History Study Centre is a resource aimed at meeting the needs of undergraduate historians and their teachers and contains over 40,000 separate documents covering world history, from medieval to modern.

From the first Viking raids and the rise of Charlemagne, to the Seattle riots and the fall of Milosevic, History Study Centre opens the door on the study of history. It offers historians a vast and cross-searchable collection of digitised primary and secondary sources that make it one of the most extensive resources of its kind.

The Journal Library offers cover-to-cover access to 47 key history-related journals including History Today, Journal of Social History, Presidential Studies Quarterly.

In History Study Centre you will find newspaper articles, rare books, parliamentary papers, journal articles, video clips, criminal trial records, diaries, radio and television news, maps, statistics and a comprehensive bookshelf of respected reference titles. Additionally, the history Web Gateway provides links to hundreds of reliable and informative websites elsewhere on the internet.

In total, History Study Centre provides access to over 40,000 separate documents and articles organised within 515 widely-studied curriculum topics and links to 2,000 websites. New topics and content are added regularly to take in new areas of study and the latest scholarship.

Enhance your research

History Study Centre is easy to use and offers an extensive and authoritative library of primary and secondary sources that will be used by all history students and researchers. It offers:

• A rich library of rare texts delivered to your desktop
• Quick answers to queries on dates, facts and figures
• The latest scholarship from history journals
• Intuitive navigation to the subjects you need using the Topic Tree
• Coverage spanning world history from 757 to 2000
• Documents from over twenty classic primary sources including the New York Times 1851-1977, Early English Books Online 1473-1700 and The Annual Register 1758-2000
• The largest online anthology of sources for history
• A 'one-stop shop' resource for all historians - with clear reference material and relevant, often rare, primary sources
• An opportunity for a wider audience to examine key primary sources

Who will use History Study Centre?

History Study Centre is ideal for:

• Hands-on history for undergraduates
• Researchers looking up historical facts, dates and statistics or tracing patterns of events
• Librarians answering history queries
• Students researching essays and dissertations
• New historians approaching a topic for the first time
• Teachers creating their own lessons and courses

Searching with History Study Centre

History Study Centre contains a vast amount of historical data from all the different sources that historians use. To help you find the most relevant information from this deep and diverse resource, there are three options for searching:

• Quick Search - simply enter a search term and instantly retrieve the best results
• Power Search - enables you to conduct a customised search in a few seconds
• Topic Tree - allows you to explore the content in a thematic way and find the study unit that is relevant to you

Quick Search
Simply enter your search terms and click Go! Quick Search cross-searches History Study Centre and sorts your results in order of relevance.

Advanced Search
There is a wide range of different types of content in History Study Centre and Advanced Search lets you decide what resources you want to search. You can choose the exact reference work you want to search and even limit your search to biographical material only.

Work Space

Each user can save their own selection of favourite items and searches. Using the Saved Searches and Saved Records feature creates a file of links to content in History Study Centre, which can be accessed and edited every time the user logs in with their own personal password. Researchers can create a file of documents used for an assignment or dissertation, and teachers can share their selection with a class.

History Study Centre contains reference works, journal articles, primary sources and a web gateway. All of this content can be instantly cross-searched or the user can browse the Study Unit Topic Tree where content is organised under 500 topic headings.

Study Units

Each Study Unit provides a short, illustrated introduction followed by a page of links to the best content on that subject. The links are arranged under categories for reference, biographies, documents, scholarship, images, video clips and websites. Study Units make it extremely easy for you to find relevant content. Study Units also provide historical context, bringing together a range of 20-120 primary and secondary sources per study unit to reveal differing contemporary accounts and academic interpretations of history.

For example, a researcher studying the Cuban Missile Crisis would find top-secret notes from strategy meetings with Kennedy, recordings of conversations with Khrushchev, and contemporary newspaper reports from the New York Times. Students can use the Topic Tree to find relevant Study Units and will be directed to other relevant content. For example, a student preparing an essay on the origins of World War II will find a Study Unit on exactly this topic and find references to a dozen related topics, giving them a total of several hundred sources and articles to choose from.

A goldmine of primary source material covering the last 14 centuries is contained within History Study Centre. Documents have been selected from classic sources including: The Annual Register, The New York Times, Early English Books, English Historical Documents.

There are also dozens of other sources, all contributing to a rich and diverse anthology of documents for each Study Unit topic. Pamphlets describing criminal trials and divorce cases illuminate contemporary attitudes and morals. Early biographical dictionaries show what society at the time really thought about their famous contemporaries. Parliamentary papers give detailed eyewitness evidence about social issues which necessitated changes in government legislation. Video clips and transcripts of television and radio news footage provide important insights into the major twentieth-century conflicts and the role of the media.

Reference

In addition to the Study Unit Topic Tree, History Study Centre provides an online bookshelf of over 50 respected reference works brought together in one cross-searchable library of history information. Reference titles include: The New Penguin Dictionary of Modern World History, The Historical Dictionary of the Elizabethan World, Who's Who in Victorian Britain, The Atlas of British Overseas Expansion, Research guides like The Encyclopaedia of Historians and Historical Writing.

Entries from the reference library provide ideal background information for students approaching a subject for the first time and a reliable source of historical dates, facts and figures for academics, researchers, students and librarians.

History Study Centre provides several thousand journal articles on 500 widely-studied topics. Each selection includes the best scholarship from over 200 current journals. The journals range from key titles like History Today and American History to specialist titles like The Journal of Family History. Articles have also been selectively chosen from journals, for example, articles by leading historians in History Today since the 1950s to add extra depth to each selection.