HIST 301 - Topics in History

This guide contains suggestions for students conducting research in a HIST 301 course. Occasionally, a sub-page is created for a specific topics course.

Library Research Guide

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History of Gaming

What is a Primary Source?

Primary sources are documents and records that were created at the time of an historical event or created by someone who witnessed or experienced that historical event.

Examples of primary sources include (but are not limited to):

diaries
legal documents & government records
letters
newspapers

Audio Visual

newsreels
oral histories

Images and Art

maps
political cartoons
paintings
photographs

Material Culture

clothing
furniture
tools
consumer products

Many of these items can also be secondary sources. The key distinction is when it was created or by whom in relation to the historical event.

Example:

Newspaper articles about the election of Susanna M. Salter who, when elected in 1887, became simultaneously the first woman mayor of Argonia, KS and the first woman mayor in the United States.

1. Newspaper article written in 1887 -- primary source, written at the time of the historical event.

2. Newspaper article written in 1961 when Salter died, describing her role in history -- secondary source, written after the fact, by someone who did not witness her term in office.

3. Newspaper article written in 1920 that included interviews with Salter and other residents of Argonia during her term-- the interviews can be primary sources because the people experienced the historical event.

Chicago Manual of Style

The Chicago Manual of Style is the guide to writing conventions, citations, footnotes, endnotes, and bibliographies in history.

Chicago Manual of Style, 18th ed.
Paid for by K-State Libraries
This is the online edition of the standard guide to editorial style and publishing practices. Authors, publishers, and students are able to find answers to particular questions or just browse general categories.

Chicago Manual of Style: Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL)
This guide includes information about Chicago style and citations.

The History of Gaming and Libraries

This page is focused on how to find materials that you might need when researching for your history of gaming projects. In particular, we focus on finding primary sources through the Libraries' databases and through public archives with digitized collections.

Information about essential sources for history, like databases with scholarly journal articles, ebook databases, and Interlibrary Loan is covered on the main page for this research guide.

As a special bonus, we've also included a cache of documents that intrepid librarians found that related to the mass production of penicillin during World War II.

Primary Sources in Databases

These databases are good starting points for primary source materials. The “best” primary source databases in History will vary depending on your research question.

Reading the database description and the dates covered will help you decide which one to use.

We have many more databases with primary source materials. Find them by using the "Primary" tag on our databases page.

Best Bets

These databases cover a diversity of publications and time periods and are typically digitized copies of documents, so that you can see them in as close to their original form as possible.

American Periodicals
Publication Dates Covered: 1740-1940 Paid for by K-State Libraries
Contains periodicals published between 1740 and 1940, including special interest and general magazines, literary and professional journals, children's and women's magazines and many other historically-significant periodicals. Includes graphic elements and article layouts.
Archives Unbound
Publication Dates Covered: 1786 - 1955 Paid for by K-State Libraries
Archives Unbound presents topically-focused digital collections of historical documents. Particular strengths include U.S. foreign policy; U.S. civil rights; global affairs and colonial studies; and modern history.
Gale Primary Sources
Publication Dates Covered: 1500 - 1955 Paid for by K-State Libraries
Primary Sources allows users to search multiple primary source databases, ifor example, Archives Unbound, British Library Newspapers, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Nineteenth Century Collections Online, Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers, Sabin Americana, 1500 - 1926, the Times Digital Archive, and almost 20 other databases.
HathiTrust Digital Library
This is the go-to source for primary sources! Digitized collections from major research libraries around the world.
Sabin Americana
Publication Dates Covered: 1500-1926 Paid for by K-State Libraries
Search Joseph Sabin’s bibliography of works on life and culture in North America from 1500 to 1926. Includes more than 29,000 full-text works, books, pamphlets, broadsides, and serials on topics such as Native Americans, agriculture, slavery and abolition.

Newspapers

African American Newspapers
Newspapers published by and for African Americans, 1827-1998.

New York Times, Historical
1851-2010

Times Digital Archive
The London Times, 1785-1985

Government

National Archives and Records Administration’s Online Public Access
Provides online access to millions of records, maps, photos, and documents held by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the nation’s official record keeper. Note: This database is currently being developed by NARA. It will eventually replace NARA’s Archival Records Catalog and perhaps its Access to Archival Databases system. At present, it does not include all the content available through those systems. For more information about its scope, see NARA’s About Online Public Access page.

Serial Set Digital Collection
U.S. congressional documents, 1789-1969

Peoples and Cultures

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Paid for by the State Library of Kansas
Discover your family's military past. You can search names, dates, places, publication names, conflict periods, document types, and more.

HeritageQuest
Genealogical research materials, include the U.S. census going back to 1790 and local and family histories.
North American Indian Thought and Culture
Autobiographies, biographies, Indian publications, oral histories, personal writings, photographs, drawings, and audio files.

