LibGuides: History: Home

Faculty Liaison

Pieter van Leeuwen

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Subjects: Arts and Culture, History, Media and Communication

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Access to our online collection

Read about on- and off-campus access

Welcome!

This guide gives you an overview of recommended resources for History: reference works to orientate on a particular topic and to find references to literature, scholarly literature databases and search engines, and all kinds of resources containing digital or digitized primary sources.

Listed are both resources to which the Library has subscribed, as well as resources that are available via the National Library of the Netherlands (you can recognize those by the symbol), or are freely available online.

New & trial databases available

Cambridge Core – e-books This link opens in a new window
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Full-text access to e-books published by Cambridge University Press, covering 30 subjects across the Humanities, Social Sciences and Medicine. Access is provided until April 30, 2024. After this date a selection of books will be purchased.
Cambridge Companions and Higher Education Textbooks of CUP are not included in this collection.

In May 2024, a selection of these books will be purchased for permanent access. The usage statistics are used to make this selection. If you have found a book from Cambridge University Press that needs to be a part of the permanent collection, for example because it’s required reading in a course, please contact your faculty liaison to ensure access after April 2024.
The Washington Post (1877-2006) This link opens in a new window
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Full-text and full-image access from the first issue in 1877 up to 2006.
Access to the more recent archive and current edition of The Washington Post is provided via several databases (click 'Access online'). For tips on how to search efficiently in those databases, have a look at our News sources LibGuide.

Related databases: The New York Times archive 1851-2019; Wall Street Journal archive 1889-2011
Gale Digital Scholar Lab This link opens in a new window
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Platform giving users the ability to create custom content sets containing as many as 10,000 documents. Users can search across the several primary source databases of Gale Cengage (see under 'More') and seamlessly select documents to be added to their custom content set. To access this resource off-campus, you need to connect through EduVPN. To start working with GDSL, you need to login with either Google or Microsoft. Access guaranteed until March 30, 2024
These can then be analyzed and interrogated with various text analysis and visualization tools. Digital humanities analysis methods such as Named Entity Recognition, Topic Modelling, Parts of Speech, and others are included in the tool. For an explanation of the various methods, see this support page. Important information on the process of cleaning unstructured text (aka how to deal with OCR errors), can be found here.

Documents and other materials from the following primary source collections can be analyzed with GDSL:
- Archives Unbound
- Declassified Documents Online: Twentieth-Century British Intelligence
- The Economist Historical Archive (1843-2015)
- Financial Times Historical Archive, 1888-2016
- The Illustrated London News Historical Archive, 1842-2003
- The Independent Historical Archive, 1986-2016
- International Herald Tribune Historical Archive, 1887-2013
- Slavery and Anti-Slavery Archive: Slave trade in the Atlantic world
- The Telegraph Historical Archive, 1855-2016
- The Times Digital Archive (1785-2019)
- U.S. Declassified Documents Online
- Women’s Studies Archive: Voice and Vision
For a short description of the content of each of these collections, click on the relevant link above.

Related database: TDM Studio
Slavery and Anti-Slavery Archive: Slave trade in the Atlantic world This link opens in a new window
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Charts the practice of slave trade on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, with particular focus on the involvement of England/the United Kingdom, France, and the United States, but also containing materials pertaining to Portugal/Brazil, Spain and Denmark.
This database features a wide range of materials, from monographs and individual papers to company records, newspapers, and a variety of government documents, and stemming from archives in the UK and the US. The available materials cover a wide spectrum of subjects related to the history of slavery: legal issues; economics; children and women under slavery; modes of resistance; and much more, from 1490 to 1896. For an overview of the collections and a detailed description of the content of each collection, see this page.

With Gale Digital Scholar Lab you can perform more advanced text analysis methods, such as Sentiment Analysis and Topic Modelling.

For related databases, see Resources per subdiscipline/History of slavery in the History Guide.
Women’s Studies Archive: Voice and Vision This link opens in a new window
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Collection of primary sources created by women and on women’s experiences in and impact on British and American society between 1820 and 2000.
Of particular importance are the materials that focus solely on female authors, magazines and journals produced by women, and materials from minority groups in the United States. For a quick overview of the collections in this database, click here.

Gale Primary Sources enables you to cross-search a range of primary source databases, including several UK newspapers, such as The Independent and The Times. With Gale Digital Scholar Lab you can perform more advanced text analysis methods, such as Sentiment Analysis and Topic Modelling.

For related databases, see Resources per subdiscipline/Women's/Gender History in the History Guide.

