Research Guides: HIST 301: Historians Craft (Dressler) Fall 2025: Book Reviews

Best Places to look for book reviews

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 (limit search to book reviews)
Use you search in the main catalog and limit the results (on the left) to book reviews.

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.
Project Muse
Arts, humanities, and social sciences. Journal articles. Coverage: Varies by title. Access is available to 2007+ alumni; requires W&M userid and password.

If you have a specific book in mind, search the title in Quotation marks any pretty much any of our databases and limit the results to book reviews.

PRIMO

America: History and Life

For this, I suggest using a subject database like America: History & Life so you can utilize the indexing.

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.

Go to "search settings" and deselect all expanders
Search as you would for a research article. Turn your question into keywords. Ex: experience of women in the atlantic world may be searched as women AND "atlantic world"
Under filters, go to "Publication Type" and limit to Reviews.
Search!
Need to narrow more? Go to advanced search and use the "Historical period" filter. As example, I'm specifically interested in books about the 17th century