Women and Social Movements in the United States 1600-2000: Basic Edition
Publication Dates Covered: 1600-2000 Paid for by K-State Libraries
Examines perspectives on women’s social movements from colonial times to the present. Brings together books, images, documents, scholarly essays, commentaries, and bibliographies, documenting the multiplicity of women’s activism in public life.

Time Periods

Eighteenth Century Collections Online
Publication Dates Covered: 1701-1800 Paid for by K-State Libraries
Includes eighteenth century collections on history and geography, social sciences, religion and philosophy, fine arts, literature and language, law, medicine, science, and technology. Users can view digital page images; full-text searchable.
Nineteenth Century Collections Online
Publication Dates Covered: 1800-1900, with some exceptions Paid for by K-State Libraries
Collection of primary materials from the 19th century on all kinds of topics. Fully searchable documents, books, images, maps, and other types of materials. Societies from around the world are profiled, as well as issues such as women’s rights, science, technology, politics, and business.

Finding Digital Archives

What are archives?

Documents and materials like photographs, maps, audio interviews that are no longer in use may be stored by an organization in an archive so that they can be consulted by researchers (and the curious) in the future.

An archive may include:

documents produced by the United States War Office during World War II regarding the need for the mass production of penicillin
photographs from a pharmaceutical company that record the production line for penicillin
letters or a diary written by a lab tech in a Peoria, Illinois laboratory who is studying mold on vegetables

Typically, an archive is created by a government entity (usually because the law requires it), a cultural entity (like a university that wants to preserve its history), or a corporation (because they need records to understand how products were created, business decisions were made, etc...).

How do I find a digital archive?

A digital archive is simply when an institution or, more rarely, an individual makes digital copies of archival material available online.

Finding digital archives is a mix of experience and perseverance. It's easier if you have at least some basic background information about your event or person, so be sure to look for some articles using the Libraries' databases.

We recommend these digital archives as good starting points for many research topics:

Digital Archive of Latin American and Caribbean Ephemera
Princeton University Library's project to digitize ephemera (flyers, brochures, stickers) from their Latin American Ephemera Collection. Most materials created in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Europeana (free resource)
European digital collections. You can search by topics and time periods.
Internet Archive
A vast collection of digitized materials from personal collections, libraries, and museums.
New York Public Library Digital Collections
The New York Public Library includes many research and archival collections, some dating back to the earliest European settlements.
Smithsonian Institution Collection Search
Search across collections in the Smithsonian Institution museums, including the Museum of the American Indian and National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Searching for Other Digital Archives

Still not finding what you need?

Create a list of the people and organizations related to your historical event
- Search the internet by matching those names with the phrase: digital archive For instance, searching Rockefeller Foundation digital archive finds this site: https://rockfound.rockarch.org/digital-library
Create a list of named documents or publications related to your historical event
- Search the internet for those titles. For instance, searching Penicillin therapy and control in 21 Army Group finds this document: https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/catalog/nlm:nlmuid-10010970R-bk
- Too many search results? Place quotation marks around the title, like this: "Penicillin therapy and control in 21 Army Group" That forces the search engine to search for that exact phrase (this works in library databases, too!)
Find images by using the Google Image Search - enter your search terms, like: war production board penicillin. When looking at the results, click on the Images link under the Google Search box, as the image below illustrates.
- You can also go straight to the Google Images search: https://images.google.com

What if I Don't Find What I Need?

The trick is that the document that you would love to find may not have been created, or preserved, or digitized. But that kind of makes this like a treasure hunt! You never know what materials you'll actually find and what you can learn from them.

Contact your friendly librarians if:

you've tried searching in the library databases and used a few of the search techniques provided above and still can't find anything relevant
you can't figure out how to start searching
you can't find a document that has been referenced or cited somewhere else
you have any questions about researching with libraries and archives

Document Cache: Mass Production of Pencillin

Consult these documents related to the scientific advances leading to the mass production of penicillin during World War II.

Penicillin. United States. Office of War Information. [Washington, DC], 1944. (Digital archive: National Library of Medicine.)
[Pamphlets re Penicillin Treatment in the Second World War, bound into a volume.] 1943-1945. (Digital archive: Wellcome Library.)
Moyer, Andrew J. Method for Production of Penicillin. US Patent 2,442,141. Filed May 11, 1945. and issued May 25, 1945. (Digital archive: United States Patent and Trademark Office.)
"Penicillin." Life, May 24, 1943, 53. (Digital archive: Google Books - Magazines.)
"Progress in Penicillin." Life, April 9, 1945, 89. (Digital archive: Google Books - Magazines.)
Penicillin, New Medical Ally. United States. War Food Administration. [Washington, DC],1944. (Digital archive: Internet Archive.)
Penicillin: Apparatus Used in the Production. (Diagram.) Norman Heatley collection. [n.d.] (Digital archive: Wellcome Library.)
"Penicillin Past, Present and Future: The Development and Production of Penicillin, England, 1944," (Photograph Collection) United Kingdom Ministry Of Information, [n.d.] (Digital Archive: Imperial War Museum)