Resource of the Week
by Shirl Kennedy, Deputy Editor
We know you like content-rich sites because we like content-rich sites. And for the American history researcher, we have something very cool this week.
U.S. History
Source: Houghton Mifflin
Reader’s Companion to American History
What’s here? The full text of several American history books. Containing full-text, signed articles. Available titles are:
+ Reader’s Companion to American History
+ Reader’s Companion to U.S. Women’s History
+ Reader’s Companion to Military History
+ Encyclopedia of North American Indians
+ Ships of the World: An Historical Encyclopedia
+ Civil War Battlefield Guide
+ Great American History Fact-Finder

The bad news is…the site is not searchable (although you could formulate a Yahoo or Google query to do it for you by using the site:college.hmco.com advanced search feature). The good news is…the site is eminently browseable. Click on each book title to display a page containing a alphabetical list of entries. Browse till you find what you’re looking for (or use your browser’s “find” feature) and click to read. There are some hidden gems here; for instance, in the Civil War Battlefield Guide, when you click on the name of a battle to read about it, you’ll see estimated Union and Confederate casualties for that battle at the bottom of the entry, as in this piece about the Appomattox Campaign. Ships of the World contains a section on Literary Ships — e.g., an alphabetical list of ships found in literature. The Encyclopedia of North American Indians offers a small collection of maps (although I had trouble getting some of the images to load). The Great American History Fact-Finder includes a bibliography of Suggested Additional Reading.

This website contains a variety of other materials, some of which are password-protected, for instructors and students who are registered to use them. But it’s worth clicking around to see what else you can find, such as:
+ Full-text Primary Sources in Western Civilization, from the Epic Of Gilgamesh to Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex: Existential Feminism.
+ Full-text Primary Sources in American History, from Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World to Consumerism, which presents “census figures on annual earnings by industry and occupation from 1890 to 1926.”
+ Recommended web links for American History, Western Civilization (annotated), and World Civilizations (annotated).

Publication data for the Reader’s Companion to American History shows a copyright date of 1991, so this is obviously not the place to look for recent events, etc., in U.S. history.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 28th, 2005 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.