Research Guides: HIST 150: Unlearning US History (Fall 2025): Finding Articles (Secondary Sources)

Finding Articles

The Libraries have a LOT of e-journal subscriptions and hundreds of databases designed to help you find them. You can use PRIMO, the main catalog, to find interesting secondary sources (like articles!). For specialized US history topics, you may want to try America: History and Life. Both work in a similar manner.

America: History & Life with Full Text
Provides full text coverage of the history and culture of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. Includes nearly 200 journals and 100 books, selective indexing for over 1,700 journals, and abstracts in English of foreign language articles.

PRIMO (Library catalog)
Very good multi-disciplinary database.
Pro: it searches almost everything we own, so you always get results.
Con: it searches almost everything we own, so you get a lot of unrelated results.

Historical Abstracts with Full Text
Covers all aspects of world history (excluding the US and Canada) since 1450. Includes journal articles, books, reviews, conference proceedings, dissertations, etc. published after 1954. About 250 History journals in this database are not findable in EBSCO's Academic Search database, making this the go-to database for finding world history articles.

Why so many databases?

TOPIC: Experience of Virginia Students during the Civil War

America: History & Life with Full Text
Provides full text coverage of the history and culture of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. Includes nearly 200 journals and 100 books, selective indexing for over 1,700 journals, and abstracts in English of foreign language articles.
JSTOR
Multidisciplinary full-text journal articles from 1,500 major journals. Please note: In many cases, JSTOR does not include the most recent 3 to 5 years of these journals. Please use other databases to retrieve recent articles, especially for current events topics. Coverage: Varies by title. Access is available to 2007+ alumni; requires W&M userid and password.

Googlescholar
Articles in PRIMO
Main library catalog and search engine. Searches about 70% of our materials at once.