Research Guides: HIST 150: History Through Objects: The Atlantic World: Articles

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 This link opens in a new window
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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.
Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
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Multidisciplinary database of journal articles (including peer reviewed), books, book chapters, reports, conference proceedings, etc. Coverage: 1887-present.

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.

Why so many databases?

Let's say I try the search ("Colonial williamsburg" OR "Colonial Virginia") AND (print* OR press)

America: History & Life with Full Text This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
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 This link opens in a new window
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.
Google Scholar This link opens in a new window
Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines.

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.