HISTORY 125: War, Peace and Society

Library Resources - Semester 1, 2012

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Books in the Short Loan Collection and electronic readings for this course are available by searching Readings & Exams.

Reference books are an excellent place to start your research. You should then go on to read more in-depth journal articles and books.

• Palmowski, Jan, A Dictionary of Contemporary World History, 3nd edn, Oxford, 2008.
• Kavanagh, Dennis, ed., A Dictionary of Political Biography, Oxford, 1998.
• Chambers, John Whiteclay, ed., The Oxford Companion to American Military History, New York, 1999.
• Davison, Graeme, John Hirst and Stuart Macintyre, eds., The Oxford Companion to Australian History, Melbourne, 2001.
• Holmes, Richard, ed., The Oxford Companion to Military History, New York, 2004.
• Heilbron, J.L., ed., The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science, New York, 2003.
• Dear, Ian, ed., The Oxford Companion to World War II, Oxford, 2001.
• Wright, Edmund, ed., A Dictionary of World History, 2nd edn, Oxford, 2006.

Subject headings in Library Search.

Journals.

It is important for you to read articles from academic journals rather than from popular magazines. Articles in scholarly academic journals have been through a peer-review process, so they have more academic credibility. Peer-review means that other academics have checked the article before it is published (much like lecturers mark essays to see if they are any good).

Academic and Popular Journals: what's the difference?

Below are some of the journals in the field of war, peace and society.

• The Journal of Military History
• War & Society
• War in History

You may want to browse recent issues of these journals to see the published results of current research. To find out what has been written in these and other journals, you should search a database.

• America: History & Life An index with abstracts (summaries) of articles about North American history.
• Historical Abstracts An index with abstracts of articles about the history of the rest of the world.
• World History in Context Journal articles, reference sources, and primary materials.
• JSTOR Full-text journal articles, especially good for older journal articles.
• Project Muse Full-text journal articles, especially good for recent journal articles.
• Women, War and Society 1914-1918 A collection of primary source documents and photographs.

Research guide.
Example: Finding information about the Franco-Prussian War.

Step 1. Get started by looking up a basic introduction in a reference book. The Oxford Companion to Military History would be a useful place to get a brief overview of the events and significance of the war.

Step 2. Your course book has lists of recommended readings. Some of them are in the Short Loans Collection, and some are in the General Library. Use the library catalogue to locate them. Some of the general books on Nineteenth Century European, French and German history will have a section or a chapter on the war which you should read first. Read one or two general introductory texts on your topic such as Howard's The Franco-Prussian War or Wawro's book of the same title. You can then move on to read more specialised texts in the reading list. The footnotes and bibliographies in the recommended readings have citations for other books and articles you can read.

Step 3. As you read each book or article, take careful notes of material you are going to use in your essay. Whether you use direct quotes or paraphrase the points made by other authors, you must be careful to cite the source in your footnotes and bibliography. However you generally don't have to cite the basic facts you find in reference books.

At each step of the research process you should evaluate what you found. Is it relevant to the question you have to answer? Does it support the argument of your essay, or does it have an argument you wish to refute?

Step 4. For more in-depth research you can search for other journal articles in a database. For this topic you could use the Historical Abstracts database. Simply searching for the keywords or subject heading "Franco-Prussian War" will retrieve many hundreds of articles, so you should refine your search. For example, your essay question might ask you to discuss a specific point such as the role of the war in German unification, so you should look for literature that addresses that issue.

Web sites.

• Library of Congress Country Studies
  Historical and contemporary information about 100 countries.
• BBC History Homepage
• Internet Modern History Sourcebook
• EuroDocs
  Primary sources on West European history.
• History of Warfare
  Outline of warfare from the 15th to 20th Century.
• Propaganda Postcards of the Great War
• The World War I Document Archive
• The History Place: Great Speeches Collection
• HyperWar: A Hypertext History of the Second World War
• The Second World War Experience Centre
• Korea: The Unfinished War
• The Wars for Viet Nam 1945-1975

Exam papers for HISTORY 125.