Guide created by Scott Libson. Updated by Catherine J. Minter in March 2024.
In a rush? Try the tabs below.
The main catalog of books at Indiana University is IUCAT. Watch the video below if you need help finding e-books in IUCAT.
If you are just starting a research project and need to know some basic information to get started, encyclopedias and historical dictionaries are great tools.
Most databases allow you click a box with a name like "scholarly articles," which does a reasonably good job of limiting your results to high-quality, academic articles.
Bibliographic database focusing on the history and life of the United States and Canada, indexing more than 1,800 journals published, dissertations and reviews.
In addition to the principle English language sources in the field, it includes some (about 10%) in other languages, as well as some state and local history journals. All aspects of historical inquiry are represented: diplomatic, ecclesiastical, agricultural, cultural, economic, political, military and others. The index also provides citations to book and media reviews from about 100 journals and references to abstracts of dissertations in the field. All abstracts are in English.
Although IU has access to newspapers from around the world, most of our large collections of historical newspapers center on the United States. Check out the "Old News" link below for non-American newspapers.
Provides searchable, online access to more than 350 U.S. newspapers chronicling a century and a half of the African-American experience. Includes newspapers from more than 35 states covering life in the Antebellum South, growth of the Black church, the Jim Crow Era, the Great Migration, Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights movement, political and economic empowerment, and more.
Some titles lasted a short time, or few extant issues have been found, so that the database may contain as little as a single issue from a source. Other newspapers had longer lives, and long runs of issues are available.
African American Newspapers, Series 1, 1827-1998:
Beginning with Freedom’s Journal (NY)—the first African American newspaper published in the United States—the titles in this resource include The Colored Citizen (KS), Arkansas State Press, Rights of All (NY), Wisconsin Afro-American, New York
Age, L’Union (LA), Northern Star and Freeman’s Advocate (NY), Richmond Planet, Cleveland Gazette, and The Appeal (MN).
African American Newspapers, Series 2, 1835-1956:
Key titles include Frederick Douglass’s New National Era (Washington, DC), Washington Tribune (Washington, DC), Chicago Bee (Chicago, IL), The Louisianian (New Orleans, LA), The Pine and Palm (Boston, MA), National Anti-Slavery Standard (New York, NY), New York Age (New York, NY), Harlem Liberator (New York, NY), North Carolina Republican and Civil Rights Advocate (Weldon, NC), and Southern News (Richmond, VA).
Access to information about historic newspapers and select digitized newspaper pages. Search historic newspaper pages from 1789-1963 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present.
Produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). NDNP, a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress (LC), a long-term effort to develop an Internet-based, searchable database of U.S. newspapers with descriptive information and select digitization of historic pages.
There are countless options for primary sources. In addition to all the physical collections at IU (including the Lilly Library and University Archives), IU has paid for access to hundreds of online databases that include primary sources from all over the world and all periods of human history. Finally, libraries, archives, museums, and other institutions have digitized many of their collections and made them freely available. For most history research, at least through the undergraduate level, you can likely find the sources you need right in Bloomington. Contact me if you need help.
Black Women Writers presents 100,000 pages of literature and essays on feminist issues, written by authors from Africa and the African diaspora. Facing both sexism and racism, Black women needed to create their own identities and movements. The collection documents that effort, presenting the woman’s perspective on the diversity and development of Black people generally, and in particular the works document the evolution of Black feminism.
Black Women Writers includes fiction, poetry, and essays. Among the authors are Nikki Giovanni, Maryse Condé, Barbara Ransby, Angela Davis, Rhoda Reddock, Margaret Walker, Ama Ata Aidoo, Rosa Guy, Sonia Sanchez, Olive Senior, and Barbara Ransby. Works are in their original languages, although an English translation executed by the original author may be available. Works are reproduced in their entirety and when possible, an image of the original page accompanies the text. The dates of the material range from the 1700s to contemporary pieces.
This resource presents multiple aspects of the African American community through pamphlets, newspapers and periodicals, correspondence, official records, reports and in-depth oral histories, revealing the prevalent challenges of racism, discrimination and integration, and a unique African American culture and identity.
Focuses predominantly on Atlanta, Chicago, St. Louis, New York, and towns and cities in North Carolina.
The Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century consists of four modules: two modules of Federal Government Records, and two modules of Organizational Records and Personal Papers, offering documentation and a variety of perspectives on the 20th-century fight for freedom.
Major collections include Civil Rights records from the Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush presidencies; the Martin Luther King FBI File and FBI Files on locations of major civil rights demonstrations like Montgomery and Selma, Alabama or St. Augustine, Florida; and the records of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (NACWC), Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).
These collections contain documentation from the founding of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs in the last decade of the 19th century to the riots that followed the verdict in the Rodney King police brutality case in the last decade of the 20th century. In the intervening 100 years, researchers will encounter documentation on subjects like the Great Migration, the East St. Louis Riot of 1917, the activities of members of the Federal Council on Negro Affairs during the New Deal, the March on Washington Movement during World War II, the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the 1963 March on Washington, the protests in Selma, Alabama, that inspired the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, and the National Black Political Convention in 1972.