East, China, and the Richard Nixon Era.
- Archives Unbound: Foreign Relations between Latin America and the Caribbean States, 1930-1944 -- organized by country, this collection covers a wide range of viewpoints on political, social and economic issues. It sheds light on the foreign relations interactions between Central American and South American countries — with coverage of the Caribbean, Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Users will find memoranda, cables, correspondence, reports and analyzes, and treaties.
- Archives Unbound: Nicaragua: Political Instability and U.S. Intervention -- this collection provides documentation on the almost continual political instability in Nicaragua through the State Department's internal documentation, as well as correspondence between the Department and other federal departments and agencies, Congress, and private individuals and organizations; telegrams, airgrams, instructions, inquiries, studies, memoranda, situation reports, translations, special reports, plans, and official and unofficial correspondence. Date Range: 1910-1933.
- Archives Unbound: Revolucion en Mexico, the 1917 Constitution and Its Aftermath -- this collection of U.S. State Department records consists of political and military documents relating to the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath -1910-1924. These unique and insightful records provide an unprecedented look at the Mexican Revolution, which began in 1910 and continued sporadically until the new Constitution was adopted in 1917, through to and including the election of Calles.
- Archives Unbound: Revolution in Honduras and American Business: The Quintessential “Banana Republic” -- this collection sheds detail to both the political and financial machinations of the fruit companies, but also the graft and corruption of the national government, the American banking community’s loans, the U.S. government’s response and the various aborted popular/revolutionary uprisings.
- Chatham House Online Archive -- provides a searchable, browsable research environment that enables users to explore approximately half a million pages and over ninety years of research, expert analysis, and commentary published in briefing papers, special reports, pamphlets, conference papers and books as well as the full-text of Chatham House's two flagship publications: International Affairs and The World Today. Additionally, the archive offers unique access to thousands of hours of audio recordings of Chatham House lectures and their fully searchable transcripts offering valuable insight into the thoughts and reasoning's of key figures in international affairs.
- CQ Press Congressional Collection -- data is presented with non-biased commentary and includes vital biographical and voting data for members of Congress, legislative information organized by topic, key votes, legislative analysis, interest group scores of members, encyclopedic information on Congress, and Supreme Court case summaries relating to the structure and powers of Congress dating back to 1945. Important resource for locating legislative involvement in foreign affairs.
- HeinOnline History of International Law -- includes more than 800 titles and 600,000 pages dating back to 1690 on international law subjects such as war and peace, the Nuremberg Trials, law of the sea, international arbitration, Hague Conferences and Conventions, and much more. Access by clicking on link in left-hand column.
- HeinOnline World Trials Library -- this collection includes more than 3,200 trials including complete sets of American State Trials, Howell's State Trials, and the Nuremburg Trials. It also includes famous trials from various law library trials collections. It contains trial transcripts, critical court documents, and trial-related resources such as full-text books and reports which analyze and debate the decisions of famous trials. Access by clicking on link in left-hand column.
- JSTOR -- a full text digital archive of core scholarly journals representing disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, most with complete back runs, some dating back to the late 17th century.
- NATO Archives Online -- open access site that contains over 23,000 declassified NATO documents, including Records of the International Military Staff (1949-59), press releases from 1961 to present, and NATO publications from 1952-2001. Searchable collections also include official documents, records, memorandum and notes of the North Atlantic Council, Military Committee and Standing Group reports and directives, and files highlight NATO’s role and involvement in the drafting, negotiating and eventual signature of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
- Political Extremism and Radicalism – covers a broad assortment of both far-right and radical left research focused on political extremism and radical thought. It offers a diverse mixture of materials, including periodicals, campaign propaganda, government records, oral histories, and various ephemera, which allow researchers to explore unorthodox social and political movements in new and innovative ways and to understand the impact they have had on today's society. The collections cover a period of just over a century (1900s to 2010s) when the world saw the formation of several civil rights movements, including for the rights of minorities, women's rights, and gay rights. It also encompasses the rise and fall of a number of peripheral groups deemed 'extreme' or 'radical' by contemporaries, such as anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, anti-war, communist or socialist, creationist, environmentalist, hate, holocaust denial, new left, survivalist, white supremacist, and white nationalist.
