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High School Guide

Guide for high school students who want to do research in the McPherson Library

Reference Works - Start here

Scholarly reference works (encyclopedias, dictionaries, chronologies, and more) provide you with facts and other information about your topic, including:

  • Identifying key individuals or groups involved in or affected by the events, and biographical information about them.
  • Key places where the events took place
  • The time span of the events (very useful to limit your journal search)
  • The language to use while searching, whether contemporary (First World War) or historical (The European War)
  • Multiple points of view you may wish to consider (victors/defeated, members of different ethnic or other groups, etc). 
  • Important debates in the field. There are always debates in the field. Historians can't even agree on when certain events officially started! 
  • A sense of the historiography of the events - how history viewed the event shortly after it happened, slightly later, today, and as new evidence is uncovered.  
  • Bibliograhies to lead you to important secondary sources on the topic.
  • Excerpts of primary sources

Maps/Atlases

Find Journal Articles

Find scholarly articles from the discipline of History using Ebscohost's two history databases: America: history and life covers Canada, The United States and Mexico, and Historical Abstracts covers the rest of the world. We have merged the two for results on topics relevant worldwide.
Find Articles for History
Limit Your Results

Primary Sources

Creative Commons License
This work by The University of Victoria Libraries is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License unless otherwise indicated when material has been used from other sources.