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Prof. Brennan's courses: a research guide

Databases aka Article Indexes

America: History and Life
Citations and abstracts to journal articles, book chapters, and dissertations on the history and culture of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. Coverage begins in 1964.
For earlier coverage back to 1902, see: Writings on American history (Baker Berry Ref. Z1236 .L331)
JSTOR
Searches the full text of a multidiscipllinary collection of scholarly journals, starting with their first issues, making it especially useful for historiography. Use the Advanced Search to filter publication dates or limit to journals in a specific subject area/areas (incl. History, African American Studies, Feminist and Women Studies, American Indian Studies).
BE AWARE OF JStor's "ROLLING WALL": Note that content from the most recent 5 years of most journals is excluded. You can check the Journal Finder to locate more recent coverage of specific journals, and/or supplement your search with the database Project Muse to find more recently published scholarly articles.
Project MUSE
This collection of multidisciplinary scholarly journals is a good resource to use in addition to JStor, since it has the most recent issues of many of the journals that only go up to 5 years prior to the current in JStor. Searches include the full text of articles.
Social Science Citation Index
Index of articles from scholarly journals in the social sciences. Records include cited references and articles citing the article in the record. This is an especially good tool for identifying seminal articles, diverging views, and intersecting topics and conversations.
The library catalog record for an article provides a link to the Web of Science record for the same article. This can help you find related articles, scholarly conversations, and threads.

Books

Library Search (Vassar College Libraries)
• use Starts With/Browse to search by author or title. When searching for an author, search in last name first name order. (eg Jones Jacqueline)
On the search results page,
• use Physical Collections to locate print books in the libraries
• use Available Online to limit to ebooks, full-text online, streaming media, and other digital material
• use "peer-reviewed journals" filter to limit to scholarly journals, keeping in mind that this is a rough tool, and you'll need to further evaluate journal articles individually
• Use publication year filter to limit to books and articles published recently
WorldCat
Union catalog of the thousands of libraries that participate in interlibrary loan. Use the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) in the records to find related titles. Books in the Vassar Libraries collection are at the top of the results.

Browsing the Stacks

The Vassar Libraries, like most American universities and colleges, uses the Library of Congress Classification system to organize books on the shelves. For research in American History, you'll find that many relevant titles are in the E and F call number ranges. In the Main Library at Vassar, this call number range is on the Second Floor, Rooms 210 and 211. You may also want to browse sections of the HN (social history, social problems, social reform) and HQ (the family, marriage, women) ranges in room 49. When you find a book on the shelf, check the books around it while you're there.