It’s been more than 140 years since the guns fell silent, but the U.S. Civil War apparently still has the power to provoke. According to this story in American Libraries Online, a thief recently stole two Civil War Era documents from an exhibition at the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. The article states that the library estimated the combined value of the two documents at only $400; other, more valuable items were passed over by the thief. Removed from the exhibition case were a confederate soldier’s furlough and the medical examination certificate of a slave. “Retired police captain Walt Hilderman, who loaned the documents to the library, said that the thief could have been motivated by controversy stemming from his split with the group Sons of Confederate Veterans…” “The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.” –Henry Miller —David C. Murray
Category Archives: History News
Digital National Security Archive Improved
ProQuest recently announced improvements to the Digital National Security Archive (DNSA). Significant enhancements include: — Faster, simpler searching via a Quick Search box — Easy bookmarking of content via durable URLs for reading lists and course web pages — Quick results review supported by hit-term highlighting in the full record display — Seamless emailing and printing records through a marked list — Easy saving of content and bibliographic records between work sessions through an individual MyArchive feature and citation software support —David C. Murray
Historic Philadelphia Photographs
A partnership between the Philadelphia City Archives and the for-profit Avencia, Inc. has resulted in the creation of Phillyhistory.org, a website that provides users with an extensive online photo archive, historic streets index, and index to print photographs held in the Archives. According to Avencia, the site now provides access to “more than 20,000 scanned historic images” of Philadelphia (Avencia.com). —David C. Murray
Enhancements to ABC-CLIO History Databases
The recently released version 4.1 of America: History & Life and Historical Abstracts includes: -Cross-database searching between Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life -User-friendly searching, including inverted author names and punctuation alternatives -Ability for users to save search histories to a personal profile -Natural language date searching, in addition to the traditional decade and century searching -Speed improvements for faster searching -A display option for expanding all of a user’s search result records at once -Addition of a “print-this-entry” option for each record in a search results display -Ability to easily limit searches to English language entries only -OpenURL-support for book entries in the Historical Abstracts database –Brian Schoolar (Electronic Resources Librarian)
Historical Statistics of the United States, Millennial Edition
Temple University Libraries has acquired Historical Statistics of the United States: Earliest Times to the Present, Millennial Edition (c2006). This resource is available not only online but as a 5-volume print work located in Paley Library’s 1st floor reference stacks. The Millennial edition is a greatly updated and expanded version of the previous 2-volume 1970 edition, which has been available both online and in print for many years. The online Millennial edition represents a major step forward in the researcher’s ability to gather and compare historical U.S. statistics. “It has now been expanded to include over 37,000 data series, which is three times more than the previous edition. This edition includes dozens of new topics including slavery, American Indians, and poverty” (HSUS Introduction, Cambridge Online). Topics are “placed in historical context by a recognized expert in the field. The fully searchable and downloadable electronic edition . . . permits users to graph individual tables and create customized tables and spreadsheets reflecting their own particular areas of interest” (ibid.). Additional features include: * Save your search criteria * Search within a chapter or volume * Bookmark tables or essays * Searchable term and contributor indexes * View tables in PDF or HTML format * Tables online include full documentation, sources, and footnotes * Select certain years or series of years to view, download, print, or graph * Download unrounded table data, for more detailed statistical analyses. * Enhanced table display features: jump to a certain table column (series), skip over blank data cells, highlight table rows and columns for readability * Toggle table sorting by ascending or descending year * Create and download colorful charts, graphs, and plots * Email a table or essay to a colleague –David C. Murray
London Times Digital Archive (1785-1985)
The Times Digital Archive, another major newspaper acquisition by Temple Libraries, is a searchable, full-text and full-image archive of every page of the (London) Times from 1785 to 1985. This database has obvious appeal to anyone studying the history of Britain and her Empire. The database complements Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), an important new resource recently discussed in the Library Blog. —David C. Murray
Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO)
