History Research Guide

Gathering background information is an important step for any topic you're researching in your History course. This is called pre-research. 

Pre-research will provide you with a good understanding of a broad topic so you can identify keywords, narrow down the topic, and form a thesis statement or research question.

For example, World War II is a broad topic. You may choose to focus on women's involvement in the war, a specific battle, or concentration camps.

• Try one of the eBooks listed below for background research on a broad topic, or search the library catalog.
• Google can be a good tool to help you identify more keywords. You’re just looking for ideas and inspiration at this point, not sources.
• As you do your pre-research, be sure to take notes! Seeing your keywords written down can help you make connections between keywords and ideas, which may then help you form a thesis statement and identify supporting arguments or evidence.

Online reference books (eBooks) are helpful for finding background information because they contain a lot of information about your topic all in one place. eBooks can be found in our library databases and are available at any time without a library card. Here are just a few of our eBook databases to get you started.

For more eBooks, please visit our A to Z Databases and sort the database Types by eBooks.