AVAILABLE TILL 30/04/2024: Cambridge University Press eBooks in History (1771-present)

This collection also includes several eBooks in History from Boydell & Brewer, Amsterdam University Press and Edinburgh University Press.
Special attention should be given to the substantial number of digitized copies of old and rare print books, dating from the late eighteenth up to the mid twentieth century from the Cambridge Library Collection. You can filter on subject within this collection. Please note filtering on publication date will not in all instances give you results based on the original publication date: sometimes digitized old books were tagged with the online and/or reissue publication date only. For a description of this collection, see this webpage.

Cambridge University Press eBooks in History includes recent titles such as:

Images of the Indonesian War of Independence, 1945-1949/Perang Kemerdekaan Indonesia Dalam Gambar (2022)

The Nationalist Dilemma. A global history of economic nationalism, 1776-present (2023)

Subversive Seas. Anticolonial Networks across the Twentieth-Century Dutch Empire (2019)

An Urban History of China (2021)

Building Socialism. The communist party and the making of the Soviet system, 1921-1941 (2023)

The Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century (2ed ed., 2023)

Warrior Women. The Cultural Politics of Armed Women, c.1850-1945 (2023)

The Contested World Economy. The Deep and Global Roots of International Political Economy (2023)

Dress Cultures in Zambia. Interwoven Histories, Global Exchanges, and Everyday Life (2023)

North Korea, Tricontinentalism, and the Latin American Revolution, 1959-1970 (2023)

Earthopolis. A Biography of Our Urban Planet (2022)

The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 4, AD 1804-AD 2016 (2017)

The Lion's Share. Inequality and the Rise of the Fiscal State in Preindustrial Europe (2019)

AVAILABLE TILL 30/11/2023: eBooks in History published by Oxford University Press, including:

This Is the BBC. Entertaining the Nation, Speaking for Britain, 1922-2022 (2022)

Age of Emergency. Living with Violence at the End of the British Empire (2023)

The Age of Interconnection. A Global History of the Second Half of the Twentieth Century (2023)

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order. America and the World in the Free Market Era (2022)

The Oxford History of the World (2023)

Only the clothes on her back. Clothing and the hidden history of power in the nineteenth-century United States (2022)

The absolutely indispensable man: Ralph Bunche, the United Nations, and the fight to end empire (2022)

Beer: a global journey through the past and present (2022)

Muslims and the making of modern Europe (2021)

Sisters and sisterhood. The Kenney family, class, and suffrage, 1890-1965 (2021)

Capitalisms. Towards a Global History (2020)

Educating Palestine. Teaching and Learning History under the Mandate (2020)

The Story of Rufino: Slavery, Freedom, and Islam in the Black Atlantic (2020)

A Long, Long Way. Hollywood's Unfinished Journey from Racism to Reconciliation (2020)

Forging a British World of Trade. Culture, Ethnicity, and Market in the Empire-Commonwealth, 1880-1975 (2019)

Politics in the Marketplace. Work, Gender, and Citizenship in Revolutionary France (2019)

Love at Last Sight: Dating, Intimacy, and Risk in Turn-of-the-Century Berlin (2019)

Slave Traders by Invitation. West Africa's Slave Coast in the Precolonial Era (2019)

The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery. Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean (2017)

Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire. Europe and the Transformation of the Tropical World (2017)

The Spread of Modern Industry to the Periphery Since 1871 (2017)

Re-Imagining Democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1780-1870 (2023)

Sources and Skills Literature for History students

Information skills

Learn how to search, find and manage scholarly information and data in an efficient way. Visit the library's Information Skills Portfoliol for more online modules!

Search techniques
Successful searching is largely about being precise. Search techniques can help you search with precision and find what you need.
Use a reference manager
Manually collecting the information you need to create correct references can be a lot of work. There are tools available, called reference managers, to make this easier. They enable you to export the bibliographical data you need (title, author name(s), publication year, etc.) from online sources such as Google Scholar, sEURch, and almost all scholarly literature databases.

The University Library supports RefWorks. When you see the RefWorks symbol next to a resource title somewhere in this Guide, you know it is possible to export references from that resource to RefWorks. The Library has created an e-course on how to use RefWorks.

Chicago Manual of Style online This link opens in a new window
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Online version of the 17th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style citation guide.
'The bible of the publishing and research community' for economists, reflects extensive revision of the Manual's content, topics, and perspectives on editing, the editorial process, and publishing. Content includes new coverage of journals and electronic publications; a comprehensive new chapter on American English grammar and usage; reorganized and updated chapters on documentation, including guidance on citing electronic sources; and new diagrams of the editing and production processes for both books and journals. Much used in economic and management publications.

Date range: 2017 (17th edition)