National History Day Resources
National History Day in Iowa is a year-long program that helps students learn about historical issues, ideas, people and events.
Students participating in the program research a topic related to the annual NHD theme, analyze the information, and present their interpretation through projects that include papers, posters, websites, and performances.
See the National History Day in Iowa website for more information:
General Tips for Getting Started
Keep the theme for this year's National History Day in mind: "Frontiers in History"
Start by learning more about the background for your topic. Remember these questions to keep yourself oriented:
- Who were the people and organizations involved in your topic?
- What were the main events that happened around your topic?
- When did the events you are researching happen?
- Where were the important locations based around your topic?
Start your research with a few simple keywords to see how much you can find, and add more specific terms or filters later, to narrow your search results.
Find Books with Quick Search
Quick Search will find both ebooks and books available through the University Library.
Searches using the box above are already filtered to show only books but there are more filters you can apply to narrow down your results on the right side of the page.
Paid Databases (Login on Campus)
- JSTOR This link opens in a new windowJSTOR spans many disciplines, primarily in the humanities, social sciences, and life sciences. It includes digitized current and back issues of academic journals, books and primary source materials.
- America: History and Life This link opens in a new windowCovers the history and culture of the United States and Canada, from prehistory to the present. With indexing for 1,700 journals from publications going back to 1910.
- Historical Abstracts This link opens in a new windowHistorical Abstracts covers the history of the world (excluding the United States and Canada) from 1450 to the present, including world history, military history, women's history, history of education, and more.
- Academic Search Ultimate This link opens in a new windowThis database covers almost all subject areas and is especially good at interdisciplinary areas. Good place to start for class assignments. It contains full text articles for more than 6,500 journals.
Free Databases (Access Anytime!)
- JSTOR: Open Content This link opens in a new windowThis is a subset of the full JSTOR collection, limited to content found in the JSTOR Open Collection. It is primarily a collection of book chapters, but it also contains several thousand freely-accessible journal articles.
- Chronicling AmericaThis website providing access to information about historic newspapers and select digitized newspaper pages, and is produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP).
- Digital Public Library of AmericaAll of the materials found through DPLA—photographs, books, maps, news footage, oral histories, personal letters, museum objects, artwork, government documents, and so much more—are free and immediately available in digital format.
Primary Sources
- ProQuest Historical Newspapers This link opens in a new windowAn archive of 14 major historical U.S. newspapers that can be searched collectively or individually. Every issue of each title includes the complete paper, cover to cover.
- The Goldfinch: Iowa History for Young PeopleAn Iowa history magazine for people aged 8 to 13. Each issue focused on a theme (ranging from Immigrants to Diaries, from Home and Family to Iowa’s Kid Heroes) and includes articles, games, photos, and fiction.
- HathiTrust This link opens in a new windowA very large (17+ million items) collection of digitized books and journals, including full access to items in the public domain. To enable additional full-text access, after the HathiTrust page loads, click on "Login" in the upper right corner, then select "Iowa State University" on the dropdown list, and enter your ISU Net-ID and password.
About the Library
The Iowa State University Library is big and a little confusing! To help you navigate around it, a few resources are available below:
1. Maps: Maps are available on the library website to show you where all the computer labs, books, and other important locations are in the library building.
2. Logging in: To access the paid databases in the library, you need two logins: one to open the computer and one to access the database.
- Ask at the Main Desk to get the current login information for the library's computers and databases on campus.
More information about logging in can be found on the "How do I access electronic resources?" webpage:
