This handout will help you find primary and secondary sources for your major assignment in History 365, Political Violence in Latin America.

Reference Resources

Use these to investigate possible topics and look up unfamiliar terms you encounter in your research.

Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture – Ref F1406 .E53 1996
Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures – Ref F1218.6 .O95 2001
Encyclopedia of Mexico: History, Society & Culture – Ref F1210 .E63 1997

Primary Sources

ALiCat & I-Share
We don’t have a lot of primary material here at Augustana, but you should look to see what is available.

• For a major figure, try an “author” search by last name: e.g., Allende
• Do a “title” search if you know the name of a particular text

In general, look out for primary source material as you are searching the catalog for other things (see more below). In some cases it may be difficult to tell, from ALiCat alone, whether the book you’ve found will count as primary or secondary material for this class, so always double-check by looking at the book itself!

Fordham University. Internet Modern History Sourcebook: 20th Century Latin America. http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/modsbook55.html
Collection of links to primary sources in 20th-century Latin American history. (It’s worth noting that the Internet Modern History Sourcebook has permission to reproduce all of these documents; either that, or they are in the public domain.)

The George Washington University. National Security Archive. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/
Online collection of government documents, including many acquired through the Freedom of Information Act. Click on “documents” (in the green bar on the top of the page); on the left-hand side of the page that comes up, click “Latin America.”

University Libraries, University of Washington. Latin American History Sources. http://www.lib.washington.edu/subject/history/tm/latin.html
A collection of links to digital archives of primary sources in Latin American history, hosted by various institutions. General Latin American studies sites are grouped near the top of the page; further down you will find sites relevant to particular countries.
Secondary Sources: Books

ALiCat & I-Share

Search ALiCat to see if any books on your topic are available here at the Tredway Library. To get a general sense of what Augustana owns, you might begin by doing a “subject” search for your topic:

Note that you can browse through the subject headings to get a broad sense of what we own, and/or you can click on a particular subject heading (e.g., Argentina—History—20th century) to see the exact book titles.

In some cases, the topic will come before the name of the country in the subject heading:

If you can’t find what you need in ALiCat, conduct the same search in I-Share and request to have books delivered.

Secondary Sources: Articles

Many of the articles that you locate in your searches won’t be available full-text through the database. Use “Augustana’s Periodicals” to see if we own the journal that published your article; if we don’t, request the article through interlibrary loan.

HAPI: Hispanic American Periodicals Index
A good source for social science and humanities information on Latin America and the Caribbean. Non-Spanish speakers: note that you can very easily limit your results to English-langauge articles on the main search page.

Historical Abstracts
The most important historical database; try this even though it’s not Latin-America-focused. First, search by keyword; then, narrow down your results by clicking on the subject headings on the left-hand side of the page. Note also that you can specify a particular historical period in this database (e.g., you can find articles that are just about a particular century, or a particular decade).

Clase & Periodica
Handbook of Latin American Studies
PRISMA: Publicaciones y Revistas Sociales y Humanísticas
Three other Latin-America-focused databases to try. Clase & Periodica and the Handbook of Latin American Studies both make it a little bit harder than HAPI to limit to English-language resources, so they may be best to use if you know Spanish, for example. PRISMA overlaps significantly with HAPI but may still turn up some new sources.

**Contact me for more help; or, ask any librarian at the reference desk on the 2nd floor of the library.**

Created by Stefanie Bluemle, Reference Librarian, Sept. 2008.