History & Political Science

By Darren Poley

As the Torah is the written law of Judaism, the Talmud is the oral law of Judaism, written down. Talmud Bavli, commonly called the Babylonian Talmud, is a monument of rabbinic literature from around 70 A.D. until the Muslim conquest of the Holy Land at the beginning of the seventh century. Falvey has added to its print collection Talmud Bavli; the Schottenstein daf yomi edition. This edition of Talmud Bavli is located in the Falvey West stacks, call number: BM499.5 .E5 2000.

The Encyclopaedia Judaica (2007) identifies the publisher, ArtScroll, as having “embarked on large-scale translation projects that have had little precedent (and not much success) among other English-language Judaica publishers, such as the case of their widely acclaimed, 73-volume Schottenstein Talmud (completed in 2005), which involved a remarkable array of sponsors, translators, and talmudic authorities from both within and outside the ḥaredi [that is the ultra-Orthodox Jewish] world” (Stolow, Jeremy. “Artscroll.” Encyclopaedia Judaica. Ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik. 2nd ed. Vol. 2. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007. 534-535. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 4 Sep. 2012.).

Translated from the German Enzyklopädie Erster Weltkrieg (2003), Brill’s Encyclopedia of the First World War (2012) is an excellent complement to the Library’s Encyclopedia of World War I (2005) and United States in the First World War (1995). With its emphasis on the social aspects of the war, the Encyclopedia covers numerous topics not included in the Encyclopedia of World War I, such as barbarians, disability, sexuality, newspapers and war toys. Half of the first volume of the Encyclopedia is dedicated to essays on warring nations, the social aspects of the war and the course of the war. Noteworthy are the essays on the social aspects of the war, such as the ones on war literature, propaganda, scientists and religion. A complete list of essays is available on the publisher’s website.

Although international in scope, the Encyclopedia overrepresents German individuals and organizations as is to be expected from a German language publication. The nine-pages long historiography essay focuses on (West-) German scholarship, but also references Anglo-Saxon and French contributions. A separate essay is dedicated to World War I scholarship in the former GDR.

The Encyclopedia’s subject index simply mirrors the A-Z list of entries and will disappoint the reader who expects detailed subject indexing. Chemical warfare and chemical weapons, for example, are not listed in the index although it would have been helpful to add a cross-reference to gas warfare. Unfortunately, the Encyclopedia is only available in print, but interested readers can compensate for the lack of a detailed index by referring to the full text search feature available for the German language copy on Google Books.

Can’t wait to get your hands on it? The print volumes of the Encyclopedia are shelved on the second floor of Falvey. Sample entries are available online on the publisher’s website. A detailed review of the German original is available on H-Net Reviews.

Questions or comments?  Contact me directly (jutta.seibert@villanova.edu) or post your comments online.

Try Declassified Documents Reference System (DDRS) (available until Sept. 28)

Background

In 1998, the systematic digitization and online publication of Declassified Documents Reference System (DDRS) was initiated by Gale Cengage Learning.  The process involves indexing, abstracting, and capturing on microfiche a large selection of U.S. government documents obtained from presidential libraries. These libraries receive declassified documents from various government agencies, including the White House, the CIA, the FBI, the State Department, and others. As researchers visit these presidential libraries and request documents, the libraries photocopy and provide for filming. The result is a collection of more than 75,000 documents, consisting of more than 465,000 pages, that has literally been built by researchers themselves for nearly two decades.

Searching

DDRS supports basic and advanced searching.  Basic search includes keyword and full-text searching.  Advanced discovery provides for searching by keyword/subject, title/abstract, source institution, and full-text, including the use of Boolean logic. Searches can be limited to a range of issue dates, a range of declassified dates, document type (such as bill, agenda, cable, airgram), source institution (such as agency, department, Supreme Court, Warren Commission), sanitized or unsanitized, completeness, number of pages.

Search history can be accessed during a search session. An InfoMark at the top of any page indicates that the URL of the page is persistent and can be bookmarked or copied for future reference.  Help links and search tips are also available.

Document facsimiles can be viewed as electronic text.  Document facsimiles can be scaled for ease of viewing, by choosing a size percentage. Facsimile documents can be viewed or printed as a PDF version but due to some excessive sizes cannot be emailed. Electronic texts of the documents can be emailed and printed.

Questions or comments? Contact me directly (merrill.stein@villanova.edu) or post your comments online.

Are you tired of repeating the basics of Chicago Style notes and bibliographies to your students?
Are your students confused about how to format first and subsequent notes following Chicago style?

