*HIST 301:
Women of Russia: A Portrait Gallery
Fall 2009 · Professor Nina Tumarkin

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

general Russian history

• Encyclopedia of Russian History (Macmillan, 2004)
• Encyclopedia of Russian History: from the Christianization of Kiev to the Break-Up of the USSR - Clapp Reference DK36 .P39 1993
• 
  

specific eras

• Walls Came Tumbling Down: The Collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe - Clapp Library DJK50 .S75 1993
• World War II & the Soviet People - Clapp Lib #D764 .W67 1990
• Great Terror; Stalin's Purge of the Thirties - Clapp Library DK267 .C65
• Stalin, the Great Purge, & Russian History: A New Look at the "New Class" - Clapp Library qDK267.3 1984 .S53
• Petrashevtsy: A Sudy of the Russian Revolutionaries of 1848 - Clapp Library DK211 .S43 1985.
• Red Screen: Politics, Society, Art in Soviet Cinema - Clapp Lib #PN1993.5.R9 R4 1992

women

• Encyclopedia of Russian Women's Movements (Greenwood, 2001)
• Living Gender After Communism
• A History of Women's Writing in Russia
• Russian Women & Their Organizations: Gender Discrimination
• Memories of Revolution: Russian Women Remember
• Five Sisters: Women Against the Tsar Clapp Reserve & Clapp Library - N530.Z9 R328 1975
• Russia Through Women's Eyes: Autobiographies from Tsarist Russia - Knapp Reserve DK37.2 .R87 1996
• Between the Fields & the Ciy: Women, Work, & Family in Russia, 1861-1914 - Clapp Library HQ1662 .E54 1994
  
• Women & Gender in 18th Century Russia - Clapp Library HQ1662 .W56 2003
• Women in Russian Theatre: The Actress in the Silver Age - Clapp Library PN2727 .S38 1996
  

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:

• to find books written about your subject, do a keyword search -- empress alexandra russia
• to find critical books (or chapters in books) written about your author, add "criticism" to the author's name in a keyword search -- anton chekhov criticism
• to find chapters in anthologies about your writer, do a keyword search in quotation marks -- "Joseph Stalin "
  
  

Some useful subject headings for this course might be:

• Women -- Russia -- History -- 19th Century (or 20th Century)
• Women -- Russia (Federation) -- History
• Women -- Soviet Union -- History

tip: browse the subcategories under these subjects -- there are many narrower categories that may prove helpful

More options if we don't have what you want

• if our copy of a book is checked out, click on the yellow NExpress button in the catalog to request a book quickly (2-4 days)
• Search WorldCat to find material we don’t own, click on "Find It@Wellesley" and then "We'll Get It For You" to request it (5-10 days)
• Use Google Books to search the full text of millions of books, then use the "Find in a Library" link for the nearest copy
• In a hurry? Get a BLC card and borrow the book directly from a nearby academic 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 check the library catalog to see if we have it in print, or follow the "We'll Get It For You" 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 for this course

• Historical Abstracts
        - index to articles on world history from prehistory to present; limit by the time period of interest
• Women's Studies International
        - index to articles on women's studies, gender, and feminism, written from 1972 to present
• PubMed
        - index to articles on all aspects of medicine, biomedicine and health care, written from 1950 to the present
• LGBT Life with Full Text
        - index to the world's literature on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues, plus some full text
  
  
• FIAF International Index to Film Periodicals Plus
        - index to articles on film and TV from 300 academic and popular film journals, including some full text
• Film and Television Literature Index with Full Text
        - articles on film and television theory, writing, production, cinematography, etc., 1914 to present
• Film Literature Index
        - Index to articles in film and television periodicals from 30 countries, 1976-2001
• MLA International Bibliography
        - index to articles on literature in all genres, including film
        - note: international journals - may wish to limit to English

• CIAO (Columbia International Affairs Online)
        has abstracts from working papers, policy briefs, books & journal titles dealing with international affairs.
• Facts on File World News Digest
        news digests written contemporary to the time by Facts on File news editors (since 1940), and much more.
  
  
• Periodicals Index Online
        - index to articles published in over 4500 journals in the humanities & social sciences in 40 languages, 1665-1995
  
• 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
  
• Google Scholar
        - searches academic and publishers' websites for references to scholarly articles. Use our "Find Full-Text@ Wellesley" link in Google Scholar to get the full text for free if we have it in our databases!
• 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: some primary sources may not be available in English translation.

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

• EuroDocs > Russia for historical documents, memoirs, etc.
• Russian films & documentaries in Clapp Library
• In WorldCat add the following to your topical search: "memoir or diary or autobiography"

Historical News Coverage

• Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) reports, 1974-1996
        - translations of foreign news broadcasts, speeches, etc.
        - use FBIS Index for coverage of Europe & earlier reports (1947-74)
• BBC Monitoring
       – foreign news broadcasts in translation
• Times of London, 1765-1985 (pdf)
       - searchable facsimile of the newspaper, licensed access through Wellesley College
• New York Times  1851-2003 (pdf) · June 1980 to present (html)

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?

*I am grateful for the help of my colleague Jacqueline Fitzpatrick, now retired, on whose guide this page is based.

Wellesley College Library · Information Services · last modified: November 2, 2009