American History and American Studies: Finding Articles

Start out with

  • America: History and Life with Full Text
    Type of Resource: Index, with accessible full text for selected items
    Coverage: items published 1955 onwards; updated monthly
    Covers writings about the history and culture of United States and Canada from prehistory through the recent past. Provides brief summaries of journal articles and book articles, as well as listings for book reviews, media reviews, and dissertations. Also provides links to full text for many journal articles.

    If your research extends beyond the United States and Canada, you may want to search America History and Life simultaneously with Historical Abstracts, which is international in scope. To do this, select the "Choose Databases" link to the right of America History and Life in your Search Screen.

    Then select Historical Abstracts from the "Choose Databases" menu that appears; and then select "OK."
     
  • Historical Abstracts with Full Text
    Coverage: items published 1954 onwards
    Covers the history of the world from 1450 to the present (excluding the United States and Canada), as represented in more than 2,000 journals published throughout the world. Provides listings for journal articles, book articles, books, and dissertations, along with full text for many articles.

    If your research is interdisciplinary in nature, you may wish to start out directly with EBSCOhost Research Databases, which includes both America: History and Life and Historical Abstracts, along with a wide range of databases in the humanities. law, social sciences, and other areas. For a fuller description of EBSCOHOST Research Databases, see box below.

Search across Many Databases at Once

Other Key Sources for Articles Relevant to American History, Culture, or Current Events

General Search Tools

  • Google scholar   
    "Provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations." When you Use the link above to connect to Google Scholar, you will also have direct access to articles in online journals to which Columbia subscribes.
     
  • CLIO : Articles Search
    Searches a large database of mostly full-text journals, encyclopedia and newspaper articles; this database also includes e-books and government documents. Newspaper articles are excluded from the initial search results. To include them, click the 'x' next to "Not Content Type: Newspaper Articles" above the search results.