Research Guides: INQ 270 The Black Death (Breault): Home

Databases for Secondary Sources

JSTOR This link opens in a new window
Full text journals, many back to the original issue. Provides access to journals in the arts & sciences, business, ecology & botany, and languages & literature. JSTOR's coverage typically begins 3 -5 years after the current year.
Google Scholar This link opens in a new window
If Fintel Library subscribes to the database or journal where the article was published, Google Scholar will link you to the full-text content.
Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
A comprehensive scholarly, multi-disciplinary full-text database, with full-text periodicals, peer-reviewed journals, monographs, reports, conference proceedings, etc. It features PDF content going back as far as 1887.
PubMed (aka MedLine) This link opens in a new window
(from the National Library of Medicine) Searching PubMed from this link gives you all the "bells & whistles" of this amazing database.
Hathitrust This link opens in a new window
HathiTrust is a partnership of academic and research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world.
Project Muse This link opens in a new window
Offers a large collection of online scholarly journals and books in the humanities and social sciences. Resources are available for reading online, printing, and/or downloading and using off-line.
Humanities International Complete This link opens in a new window
Includes all data from Humanities International Index(more than 2,300 journals and more than 2.9 million records) plus unique full text content.

Digital Collections

These collections contain many secondary sources and may also link to or reference primary sources.

Contagion: Historical Views of Diseases and Epidemics
This online collection offers important historical perspectives on the science and public policy of epidemiology today and contributes to the understanding of the global, social–history, and public–policy implications of diseases.
Decameron Web
Project of the Italian Studies Department's Virtual Humanities Lab at Brown University.
Public Domain Review
Founded in 2011, The Public Domain Review is an online journal and not-for-profit project dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas.

Digital Collections for Primary Sources

Avalon Project This link opens in a new window
The Avalon Project will mount digital documents relevant to the fields of Law, History, Economics, Politics, Diplomacy and Government from ancient to modern times. (Yale Law School)
Hathitrust This link opens in a new window
HathiTrust is a partnership of academic and research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world.

Internet History Sourcebooks Project
Collection of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts for educational use. It includes not only documents associated with the "western civilization" approach to history but also provides much information on Ancient history, Byzantine, Islamic, Jewish, Indian, East Asian, and African history. You will also find many documents especially relevant to women's history and LGBT studies.
Europeana
Europeana is a free database that searches a large number of digital collections from all over Europe.
The Labyrinth
The Labyrinth provides free, organized access to resources in medieval studies. The Labyrinth’s easy-to-use links provide connections to databases, services, texts, and images around the world.
EuroDocs
Online sources for European history: selected transcriptions, facsimiles, and translations.

Instruction & Research Services Librarian

Sarah Beth White

Subjects: History, Honors, INQ 100s, Library Instruction, Political Science, Primary Sources, Public Affairs

Tips for Finding Primary Resources

Citation mining: use secondary sources to help lead you to primary sources. Look at the bibliography/references section of your source for leads. Also look for published bibliographies on a particular topic. Many of these are available online--Wikipedia can sometimes be a helpful for finding these!
When using the search box on the Fintel Library homepage, try adding terms such as these along with your topic keywords: personal narrative, interview, journal, diary, correspondence, pamphlet, sources, speeches, manuscripts, documents, documentary etc.
Limit your searches by date depending on the time period of your topic/event.
Use the advanced Google search and include terms like "digital collection," "digital archive," etc. Also try limiting the site to .edu to because many digital collections are created by colleges and universities.

Discover Fintel Search Tips

These are some recommended Subject Terms for the Discover Fintel search box on the home page. To use these in your search, go to the Advanced Search screen and change the dropdown menu that says "Any Field" to "Subject":

Black Death

Black Death -- Europe

Plague -- Europe -- History

Medicine, Medieval

Diseases and history

Epidemics -- History