Sources
& Search Tips by-
Steven Wise , Reference & Instruction Librarian,
Sueltenfuss Library, Our Lady of the Lake University
Contents
Reference Materials
Remember,
reference works are designed to provide important background information,
critical introductions, and overviews to help you better understand a topic
and plan a more informed and efficient search. Also, use them to
find bibliographies (usually following each article or entry) that identify
books, articles and other information resources for further reading about
your topic.
Several of the
reference items
listed in the library guide, Resources in Colonial
Latin American History,
are also pertinent to Mexican history and the Mexican Revolution in particular.
Please refer back to that guide.
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Primary & Secondary
Sources in the Sueltenfuss Library
Whether you're searching
for primary or secondary sources, you'll use
WebCat, the Library's catalog, to find them. Note that WebCat provides access, not only to books "on
the shelves", but also to a collection of e-books available on the Web. At
times, e-books can be especially convenient since you can print at least
some of their contents directly from the Web.
Remember, too: For the historian,
"primary sources" are documents produced by contemporaries of the events
they are recording. As such, a wide range of material is included under
this rubric, including memoirs, diaries, letters, newspaper accounts, government
publications, novels, paintings, photographs, and so on.
Search Tips
The “official” Library of
Congress Subject Heading (LCSH) for the Mexican Revolution is “Mexico—History—Revolution,
1910-1920”. The general LC subheading for primary sources is “sources”.
Combining the two as subject keywords yields the relevant items.
- Identify primary sources
available in the library using the following subject-keyword search in WebCat:
Mexico Revolution 1910-1920
AND sources
- A broader search to
identify primary sources on any topic in Mexican history should look
like the following (also a subject-keyword search);
Mexico history AND
sources
- To find primary sources
on other specific topics in Mexican history, combine the subject keyword
"sources" with keywords selected from the LCSH entry
under Mexico - History
(click to link to the pdf file).
- Any LC subject keywords
that apply to primary sources also apply to secondary sources. Simply leave
out the subject-keyword "sources" and most of your results will, in fact,
be secondary sources.
- Other LC subheadings
that work to find specific types of primary sources include: personal
narratives, manuscripts, correspondence, memoirs.
Primary Source
List - Selected Titles
Border Fury: A Picture
Postcard Record of Mexico's Revolution and U.S. War Preparedness, 1910-1917
F1234 .V2 1988
Documents on the Mexican
Revolution
F 1234.D738 1976
A nine-volume set organized
thematically/chronologically: From the origins of the Revolution through
such events/issues as the murder of Madero, anti-American sentiment during
the revolution, and counter-revolution on the border.
Fragments of the Mexican
Revolution: Personal Accounts from the Border
F 1234.M378 1983
Historía Documental
de México
F 1226.M53
(In Spanish). Two
volumes. Volume I covers the Pre-Hispanic era, the Conquest, the Colonial
period, and the 18th century. Volume II covers Independence, the era of Santa
Anna, "La Reforma y el Imperio", the Modern Era (1867 - 1910), and "La Etapa
Contemporanea" -- roughly, the Revolution through the mid-1950's.
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Primary Sources
on the Web
Search Tips
There is no standard indexing
language on the Web which, like LCSH in your academic library, assures uniform,
comprehensive access to materials. Therefore, you'll need time, persistence,
and a good knowledge of search engines to find what's out there.
In the end, you'll have to judge for yourself if the
search was worth the effort, but we'll offer this forewarning: Nowhere on
the Web will you find the number or range of primary sources -- freely and
easily accessible -- that you'll find on the library's shelves; the 8-volume
set Documents on the Mexican Revolution alone, for example, contains
800 primary documents!
Primary Source
List - Selected Sites
Postcards of the Mexican Revolution
http://www.netdotcom.com/revmexpc/
The Mexican Revolution: Conflict in Matamoros. Photographs from the Robert
Runyon Collection
http://runyon.lib.utexas.edu/conflict.html
Border Revolution 1920-1920, text by Cindy Baxman with period photographs
from the collections of the San Diego Historical Society
http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/projects/border/page01.html
The Plan de Ayala
From Don Mabry’s Historical
Text Archive
http://historicaltextarchive.com/sections.php?op=viewarticle&artid=127
The Plan of San Luís Potosí
(Nov. 20, 1910)
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1910potosi.html
Constitution of 1917
http://historicaltextarchive.com/mexico/1917const.html
Internet Modern History Sourcebook
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/modsbook.html
Maintained by
Fordham University's History department, this is an excellent gateway to
diverse primary source material in modern European, American, and Latin American
history.
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Scholarly
Journal Articles
- Academic Search
Premier
Online via the Web.
Offsite access available to currently enrolled students, faculty and staff
of OLLU only.
Includes full text
from 3,000 journals in most academic disciplines, covering both popular
and scholarly sources. Recommended as a starting point for lower-division
coursework, though use of Humanities Index (below) is a
must for more comprehensive literature searches on topics in History.
Search Academic Search Premier
- Humanities Index
Online via the
Web. Offsite access available to currently enrolled students, faculty and
staff of OLLU only.
Covers the literature
of History and other disciplines in the Humanities in greater depth than
Academic Search Premier (ASP) but lacks the convenience of full text that
ASP offers. This is a citation and abstract database only! Citations to articles
on your topic must be cross-referenced with our
Periodical Holdings List
to determine if the Library has a subscription to the journal cited.
Search Humanities Index
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Supplementary
Web Resources
In general, few (if any) web sites will provide the depth of content and
analysis that you'll find in books in your library, so it's best to consider
these resources as supplementary: You'll find some useful in providing, for
example, convenient summaries of key events, timelines, etc., pertaining
to the Revolution and to other events in Mexican history.
LANIC - http://www.lanic.utexas.edu/la/mexico/
Mexican Revolution: Student-Teacher Resource Center -
http://northcoast.com/~spdtom/rev4.html
General Links to Topics Dealing with the Mexican Revolution -
http://www2.truman.edu/~marc/webpages/revsfall98/mexico/mex_rev.html
Don Mabry's Historical Text Archive: Mexico -
http://historicaltextarchive.com/sections.php?op=listarticles&secid=21
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