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HIST 597: Race & Nation in Modern Latin America & the Carribbean

 

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Eric Novotny
Title: Acting Head Arts and Humanities


Arts & Humanities Library
W321 Pattee Library
Penn State University
814-865-1014

Services for History Researchers

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Course Info

Course Name:
  HIST 597: Race & Nation in Modern Latin America & the Carribbean
Semester:
  Fall
Campus:
  University Park (UP)
Instructor:
  

Books

To find BOOKS (and other materials) at Penn State use the library's catalog, The CAT.  Use WorldCat to search for materials in libraries worldwide. Use the "Request via ILL" link to have items delivered to you. For more see our Interlibrary Loan.

Bibliographies

Bibliographies typically contain a list of sources; books articles, etc. Use them to determine key works, and to confirm you've uncovered all the relevant literature on a topic. While the printed guides are generally comprehensive, (often hundreds of pages long), they take years to produce and thus are unable to keep pace with the newest publications. For more current scholarly literature use the article databases in the next section of this guide. The bibliographies listed below are examples only. There are many other country and topic-specific guides. To find others search using the subject heading "bibliography: in The CAT. (e.g. Caribbean and bibliography).

  • A Bibliography of the Caribbean (1996. 346 p.)
  • Black Slavery in the Americas: an Interdisciplinary Bibliography, 1865-1980 (1982. 2 vols.)
  • Latin America: a Guide to the Historical Literature (1971. 700 p.)
  • Latin American Studies: an Annotated Bibliography of Core Works (2002, 173 p.)
  • Women in Spanish America: an Annotated Bibliography from Pre-conquest to Contemporary Times (1977. 696 p.)

Latin American Journals

Titles with links are freely available online. Search The CAT to determine where the others are (either in print or full-text in library databases.

Article Databases

  • Historical Abstracts.  References to world history from 1450 to the present in about 2,000 journals and some dissertations and collections of essays. Indexing began in 1954. Articles relating to the United States (including Puerto Rico) can be found in the companion database America: History and Life.
  • Handbook of Latin American Studies. Bibliography on Latin America consisting of works selected and annotated by scholars from the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress. The multidisciplinary Handbook alternates annually between the social sciences and the humanities. Each year, more than 130 academics from around the world choose over 5,000 works for inclusion in the Handbook. Continuously published since 1936, the Handbook offers Latin Americanists an essential guide to available resources.
  • HAPI (Hispanic American Periodicals Index). Online contains citations to articles, book reviews, documents, and other materials about Central and South America, Mexico, the Caribbean basin, the United States-Mexico border region, and Hispanics in the United States appearing in more than 500 key social science and humanities journals published throughout the world.
  • Women's Studies International. A multidisciplinary search tool designed to collect information on books, articles and other research on women worldwide.
  • FRANCIS . Indexes multilingual (primarily West European languages, especially strong in French) information from many disciplines published in over 4,300 academic journals in the humanities and social sciences. Subject terms and abstracts may be in English or French. The database covers journal articles, books, book chapters, conference papers, French dissertations, exhibition catalogs, legislation, teaching materials, and reports.
  • IBZ: International Bibliography of Periodical Literature. An index of periodical literature covering basic research from many fields of knowledge, and is particularly strong in the humanities and the social sciences. Over 11,000 periodicals are indexed by this multilingual database. Especially strong coverage of German scholarship as well as periodicals published on the European continent.
  • IIBP: International Index to Black Periodicals. Covers international scholarly and popular periodicals in Black Studies with full-text coverage of 40 core Black Studies periodicals. It covers a wide array of humanities-related disciplines including art, cultural criticism, economics, education, health, history, language and literature, law, philosophy, politics, religion, and sociology among others.
  • Periodicals Index Online. A unique resource this database provides table of contents for back volumes of thousands of scholarly journals. Coverage goes back to the first issue of a given publication. A good resource to use to discover earlier scholarship that may not be covered by more current databases.
  • Google Scholar Scans the contents of a FEW library databases. However, it only can "see" a handful of the more than 400 databases the library has. It can be very convenient, but use it as a complement to library searches, not a replacement.
  • Dialnet. Indexes Spanish language journals (and English-language journals about relevant Spanish topics) in science, art, literature, humanities and the social sciences. Hosted by the Universidad de la Rioja in Spain it is primarily a database of tables of contents with a limited number of full-text articles available. Full text is available for all journals published by the Universidad Complutense.

Text Databases

The databases below include full-text of hundreds of periodicals in various disciplines.

Citations

Citation indexes are a special type of index. They allow you to discover who has referenced a particular work. If you have a publication which is important to your research, you could use a citation index to find more recent articles which have cited it. This can be a good way to find responses to the important publication.

  • Web of Science. Includes the Arts and Humanities Citation Index and the Social Sciences Citation Index. Use the "Cited Ref" search to determine who else has cited a specific work. Can be tricky to use (for example only first initials are included) so ask for help!.
  • Google Scholar. Uses the technology of the Google search engine but ranks results by how often they have been cited. Google has not detailed their criteria, but it seems to focus on postings of research organizations and university departments. Also scans the contents of a FEW library databases. However, it only can see a handful of the more than 400 databases the library has. It can be very convenient, but use it as a complement to library searches, not a replacement.