For those of you, like me, who remember libraries prior to the advent of digital resources, ECCO will serve as a revelation. In a world of hype and spin, this is the real deal. Even younger, Web-savvy researchers will be utterly amazed by ECCO. According to Thomson-Gale’s “About” page, ECCO is the “most ambitious single digitization project ever undertaken”. It is based on the English Short Title Catalog, and contains the full-text of 150,000 book titles published in Great Britain between 1701 and 1800. ECCO provides, “in essence, [easy access to] every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom, along with thousands of important works from the Americas” (ibid.). ECCO complements Early English Books Online (EEBO), another Temple database that contains the full-text of nearly 110,000 English-language titles published between 1475 and 1700. It has never before been possible to quickly and comprehensively search the corpus of printed works spanning the entire history of Early Modern Britain. This opens up possibilities for research virtually unimaginable before the creation of ECCO, EEBO, and other primary source databases. Scholars from every conceivable field of inquiry can potentially benefit from access to ECCO. Obvious examples are history (including the history of science & technology), literature, political science, and even music. Important Note: The undergraduate researcher, especially, should work closely with his or her professor and/or a librarian to identify reference works and other secondary titles that can provide some context for the primary sources discussed in this post. It is important to understand wider social, political, economic, and military contexts in order to make sense of primary documents preserved in the historical record. —David C.Murray
History News Archive
Here are the “old” History News entries, originally posted to the Subject Guide. I wanted to remove them from the subject guide while retaining the ability to track history-related library news over the past two years. New History Blog Category: History News, a new Library Blog category, will serve as a forum for news, events, and discussion of interest to Temple’s History Department. Find announcements about new library databases, trials, search tips, etc. An RSS feed is available. History News replaces this section of the subject guide. Posted 11/16/05 Trial Databases Page: The Libraries recently created a trial page for electronic databases. Please see the Library Blog entry on this topic for more information. Posted 11/4/2005 Find Temple History Theses: Use Diamond to find dissertations and theses written by Temple’s history graduate students. For a complete, chronological list of the nearly 300 titles indexed since 1973 (newest to oldest), click here. To search within this list, perform a keyword search in Diamond as follows: s:History — Temple University Theses. AND [keyword of choice] Sample searches: s:History — Temple University Theses. AND military s:History — Temple University Theses. AND war s:History — Temple University Theses. AND women s:History — Temple University Theses. AND mexico Note that in a Diamond keyword search, “s:” tells the computer to return only those records that match a specific subject heading, in this case “History — Temple University Theses”. See also Digital Dissertations, below. Posted 9/1/2005 New Database: History Reference Center: Ebsco’s History Reference Center “features cover-to-cover full-text for more than 750 historical encyclopedias and non-fiction books. . . . nearly 60 leading history periodicals. . . . 58,000 historical documents; 43,000 biographies of historical figures; more than 12,000 historical photos and maps; and 87 hours of historical film and video”. Posted 8/18/2005 New History Databases: PA Gazette & African-American Newspapers: Published in Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania Gazette, 1728-1800 is often called the New York Times of the 19th Century. African-American Newspapers: The 19th Century includes full-text access to publications such as Freedom’s Journal, the North Star, Provincial Freeman and the Frederick Douglass Papers. Posted 6/20/2005 New History Database: Early American Imprints: Series I: Evans (1639-1800) and Series II: Shaw-Shoemaker (1801-1819). Based upon the pioneering work of Evans, Shaw, and Shoemaker, Early American Imprints online is the most comprehensive collection of full-text books and broadsides published in the colonies and early United States between 1639 and 1819. Posted 6/16/2005 Librarian Office Hours in History Department: Catch the history librarian every Monday and Thursday between 10:00 – 11:30 a.m. in Room 937, Gladfelter Hall. Students and faculty can take this opportunity to ask questions about history research, collection development, or any other library-related topic. If for no other reason, please drop by to say hello to your history librarian! Posted 6/7/2005 Research Guides: Over the course of the next several months look for a number of new history research guides on this site. The first will be guides to Force & Diplomacy and Modern Europe. For those interested in researching the pre-Columbian Americas, please consult Ancient Mesoamerica: A Librarian’s Research Guide. Posted 1/17/2005 The Encyclopedia of World War II (2004, online version) An exciting new reference work from ABC-CLIO. Also available in print at Paley Library. Posted 1/12/2005 New Database Trial: Oxford Scholarship Online “Oxford Scholarship Online is a groundbreaking online resource, combining OUP’s core scholarly books in four disciplines and powerful research tools into one cross-indexed, fully searchable database. With over 