HIST 240:
Cities in Modern Europe
Fall 2009 · Professor Quinn Slobodian

Contents:

Find background information
Find books
Find scholarly journal articles
Find primary sources
Evaluating what you find

• $300 award for a paper or project of any length from a 100 or 200 level Wellesley College course (2 awards)
• $750 award for a paper or project of any length from a 300 level Wellesley College course, excluding 360s, and 370s (1 award)
• Deadline: March 1, 2010

• Encyclopedia Britannica -older print editions may be useful for historical viewpoints and illustrations - Clapp Reference AE5 .E36 and .E363
• entries on cities in historic foreign-language encyclopedias such as:
  • Diccionario Enciclopedico Hispano-Americano (Clapp Reference fAE 61 D5)
  • Der Grosse Brockhaus (Clapp Reference AE 27 B92 1952)
  • La Grande Encyclopédie Larousse (Clapp Reference fAE 25 G7)
• Encyclopedia of Urban Planning - Clapp Reference HT165 .E5
• Grove Art Online

Use the Wellesley library catalog to find books, videos, and journals (not individual articles). Try the new Encore interface, or use our "classic" catalog search.

a few tips:

• use a keyword search for simple concepts
  
  - find a book that looks useful, click on the title, then click on the Full Record tab to see the subject terms
  - click on each subject term to find "more like this"
  - for example: keyword search "planning Paris" leads to the following subject terms (and many more books on the topic):
  
  
  • Paris (France)--History
  • Urban renewal--France--Paris--History
  • City planning--France--Paris--History
  • Haussman, Georges Eugène, baron, 1809-1891
    

Some useful subject headings for this course might be:

• Memory -- Social aspects
• Memorials
• Monuments
• City planning--[country name] -- [place name]
• City planning--History [place name]--Description and travel
• [country or city name]--Guidebooks
• [country or city name]--Description and travel
• Cities and towns--[place name]--History
• City planners--[country name]--Biography
• City planners--[place name]
• Land use, Urban --[place name]--History
• Regional planning--[place name]--History
• Transportation--[place name]--Planning--History
• Urban renewal--[place name]--History
• Urbanization--[place name]--History
  

• if our copy of a book is checked out, click on the NExpress button to request a book quickly (2-4 days)
• Search WorldCat to find material we don’t own, click on Find It@ Wellesley and request it ("We'll get it for you")
• In a hurry? Get a BLC card and borrow the book directly from a nearby library

tips:

• to find the full text of an article, click on the title for the full record, then look for the Find It! @ Wellesley button to link to the full text (online if we have it, or in print, or to the Interlibrary loan request if we don't own the journal)
  
  
• do your searching early and place interlibrary loan requests NOW for books and articles we don't have -- then, when you're ready to start reading and writing, you'll have a great selection of materials. If you wait, your choices will be very limited.

the most useful databases

• Historical Abstracts
        - index to articles on world history from prehistory to present; limit by the time period of interest
• Avery Index to Architectural Publications
        - index to articles on architecture, urban planning, design
• Anthropology Plus
        - index to articles on anthropology, archaeology and related disciplines
• ARTStor for images
  
  
• Periodicals Index Online
        - index to articles published in over 4500 journals in the humanities & social sciences in 40 languages, 1665 to 1995
• Project Muse
        - full text academic journals in the humanities & social sciences, from the past five years - see JSTOR for prior years
  
• JSTOR
        - full text of scholarly articles in all fields, up to 3 to 5 years ago (not recent articles)
  
• Academic Search Complete
        - broad, multidisciplinary database of both popular and scholarly articles, mostly fulltext
        - tip: limit to peer-reviewed articles or select the "Academic Journals" icon above your search results
  
• British Periodicals
        - searchable full text facsimiles of more than 160 British periodicals from the late 17th to the early 20th century
  
  
• Web of Science
        - despite its name, covers all branches of knowledge
        - trace references back from an article, or find more articles that cite that particular article

Primary sources are original, uninterpreted information, such as firsthand accounts of events in letters, diaries, interviews, or historical news reportage; original works of fiction, art, or music; research reports or data; testimony, speeches, etc. Note: primary sources may not be available in English translation!

How to Read a Primary Source - Patrick Rael, Bowdoin College

• Baedeker guides - Clapp Reference and also in the circulating collection, various call numbers
       - early 20th century travel guides with detailed maps and descriptions - FRAGILE
• autobiographies, memoirs, letters by planners, architects, government officials
       - use WorldCat to locate these (contact me if you don't find what you need).
• North American Women's Letters and Diaries, Colonial to 1950
• North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries and Oral Histories
• Times of London, 1765-1985
       - searchable facsimile of the newspaper, licensed access through Wellesley College
• EuroDocs
       - huge site of transcribed primary sources and images, some in translation
• Urban Planning, 1794-1918: An International Anthology of Articles, Conference Papers, and Reports by John Reps
       - digitized or transcribed primary source documents in a searchable bibliography from a Cornell professor emeritus
• OAIster ('oyster")
       - specialized search engine for digital collections of primary sources (images, letters, documents, maps, etc.). Finds things Google won't find.
• Wellesley College Special Collections - rare books include firsthand narratives of life in 19th century Paris, e.g. Located on the 4th floor of Clapp Library.

Criteria to keep in mind when choosing and using soures:

• Accuracy - Does the author cite her/his sources and are they legitimate?
• Authority - Who wrote the source? Is s/he credible?
• Objectivity - Does the author have a bias - political, religious, commercial or otherwise?
• Currency - Is this information new or based on outdated sources? Can you tell how current it is?

Wellesley College Library · Information Services · Laura Reiner · last modified: October 19, 2009