Hist 400: Senior Seminar

Primary Resources

What are primary resources?   
A guide to identifying and using primary sources in Pickler Memorial Library

Pickler Memorial Library Microforms Collection   
Collections of primary materials ranging from records of presidential primaries to the calendars and state papers of English monarchs.

Manuscript Collectons
Collections of letters, journals, and scrapbooks, most dealing with citizens of Kirksville or Missouri or those affiliated with Truman State University.  These can give insight into the time periods in which they were produced.  Examples are the Ross C. Allen Letters, written by a World War II corporal to his parents in Kirksville and the Kirksville Methodist Episcopal South records of marriages, baptisms, and memberships between 1989 and 1907.  These are located in the Special Collections room on the third floor of Pickler Memorial Library.

Special Collections
In addition to the manuscript collections, the Special Collections area also contains larger holdings of materials.  These include a Rare Books collection of materials that are extremely old or valuable, scarce, signed by the author, or otherwise unique or "rare" in some sense.  Other collections include the Violette-McClure Missouriana holdings of books or materials that were written by Missourians, are about Missouri, or were published in Missouri, The Brashear-Henderson Mark Twain Collection of works by and about Twain, and the Harry L. Laughlin Eugenics Collection on eugenics, genetics, and related topics donated to the library by Laughlin, a prominent researcher in the field and an alumnus and formal faculty member.

 

Online Resources

American Memory (Library of Congress)
Historical collections of the National Digital Library.  Among them are a history of Coca-Cola advertising, scripts, documents and administrative of the Federal Theatre Project of the 1930s, and original historical material regarding the exploration and transformation of the Ohio River Valley. 1750-1820, among many others.

Avalon Project (Yale Law School)
Large collection of documents in law, history, and diplomacy from the 17th to the 21st century.  The range from the Charter for the Province of Pennsylvania : February 28, 1681 to the The Texas Declaration of Independence - March 2, 1836 to the Executive Order Establishing the Office of Homeland Security and the Homeland Security Council; October 8, 2001

EuroDocs
Online sources for European history.

 

Other Resources

Class pages for HIST 231: Library Resources and HIST 231: Internet

Guide to Library Resources for Historical Research and related guides for Political Science, Sociology, and Women's Studies
A complete list of guides is available at http://library.truman.edu/guides/mainpage.htm.