- Population Index on the Web -- the database provides a searchable and browsable access to books, journal articles, working papers, and other materials published in Population Index in the period 1986-2000. International in coverage, the database covers all aspects of research related to population and demographics. The complete journal collection is available in JSTOR.
- Propaganda and The Chinese Press – this is a wide-ranging archive of translated news for researchers seeking to understand the role Communist mass media played in Chinese culture, the Cold War, and 20th-century world history. This collection covers many topical categories such as the leaders of China, the Soviet Union and Russia, the United States, and other countries in addition to reports on China’s foreign and domestic affairs. Content facilitates understanding about the China Communist Party’s perspective on international issues and events.
- ProQuest History Vault -- provides access to millions of full-text/full-image primary source materials on widely studied topics in nineteenth and twentieth century American history. Source materials include letters, official memoranda, personal papers, photographs, scrapbooks, financial records, diaries, and much more. Current collections relevant to the study of American foreign affairs include:
- American Politics and Society from John F. Kennedy to Watergate
- Confidential U.S. State Department Central Files, Asia, 1960-1969
- FBI Confidential Files and Radical Politics in the U.S., 1945-1972
- Immigration: Records of the INS, 1880-1930
- New Deal and World War II
- Office of Strategic Services and State Department Intelligence and Research Reports, 1941-1961
- Socialist Party of America Papers, 1897-1976
- U.S. Diplomatic Post Records, 1914-1945
- Vietnam War and American Foreign Policy, 1960-1975
- World War I: British Foreign Office Political Correspondence, 1914-1920
- World War I: Records of the American Expeditionary Forces, and Diplomacy in the World War I Era, 1915-1927
- World War II Digital Archive
- ProQuest U.K. Parliamentary Papers: House of Commons -- access includes over 200,000 House of Commons sessional papers from 1715 to the present, with supplementary material back to 1688. Page images are provided, with full text searching for each paper.
- Records of the Kurds: Territory, Revolt, and Nationalism, 1831-1979 -- set of documents traces early insurgencies of the Kurdish people directed against regional and metropolitan powers, their inter-relations with neighboring tribes and other ethnic groups, while also depicting the extent of territories pertaining to the Kurds.
- Revolution and Protest Online -- explores the protest movements, revolutions, and civil wars that have transformed societies and human experience from the 18th century through the present. Organized around more than thirty events and areas, representing a variety of time periods, regions, and topics, this collection will include at completion 175 hours of video, 100,000 pages of printed materials.
- United States Congressional Serial Set -- commonly referred to as simply the Serial Set, this collection contains the House and Senate Documents and the House and Senate Reports. The reports are usually from congressional committees dealing with proposed legislation and issues under investigation. The documents include all other papers ordered printed by the House or Senate. Documents cover a wide variety of topics and may include reports of executive departments and independent organizations, reports of special investigations made for Congress, and annual reports of non-governmental organizations. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, executive-branch materials were also published in the Serial Set.
- Women in Politics Bibliographic Database -- provides access to books and articles produced throughout the world on the subject of women in politics before 2015. The database covers titles representing international, regional, country-by-country as well as thematic perspectives. Site also includes a lists of useful links on this subject.
Using Primary Source and Archival Materials
AM Research Methods – this platform provides practical advice on how to work with primary source materials and integrate them into a research study. Contents include approximately 200 hundred essays, instructive videos, practical "How to" guides, and case studies created by scholars and archivists. The videos and "How to" guides introduce the key concepts of conducting research and analyzing primary source materials. Case studies describe examples of the ways in which historians have used diaries, government records, and posters, or popular culture, gender, and science materials in their research. A discrete collection of cases focusing on historical datasets is also included.
Descriptions of resources are adapted or quoted from vendor websites.