Resources for History Students and Teachers

Learning to "Do" History

Teaching students how to "do" history - the process of historical thinking - requires the development of critical thinking and analysis skills. Most often, students learn these skills by working on their own research projects. These sites help students taking a History course and History majors become familiar with the tools historians use and to develop their own skills. Students learn about primary and secondary sources, internet sources, and writing the research paper.


The Historian's Toolbox

Produced by California State University, San Bernardino, The Historian's Toolbox offers six on-line tutorial self-testing units on: 1) Getting Started: How to select a topic and determine the information parameters; 2) Locating secondary sources; 3) Locating primary sources; 4) Evaluating both primary and secondary sources; 5) Organizing and creating the research paper; and 6) Documenting sources using the Turabian or University of Chicago style manual.

Citation Machine

Citation Machine is an automated tool for the proper use of APA, MLA, University of Chicago, and Turabian citation formats for books, web pages, magazines, interviews, encyclopedias, journals, newspapers, and other bibliographic listings. The tool asks for the relevant information and generates the citation in a format that can be copied and pasted into the research paper. The site is hosted by the Landmark Project.

The History Research Project

Designed by Dr. Tracy Penny Light, Co-Editor of the MERLOT History Editorial Board and Jane Forgay, Liaison Librarian for History at the University of Waterloo, this interactive 3-part tutorial is designed to guide students through the process of preparing a research paper. It addresses how to search for and develop a research topic, how to evaluate the information found, and lastly how to create an outline. Although developed for the use of History students, it is applicable to any Humanities or Social Science discipline. Currently, only the first two modules ("Searching" and "Evaluating") are available for study. The last module ("Outline") is still under development. This learning object was designed so that the code could easily be altered to link to other university libraries.