Search one or more of the following e-Reference resources in order to get a good, authoritative overview of your history topic.
Subject-specific reference books are available at Perkins Library. They are worth a trip to the library in order to get a concise, authoritative overview of your History topic as you begin your research. This list represents just a sampling of the many print reference books available in the Library. Search the library's catalog, or browse the C through F section of the Reference collection to find more history reference books.
Encyclopedia of rural America : the land and people by 
Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War : a political, social, and military history by 
This Is Who We Were: in The 1940s (1940-1949) by 
Reference Library of Black America by 
A History of Women in the United States by 
United States Naval Aviation, 1910-1995 by Of course, you might need to think outside of the history box to find the necessary sources for your research. The Library has many reference books in a multitude of subject areas. Some will be found in the Reference collection (in the Learning Commons, main floor), while others have been put in the main collection on the lower level. You will also find many reference books online, especially those in the Gale Ebooks collection above, but there are a few in the EBSCO eBook collection and the ProQuest's Academic Complete collection.
Other sources of reference or secondary books are available. For instance Black's Law Dictionary is available in the Westlaw Campus Research database
*Gasp!* Why is a library guide telling you to search Wikipedia? Like other reference sources, you might want to consult Wikipedia for background reading and fact gathering, but do not cite it as a source in your paper. For this particular class, the real value of Wikipedia is the list of links at the end of the article. These links will sometimes lead you to digitized collections of primary sources on your topic.