History 399: The Iraq War

Finding Newspaper Articles

The following databases will be most helpful to you:

• Academic Search Premier
• Lexis-Nexis Academic
• Ethnic News Watch
• Left Index

Finding Government Information

The following resources will be most helpful to you:

• FDSys: Federal Digital System - includes the Compilation of Presidential Documents and the Congressional Record
• Lexis-Nexis Congressional - a source for the full-text of Congressional documents (e.g., hearings, CRS reports)
• Search USA.gov - searches all government websites, including the military

Other Useful Resources Online

• Al-Jazeera - It's really slow and you can't limit the date of the search, but this is a valuable archive of non-Western (and Western) reactions to the war
• International Crisis Group - excellent analysis of the situation in Iraq dating back to 2002, especially notable for coverage of Iraqi issues
• RAND - another independent, non-governmental source for analysis of the Iraq War, including U.S. foreign policy/international politics and more on-the-ground issues such as governance in Iraq and issues for American soldiers returning home

Tips for Effective Web Searching

Use Technorati or Google Blog Search for searching blog content.

Target your searches by using the site: feature. For example, the search "Iraq War" site:gov will only return U.S. government web pages that contain the phrase "Iraq War." You can also modify this to search a specific website - for example Fallujah site:alternet.org will return all instances of the word Fallujah on any of the webpages in the alternet.org domain. You can also combine searches if you think it might be useful: for example, if you wanted to compare discussions of the bombing of the Askariya Shrine in 2006 using The Economist and the Brookings Institution, you could search "Askariya Shrine" site:brookings.edu OR site:economist.com (Yahoo! or AltaVista work best when you have more than 2 sites that you'd like to include; Google doesn't seem to be able to deal with more than 2).

Another useful web resource is Docuticker, a daily source of documents from government agencies (including the military), NGOs, and other groups. There is a search box on the main page. Examples of documents mentioned: On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign: The United States Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom, May 2003-January 2005, Senate Intelligence Committee Unveils Final Phase II Reports on Prewar Iraq Intelligence, Choosing War: The Decision to Invade Iraq and Its Aftermath.