LibGuides: History: Home

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

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:

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

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

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

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

An Urban History of China (2021)

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

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

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

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

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)

Earthopolis. A Biography of Our Urban Planet (2022)

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

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)