700 classic and newly published titles now available, OSO will be updated quarterly with an additional 200 titles added each year.” Researchers can access Bible-Carrying Christians (2002), the latest book published by the History Department’s own David Harrington Watt. Trial scheduled to end on 11/13/2004. Posted 11/15/2004 New Database Trial: History Compass Offers full-text access to original survey articles published within nine online journals. History Compass also allows the history researcher to access a range of useful reference resources. It allows those involved in the “teaching and research of History to do the following: 1) Teach in a new or unfamiliar area; 2) Keep up with developments in a field and areas related to it; and 3) Ensure that students are exposed only to quality-controlled online content”. Trial ends on 7/15/2004. Please provide feedback. Posted 6/21/2004 Evaluating Scholarly Credentials in History A resource for historians at Temple, this guide details specific tools for determining the quality of a scholar’s academic output. Learn the impact of a journal article or book, or perform a citation analysis on the work of a particular author (who is citing whom, when, and where). Designed primarily for those seeking tenure. Posted 6/7/2004 Looking for convenient access to history reference material? netLibrary’s Reference Center offers full-text access to over 40 reference books in American and world his
tory. Representative titles include A Dictionary of American History, Facts About the Presidents, Encyclopedia of North American Indians, A Concise History of the Middle East, Events That Changed Great Britain Since 1689, The History of India, World Leaders of the 20th Century, and Who’s Who In Ancient Egypt. Posted 5/12/2004 The War on the Walls is a new online exhibition of historic images taken from the George F. Tyler WWI Poster Collection. Developed by Temple University Libraries, this worthy exhibition features accompanying descriptions and quotations from primary source material, related links to photograph and document images, and powerful zooming capabilities not usually seen in other online exhibits. Jay Lockenour, Associate Professor of History at Temple, wrote one of the essays featured in The War on the Walls. Please remember to sign the guest book. Posted 5/7/2004 New History Database Trial: Oral History Online Bring oral history into your classroom! Alexander Street Press’s Oral History Online is the only commercial database of its kind. If you are a member of the history faculty or a history student please provide me with feedback. Trial ends in May. Posted 4/30/04 If you haven’t already, take a look at the recently licensed ACLS History E-Book Project. This database contains 1,000 important history books. It will grow in size and become more valuable over time. If appropriate, consider assigning your students readings from this outstanding resource. Posted 4/30/04 –David C. Murray
Sources for the Study of Early America
Over the past semester alone, the Libraries have acquired more than eighty databases. That’s an awful lot of new information to keep up with, even for the librarians! The rapid pace of change means that it can sometimes be difficult to pinpoint the most appropriate database for a specific research need. One way to keep pace is to consult a discipline-specific subject guide. Another, of course, is to frequently read this blog! And so, in the spirit of “keeping up,” I offer the following list of… Full-Text, Primary Source Databases Relevant to the Study of Early America Books Early American Imprints, Series 1: Evans (1639-1800) Early American Imprints, Series 2: Shaw-Shoemaker (1801-1819) Making of America Books (University of Michigan) Pennsylvania County Histories to 1900 Google Books Many important, pre-1900 monographs are available. American Memory Several distinct monograph collections from the Library of Congress: California, First-Person Narratives 1849-1900; The Capital and the Bay: Narratives of Washington and the Chesapeake Bay Region, ca. 1600-1925; Dance Manuals 1490-1900; Nineteenth-Century Books 1850-1877 (see Making of America, above); Puerto Rico Books & Pamphlets 1831-1929; Sunday School Books 1815-1865; Traveling in America 1750-1920; Upper Midwest Books 1820-1910; and Woman Suffrage Books & Pamphlets 1848-1921. Newspapers African American Newspapers: The 19th Century Early American Newspapers, Series 1 (1690-1876) HarpWeek (1857-1877) New York Times (1851-present) Pennsylvania Gazette (1728-1800) Wall Street Journal (1889-present) Journals / Magazines American Periodical Series Online (1740-1900) Making of America Journals (University of Michigan) Ephemera American Civil War Letters & Diaries Digital Sanborn Maps, 1867-1970 Early Encounters in North America Gerritsen Collection: Women’s History Online, 1543-1945 LexisNexis Congressional with the U.S. Serials Set Documenting the American South (University of North Carolina) Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 —David C. Murray
Trial – Historical Statistics of the United States
Cambridge University Press has just released the much anticipated Historical Statistics of the United States, Millenial Edition Online. This massive update to the now 30-year-old U.S. Census Bureau title of the same name is already available in Paley Library. A 30-day trial to the online edition has been activated. Please provide feedback. Other sources of historical statistics can be found here. —David C. Murray