Research Guide for Hist 407: The South African War, 1899-1902

If you have any questions about doing your research, please contact me:

John Russell
johnruss@uoregon.edu
541-346-2689

Back to History Research Guide

Finding Secondary Sources

Historical Abstracts - provides citations & abstracts for articles and books covering historical topics outside of the U.S. and Canada.

JSTOR - provides full-text access to back issues of 44 major history journals (and is also useful for interdisciplinary and area studies work).

AfricaBib - portal to a number of African Studies specific indexes, including Africana Periodical Literature, African Journals Online, and ASA Online.

Africa Journal Archive - full-text access to back issues of selected journals published in Africa; includes Historia and the South African Journal of Cultural History.

Finding Primary Sources

You will likely need to be creative when searching for primary sources. Remember to ask yourself "who would have cared enough about this topic to document it in some form?"

Searching the library catalog:

• use subject keywords like Diaries, Personal narratives, Correspondence;
• limit your search by date to find material published contemporary to the time period covered by your topic; 
• search for people or organizations as authors.

Finding Primary Source Materials

Recommended online resources:

African Newspapers, 1800-1922 - full-text access to selected newspapers in Africa, including four South African newspapers that cover the period of the South African War.

Pamphlets from the Harvard College Library - includes a collection of around 70 Boer War pamphlets.

Foreign and Commonwealth Office Collection - full-text pamphlet collection drawn from the British Foreign Office; covers a broad time period (1545-1900) and has a good deal of documents related to the War.

CRL Catalog - as members of the Center for Research Libraries, we have access to their print and microfilm holdings via Interlibrary Loan.

Hansard Online - full-text access to most of the British Parliamentary Debates. [Search function currently down, but still can browse; print volumes in Documents Collection]

Google Books - a good source for older books, journals, and government publications; use the advanced search to limit by date.

Gallica - the French response to Google Books; material drawn from the Bibliothèque nationale de France and (increasingly) special collections from French universities; contains content in many languages, not just French.