HISTORY 495S/496S: Honors Thesis Seminar 25/26

This page provides some suggestions for how to search for primary sources and background information relevant to your topic. The subject librarian/s listed below can help you dive deeper into the materials needed for your Honors Thesis as your year-long research project evolves. The Contact information is included below; meetings can be in person or by Zoom. In addition to that, you may use the Ask a Librarian chat service for general information needs as you navigate the library and its vast resources. 

Kelley Lawton Head, East Campus Libraries and Subject Librarian for United States History kelley.lawton@duke.edu

To get started with finding primary sources and archival materials, ask yourself questions that immediately yield search terms such as personal names, etc.

• What are names of individuals and families?
• Which businesses, corporations, or organizations played a role in events?
• Which ethnic groups are most relevant?
• What professions and occupations would have placed people in contact with your topic?
• Where did the events happen? Which locations like cities, countries, or regions are most relevant?
• Can you divide your research topic into subtopics?
• What types if information would be useful? Financial information, personal commentary, memoir?
• Determine how that information is likely to have been generated. What functions or activities would produce relevant information? Is the information likely to be found in personal papers, records of a business, government records, etc.
• You might only need one substantial source, or you might look for a number of complimentary sources.

Below are some suggestions for starting points. Credits

Archives and Special Collections

• Already the foundation of your research, the Rubenstein Library has the extensive Doris Duke Collections.
• ArchiveGrid provides access to millions of records/descriptions of archival collections. The majority of the records are from WorldCat, but it does include items harvested from the web. It is good way to identify Doris Duke materials in other archives/collections.

Magazines

• Readers' Guide Retrospective, covering the years 1890-1992, indexes general interest magazines published in the United States. This is not a full-text database, so searching is limited to fields such as article title and subjects.
• Women's Magazine Archive provides full-text access to women's interest magazines from the 19th to the 21st century. Titles include: Good Housekeeping, Ladies' Home Journal, Redbook, and Better Homes & Gardens.
• American Periodicals provides access to scanned images of magazines and journals which began publication from 1740 to 1900. Content is weighted toward the earlier years, but there are some titles that extend into the 1940s.
• Vogue Archive is database of the America edition of Vogue from its first issue in 1982 to the current month.

Newspapers 

• Proquest Historical Newspapers provides access to scanned images from major U.S. newspapers: Atlanta Constitution (1868-1985); Baltimore Sun (1837-1999); Chicago Tribune (1849-2015); Los Angeles Times (1881-2016); The New York Times (1851-2021); The Wall Street Journal (1889-2013); The Washington Post (1877-2008). These titles can be searched simultaneously or individually.
• ​​​​​​America's Historical Newspapers (1690 to 1922) provides access to scanned images from newspapers from across the United States.
• ​​​​​​Newspapers.com provides access to articles from thousands of newspapers from the 1700s -2000s.

Possible subject headings to explore in Books and Media (our online catalog):

• Duke, Doris, 1912-1993
• Duke, James Buchanan, 1856-1925
• Duke, Nanaline H.
• Duke Family
• Duke University
• Duke, Washington, 1820-1905

Sample Titles

Bingham, Sallie. The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke. New York, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2020. Perkins Library

Mellins, Thomas and Donald Albrecht, eds. Doris Duke's Shangri La: A House in Paradise: Architecture, Landscape, and Islamic Art. New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2012. Perkins Library

Note: If you find a title you need from the Lilly collection that is "unavailable due to renovation," please email lilly-requests@duke.edu. We will work with you to get the materials that you need.