Clear up some of your students’ confusion by referring them to Falvey’s Brief Introduction to the Chicago Manual of Style.  Research Center intern Matt Ainslie has created a brief online tutorial (4 min.) in which he demonstrates step-by-step how to cite a sample source in the first note, in subsequent notes and in the bibliography.

The tutorial includes a link to the Chicago-Style Citation Quick Guide, which is basically a short list of templates for first notes, subsequent notes and the full bibliographic entries for commonly cited sources such as books, chapters, journal articles, dissertations and even web sites.  The Quick Guide is easy to use and a great reference tool for undergraduate and graduate students alike.  It includes a link to the full text online version of the 16th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style.

Please contact me with your ideas and suggestions for additional tutorials.

Race, Slavery and Free Blacks, a primary source collection of court petitions and slavery statutes which was originally published on microfilm by University Publications of America, has received a second lease on life as a digital collection.  It has been re-released in Proquest’s History Vault and is now called Slavery and the Law.

The collection covers the years 1777-1867 and consists of petitions to state legislatures and Southern county courts as well as state slavery statutes.  The reproductions of the handwritten petitions are accompanied by petition analysis records (PAR) to facilitate access to the document.  Each PAR contains an abstract of the petition besides dates, location, names of petitioners and defendants, the repository of the original document and subjects.  As an added bonus the collection also includes the contents of two classical scholarly works related to the subject:  Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro (1926) by Helen Catterall and James Hayden and The Law of Freedom and Bondage in the United States (1862) by John Hurd.

Slavery and the Law is now available as a trial until November 22, 2012.
Questions or comments?  Contact me directly (jutta.seibert@villanova.edu) or post your comments online.

The Black Abolitionist Papers (BAP) document the struggle for abolition from the perspective of African Americans both free and enslaved. The digital collection consists of the correspondence, speeches, sermons, lectures, editorials and poems of close to three hundred African American abolitionists. Some of the voices are familiar such as those of Harriett Tubman and Frederick Douglass, others are less well known or disguised behind pseudonyms. The original sources are located in over one hundred archives and libraries. Over thirty percent of the sources are hand-written letters and documents.

Previously only available on microfilm, the collection can now be accessed online by Villanova faculty and students.  Access links to BAP can be found under Databases A-Z, in the library catalog and under the primary sources tab of the history subject guide.

Collection contents can be browsed and results can be narrowed by document type, time period, subject, geographic location and source library.  A personal, password-protected archive is available to store documents, citations can be exported to RefWorks and persistent URLs make sharing with colleagues and students a snap.  Short online tutorials introduce the novice to the collection’s search features.

BAP includes the five companion volumes to the original microfilm collection edited by P. Ripley and published by the University of North Carolina Press.  The companion volumes add commentary, annotations and images to about ten percent of the primary sources in BAP and make the collection suitable for undergraduate students.  Look for the Full Text links (see image below) in the search results to locate commentary, notes and images or browse the companion volumes.  Use the links to explore two sample documents with commentary and annotations:

Charles Lenox Remond to Richard Allen, 7 January 1841 . Rhodes House—Oxford, England. MSS, British Empire, C154/202 . 7 January 1841.
“Bury Me in a Free Land” by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Anti-Slavery Bugle . 20 November 1858.

Additional online resources with African American primary sources:

African American Studies Center Online
Includes biographies, subject entries, primary sources, maps, charts and tables.  Notable titles in this collection are the New Encyclopedia of African American History 1619-1895 and the African American National Biography Project.

African American Newspapers: the Nineteenth Century
Comprises major 19th century African-American newspapers such as The Christian Recorder (1861-1902), Freedom’s Journal (1827-1829), The North Star (1847-1851), and the Frederick Douglass’ Paper (1851-1863).

American Periodicals Series
Includes abolitionist periodicals such as the Liberator (1831-1865) and the Anti-Slavery Examiner (1836-1845).

Questions or comments? Contact me directly (jutta.seibert@villanova.edu) or post your comments online.

The waiting is over!  Ancestry Library Edition is now available at Falvey Memorial Library.  Earlier this year, the library ran simultaneous trials of two popular genealogical databases, Ancestry Library Edition and HeritageQuest. Faculty and students alike unanimously voted for Ancestry.  Access to Ancestry is available via the library’s Databases A-Z list as well as from the History and Biographies research guides.

Ancestry encompasses a vast collection of genealogical data which traces the history of millions of individuals going in some cases as far back as 1300.  The collection consists of census data, vital records, directories, photos, and more.  Faculty members in the history department are already planning student research projects with  Ancestry data sets for the coming semesters.

