RUSA History Section Historical Materials Committee
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Welcome to the annual review of “Best Historical Materials.” Each year members of the Historical Materials Committee, RUSA History Section identify and review numerous bibliographies, indexes, and websites to offer our recommendations of English-language resources in the field of history. We recognize that this year has been difficult for many of us in libraries. With shrinking or nonexistent budgets, many of us are worried about merely maintaining our current collections, much less adding materials. We’ve also noted that in light of changing publishing models, an ever increasing number of publishers have stopped or drastically reduced the number of bibliographies and indexes in print. Despite this trend, we were pleased with the number of submissions for both print and electronic resources. With all this in mind, the Historical Materials Committee presents eight resources, a balance of four print bibliographies and four websites. The print bibliographies are from 2007–09. All websites are freely available and accessible via the Web. Reviews of these sites were completed in late April and May of this year.
Members of the library profession are invited to submit suggestions of print indexes and bibliographies as well as online resources to the committee for consideration. Nominations from any historical time period will be considered. Suggestions, with appropriate bibliographic information, should be sent to Brooke Becker (babecker@uab.edu). The next submission deadline is October 31, 2009.
Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive, www.lib.usm.edu/~spcol/crda. The University of Southern Mississippi.
Materials in this website pertain to Mississippi’s civil rights movement, particularly the seminal 1964 Freedom Summer Project in Hattiesburg. The site contains 149 oral history transcripts, some with digital audio, of individuals involved in the movement in Mississippi, along with diaries, correspondence, pamphlets, newsletters, posters, journals, photographs, and other items selected from the University of Southern Mississippi’s manuscript collections. The historical context section details the history of the civil rights movement in Hattiesburg and Mississippi; explains the role of Oxford, Ohio, in the movement; and lists Freedom Summer civil rights incidents by county or city. A thorough explanation of copyright permission policies for the collection along with a list of other civil rights collections completes the collection. Keyword searching of the collection is available through the cooperative Mississippi Digital Library.—Alica White, Penn State Mont Alto Campus
Holocaust in Hungary: A Selected and Annotated Bibliography: 2000–2007. Ed. and comp. Braham Randolf and Julia Bock. Boulder, Colo.; New York: Columbia Univ. Pr., 2008. 160p. $40 (ISBN: 0-88033-628-5).
This third bibliographic volume continues a series of bibliographies on the holocaust in Hungary. Browseable chapters include “Personal Narratives,” “Fictional Accounts,” “International Reactions,” “Education and Textbooks,” “Documentaries and Films,” “Museums,” “Illustrations,” and “Denial Literature.” The entries are easily browseable, but an index assists in more precise subject identification. Bibliographic citations are multilingual (Hebrew, Russian, and Yiddish) with sparse, nonanalytical annotations. A nice essay about the history of holocaust publishing in general and of Hungary’s place in that record introduces the volume. With the focus on Hungary, there are no serious competitors. The audience for this volume and the others are certainly academic, advanced undergraduates to graduate students. Recommended for advanced collections in holocaust studies.—Jenny Presnell, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio
National Archives Experience: Digital Vaults. http://digitalvaults.org.
This amazing website contains a database of some twelve hundred documents, photographs, drawings, maps, and other materials drawn from the vast holdings of the National Archives and covering all periods of U.S. history to about 2004. Users can collect images and use them to create posters, slide shows, and educational games or find materials for further research.
The site opens with a rotating display of images. Moving the cursor over one activates a pop-up with its title and record details. Details include a short description, tags (descriptors) that link to related images, links to educational resources (lengthy essays and suggested teaching activities), and additional resources (links to related materials in the Archives and articles from Prologue, the Archives’ quarterly journal). Instructions are available but hardly necessary.—Jean S. Kiesel, Edith Garland Dupré Library, University of Louisiana at Lafayette
Peake, Louis A. The United States in the Vietnam War, 1954–1975: A Selected, Annotated Bibliography of English-Language Sources, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2007. 377p. $150 (ISBN: 0-415-95770-2).
Since 1986, the first edition of Peake’s bibliography has been used in the study of the Vietnam War and is listed in the Columbia Guide to the Vietnam War as a guide to “older, standard works.”
Sexton, Donal J. The Western European and Mediterranean Theaters in World War II: An Annotated Bibliography of English-Language Sources. New York; London: Routledge, 2009. 600p. $150 (ISBN: 0-415-95769-9).
This volume contains more than 3,900 annotated entries and is a substantial revision of a similar title published twenty-five years ago. Sexton includes general and specialized reference works, articles in scholarly journals and popular magazines, monographs, memoirs, and unit histories, but not websites. The book is organized by reference works, special studies, and the war in the air, land, and sea, and includes author and subject indices. In a nod to the changing nature of military historiography, Sexton includes materials on women and minorities; however, finding these materials using the subject index is often challenging. There are also a few inaccurate entry numbers. This book should appeal most to history buffs, but serious scholars may also find occasional gems.—Joel D. Kitchens, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas
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