Welcome

Your assignments at university are an invitation to join a scholarly conversation by exploring topics in depth, weighing the evidence, and drawing your own conclusions.  A good research topic is one that sparks your interest and allows you to ask new questions. This guide is intended to help you get started.

Pick a research topic

• Read your assignment instructions carefully
• Pick a research topic that interests you and meets the assignment criteria
• Identify the key concepts of your research topic
  • If you need extra help, click on Choosing an essay topic
• Do some background reading on your topic using Wikipedia
  • Using Wikipedia wisely (video)

Use guides, dictionaries, and encyclopedias to find authoritative definitions, critical perspectives of major historians and useful bibliographies.

• Bibliography of imperial, colonial, and Commonwealth history since 1600
• The Cambridge encyclopedia of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, and the Maldives
• Conflict between India and Pakistan : an encyclopedia
• A dictionary of modern Indian history, 1707-1947
• Dictionary of the modern politics of South-East Asia
• Digital Dictionaries of South Asia
• The encyclopedia of India
• Encyclopaedia of Indian army
• Encyclopaedia of Hindu civilization, customs and traditions
• Encyclopedia of women in India
• India in English fiction, 1800-1970; an annotated bibliography
• Historical and cultural dictionary of India
• Historical dictionary of India

Begin with the Primary, Secondary and Tertiary Sources overview.

Searching for primary sources:

Search your topic (or historical person of interest) using the library's main search box to find primary sources (or reproductions) in our collection. Keyword searches that include the following terms will identify primary materials most of the time.

• Diar* (for diary or diaries)
• Correspondence
• Letters
• Memoir
• Personal narrative
• Recollections
• Reminiscences
• Journal
• Sources

 Other search tips:

• Use bibliographies and footnotes of secondary sources on your topic to help identify primary source material.
• Useful book: Reading primary sources: the interpretation of texts from 19th and 20th century history
• Original documents can also be found by searching our archival collections or by contacting the Archives and Special Collections (ASC) staff for help. The library has many microform collections of primary sources as well. Please ask for assistance at the Research Help Desk.

Historical Newspaper Databases

• Historical Archives of newspapers

Primary Sources on the web

• Archives and Primary Sources Databases
• Digital Public Library of America
• Internet Archive
• Hathi Trust Digital Library
• Library of Congress Digital Collections
• National Archives (UK)
• New York Public Library Digital Collections
• RUSA Primary Sources on the web guide

Other libraries with significant primary source collections:

• Center for Research Libraries (CRL) - Carleton University Library is a member of the CRL consortium. It regularly acquires and preserves newspapers, journals, documents, archives, and other traditional and digital resources for research and teaching and makes them available to member institutions through your RACER account.
• Bhagat Singh Internet Archive
• Digital Library of India
• Digital Colonial Documents - India
• Empire Online
• Eighteenth Century Collections Online
• Eighteenth Century Journals
• Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Daily Reports
• Gramaphone Recordings from the Linguistic Survey of India (University of Chicago)
• House of Commons Parliamentary Papers
• The Indian papers of Colonel Clive and Brigadier-General Carnac, 1752-1774
• Mutiny at the Margins: the Indian Uprising of 1857
• Punch Magazine Cartoon Archive
• South Asian Literary Recorings Project (Library of Congress)
• South Asian Migration Histories  (British National Archives)
• Women in World History--Primary Sources on South Asia