U.S. census data from 1790 to 1940, Indian census rolls, passenger lists from New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, New Orleans, New South Wales and Hamburg, U.S. naturalization records, Irish immigrants arrival records, and London parish records are some of the data collections available through Ancestry.  An unexpected bonus are image collections, such as U.S. historical postcards, U.S. Civil War photos, U.S. war and conflict images (1765-1970), and the African American photo collection.  The photo of St. Rita Hall in this post is from the U.S. historical postcards collection.

Questions or comments?  Contact me directly (jutta.seibert@villanova.edu) or post your comments online.

by Matt Ainslie (Falvey Research Center Intern)

Looking for scholarly historical data sets used by others in projects past?  The solution may be a resource about which most historians  have probably not heard.  It’s a clearinghouse of quality data, some historical, called the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research.  ICPSR has grown from its 1962 founding into a data archive of more than 500,000 files of research in the social sciences.  Data files can be downloaded into statistical programs such as SPSS and a growing number of data sets can also be analyzed online with ICPSR’s own Statistical Data Analysis program.

The historical data sets in ICPSR are mainly raw data from surveys, censuses and administrative records.  You can browse by subject or use ICPSR’s search engine.  For example, subject browsing for historical resources leads to data sets of tax lists from Chester County, Pa. from 1693 to 1799, tax and census records in New York City in 1790,  and data from census records that reflect the social characteristics of Mexican-American families in Los Angeles from 1844 to 1880.  The search function is also excellent.  Searching using the keyword “riots” turns up, to name one example, demographic information about those arrested for participation in the insurrection in Paris, France: Analysis of Arrests in Paris, June 1848.  Results can be narrowed by subject, geography, author, and historical time period.  You can save your search and sign up to be notified of new results using RSS.  You can download the data in different formats after you set up an account.

Remember that research article by Goldin on the wages of single women during the progressive era which you recently read?  Are you interested in taking a closer look at the data she used?  A quick author search in ICPSR will establish whether Goldin archived her data sets in ICPSR as indeed she did.  The View Related Literature link will eventually lead you to her Woman and Child Wage Earners (1907, Philadelphia and New York) data files.  The study description lists the scope of the study, its data sources and the methodology.  In order to download the data files you need to create an account and log into ICPSR.

Feel free to contact your liaison librarian with any questions or comments that you may have.

Genealogical research has a passionate following outside of the academic world, a fact that is reflected in the often impressive genealogy collections of public libraries.  Now Villanova faculty members are planning to add genealogical research projects to their undergraduate history syllabi.  Welcome to the digital new world of genealogy: like in so many other areas of research, the time of dusty old books and reels of microfilm has passed and online databases have taken their place. 

Ancestry.com and HeritageQuest are two of the major genealogical research tools currently on the market.  Both are available on trial basis until March 15 to Villanova faculty and students.  Discover a wealth of genealogical materials such as U.S. census data (1790-1930), church records, county census data, immigration ship lists, passport applications, Freedman’s Bank records, Revolutionary War pension applications, even international data from the UK, Canada and Germany.

I strongly encourage you to evaluate both resources and send me feedback about their usefulness in the classroom. For more detailed information about the contents of ancestry library edition and HeritageQuest Online, please consult the comparison chart provided by Proquest.  Contact me directly (jutta.seibert@villanova.edu) or post your comments online.

The Historical Periodicals Collection of the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) is currently available on trial basis.  Described as “the most comprehensive collection of American periodicals published between 1691 and 1877,” the collection includes more than 7,600 magazines and journals with more than seven million digitized pages. The digitization of series 5 which extends coverage up to 1877 has just been completed.

Series 1: 1691-1820
Series 2: 1821-1837
Series 3: 1838-1852
Series 4: 1853-1865
Series 5: 1866-1877
Series 1-5: 1691-1877

Don’t miss the twelve collection overview essays which can be found on the lower right hand corner of the results screen via the Reference Shelf link.  The essays discuss the research value of the AAS periodicals collection. Included are titles such as Doing Women’s History at the American Antiquarian Society and An Overview of the American Antiquarian Society Periodicals Collection. The essay on the periodical literature in the Revolutionary War Era includes detailed descriptions of selected periodicals.

The Publications link at the top of the search screen brings up a complete title list with publication start and end dates. Search results can be limited by types of publication, document and image. The collection is available on the familiar EBSCO platform.

The trial will run until April 2.  Give the AAS Historical Periodicals Collection a try and let me know what you think.  Your feedback is important.  Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments that you may have.