HIST 200 Gateway: Race, Gender and the California Gold Rush: Home
Primary Sources
For historical research, the phrase "primary sources" refers to items that were created at the time an event occurred usually by direct observers or participants. Primary sources are not limited to traditional text-based documents such as newspaper articles and journal entries; photographs, posters, audio recordings, video clips, books, and more can all serve as primary sources if they are used as evidence of the time in which they were created. It's not about the source type...it's about how the source is used for your research.
The Gale Primary Sources cross-search interface provides access to millions of pages of content spanning many centuries and geographic regions. Users can explore a wide range of content including monographs, manuscripts, newspapers, photographs, maps, and more.
Provides full-text access to historical California newspapers, spanning the Gold Rush era to the present. This collection offers firsthand accounts of race, gender, labor, and social life during the California Gold Rush.
Provides free access to a vast collection of digitized primary sources from California’s libraries, archives, and museums. This resource includes photographs, letters, newspapers, government documents, and more.
Provides access to a vast collection of archival materials, including letters, diaries, photographs, government records, and oral histories from California’s past
Provides access to baptism, marriage, and burial records from California’s Franciscan missionaries between 1769 and 1850, documenting "information on tens of thousands of Native Americans, soldiers and settlers who lived in Spanish and Mexican California."
HathiTrust includes digital scans of millions of books and documents, many of which are freely available for download. After running a search, try using the "Place of Publication" or the "Date of Publication" facets to narrow your search.
Includes papers from prominent Americans from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. Relevant collections for this course may include the papers of James K. Polk (westward expansion), Frederick Law Olmsted (observations on race and labor), Ulysses S. Grant (military and Reconstruction), and Daniel Webster (legal and political debates).
Provides primary sources such as travel narratives, letters, and legal documents that explore interactions among Indigenous peoples, European and American settlers, and others.
Scholarly Research
Secondary sources and other supporting research materials provide an interpretation or analysis of historical topics, figures, and/or events and build context around the primary sources you are using for your research. There are many kinds of secondary sources, but some of the most common for academic research are scholarly books and e-books and peer-reviewed journal articles.
JSTOR is a great starting place for most topics. Particularly strong in the humanities and social sciences, JSTOR provides access to a wide range of journals from history, area studies, anthropology, literature, film and media studies, and more.
Subject areas include African-American studies, anthropology, Asian studies, business, ecology, economics, education, finance, history, literature, mathematics, philosophy, political science, population studies, sociology, statistics. The University of Rochester Libraries currently subscribes to the following multidisciplinary JSTOR Collections: Arts and Sciences I through XV. JSTOR also packages their content in disciplinary collections; however, the only ones of these that we have licensed are the Biological Sciences segment and the first of the Business collections. For alumni access, see also Alumni Library Gateway.
Researching a U.S.- or Canadian-based topic? Be sure to search in America: History and Life. This is an abstract database, so if you don't see the full-text for an article, click the red "FindText@UR" button to see if UR provides full-text access through another database (we often do!).
Our EBSCOHost package searches across a range of databases including Humanities Full Text and Social Sciences Full Text, two full-text resources containing sources from a variety of disciplines. Be sure to use the filters to the left of your results to limit your search by the source type that you need (e.g. peer-reviewed journals).
Includes books and dissertations; journal, magazine, and newspaper articles; laws, legislation, court cases, and other government documents; reports; manuscript materials; maps; website articles; and videos and podcasts.
