HIS 496 - History Seminar

Finding primary source documents in books

Search the online library catalog for your topic, then try adding one of the following words to your search to find collections of primary sources:

"documents," "sources," "letters," or "diaries"

e.g., "Korean War AND Sources" or "Civil War AND Diaries"

Don't forget to change the "Held By" selection to Libraries Worldwide to find books you might be able to obtain through interlibrary loan.

Newspaper articles online

The Doane Library has a few databases that give you access to many newspaper articles.

Databases for Multiple Sources

• America's News -- This includes many newspapers and news transcripts for each state, regional and national news, as well as English-language international news sources. 
  • Nebraska Newspapers -- Search 38 Nebraska city, town and college newspapers for stories published in the last 30+ years.
• Newspapers.com - Nebraska Collection -- Search 48 Nebraska newspapers, dating from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s
• ProQuest -- This large database includes two news databases -- US Newsstream and International Newsstream -- providing more recent news stories from the past 30-40 years, approximately. 
• MyHeritage -- This database provides access to many newspapers in the US and some other countries. It includes some of the newspapers in the Chronicling America project.

Single Source Databases

• Crete News -  Find local and area news in this weekly newspaper, from 1871 to 2017 or newer (updated occasionally).
• Doane Owl - Discover campus news from 1879 to 2019 (when this student paper went online).
• Omaha World-Herald - Explore Omaha and state history through the news, events and people in this collection. 
• New York Times -- You must register for an account to have generally unlimited reading, though our subscription limits you to only 5 articles per day if published 1923-1980. Issues of the NY Times from these dates also may be using the TimesMachine

Freely Available Collections

Free-to-the-public sites you might search for historical newspapers include:

• Chronicling America -- The Library of Congress provides free access to digitized newspapers from 1836-1922 and a newspaper directory for papers published in the U.S. from 1690-present. 
• Google's Advanced News Archive Search in order to find scanned images from historical newspapers
• Historical Worldwide Newspapers Online -- This Libguide from Bowling Green State University library lists many free online newspaper sites. NOTE: The guide is no longer maintained, therefore, some links may be broken.
• Europeana Newspapers -- This is a very large collection of historical European newspapers. In their original language, no translations.

Special Digitized Collections in the Doane Library

The library has purchased the following collections of primary source documents for your use:

Doane University Archives

If you are doing research on a Doane topic, refer to the Doane University Archives research guide to access the directory of the archives.

Digitized Collections - Nebraska

Here are websites specific to Nebraska:

Other Digitized Collections

The list below is representative of history websites that might be helpful in your research.

Guides to Reliable Websites

Websites

Interlibrary loan requests

Use our interlibrary loan (ILL) form to request resources from other libraries around the nation:

Perkins Library ILL Request