Reading Seminar on the Era of the US Civil War

Search America History & Life with the subject set as "historiography," or search one of the following publications for phrases such as review article, review essay, or historiography.

• The American Historical Review
• Civil War History
• Journal of African American History
• Journal of American History
• Journal of Southern History
• Journal of the Early Republic
• Reviews in American History
• The William and Mary Quarterly

Sheehan-Dean, Aaron, ed. The Cambridge History of the American Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

• Volume 1: Military Affairs
• Volume 2: Affairs of the state
• Volume 3: Affairs of the people

Miller, Richard F., ed. States at War. Hanover: University Press of New England, 2013-2020.

• Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont
• New York
• Pennsylvania
• Delaware, Maryland, and New Jersey
• Ohio
• South Carolina
• Michigan

Other relevant encyclopedias and handbooks

Remember that many secondary sources will have a bibliography that you can use for your own research. Beyond your course readings, examples include:

• The background sources listed above
• Wikipedia entry for American Civil War
• Oxford Bibliographies, e.g.,
  • The Bible and the American Civil War
  • Civil War Literature, 1861–1914
  • Robert E. Lee
  • Military Medicine
• Many theses have substantial bibliographies.
  • ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global
  • e.g., Waddell, K. (2018). American mnemonic: Racial identity in women's life writing of the civil war ​​​​​​​

Search in Omni - items at Laurier and 17 other Ontario libraries

• limit to "Books and eBooks" on the left side of search results
• tutorial: How to find scholarly books
• tutorial: Finding books in Omni
• tutorial: Requesting books from other libraries in Omni
• From Universities Outside of Omni Libraries (Interlibrary Loans)
• other Omni tutorials

Quick tips helpful for this course

• remember to use "quotation marks" when searching for phrases
• limit your searches to the subject field, with terms/phrases such as:
  • United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865
    • and then add words like causes, influence, campaigns, etc.
  • Secession -- Southern States
  • Confederate States of America
  • Reconstruction (U.S. History, 1865-1877)

ebooks

• all of our ebooks are catalogued in Omni, however you cannot search the entire full text of the ebooks. To do this, search one of our ebook collections. For this course, try the following:
  • Proquest Ebook Central
  • Ebook Academic Collection (Ebsco)
  • ACLS Humanities Ebook
• The Internet Archive has a lot of free content as well
  • best used if you have a known title, example

Search in Omni - items at Laurier

• limit to "Articles" and "Peer-reviewed" on the left side of search results
• tutorial: Finding scholarly articles in Omni

Due to the large number of results from an Omni search, it can sometimes be helpful to search history specific databases. For this class, try

• America History & Life (index)
  • Confederate States of America
  • United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865
• JSTOR
  • as with ebooks, search the entire contents of many journals, not just the citation/subjects
• Periodicals Archive Online
  • covers 1802-1902

• Laurier History Department’s Style Guide
• Chicago Manual of Style
• Rampolla, Mary Lynn. A Pocket Guide to Writing in History. Tenth edition. Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s, 2021. (ebook, one user at a time)