History News: January 2006 Archives

According to an article published in the January 27, 2006 edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education, over the past several years the number of history Ph.D. graduates has decreased even as the number of positions on offer at colleges and universities around the United States has steadily increased. While job markets are cyclical, the statistics can only be good news for history graduate students. The addition of more than a dozen new, highly regarded history faculty at Temple over the past several years certainly bears out this trend.

--David C. Murray

African-American Newspapers: The 19th Century is an important, primary resource for the study of U.S. history.

Containing over 100,000 articles from seven newspapers including The North Star (Rochester, NY), The National Era (Washington, D.C.), and Freedom's Journal (New York, NY), African-American Newspapers: The 19th Century provides an extraordinary window into the events and issues that affected the course of American history. When used in conjunction with our 20th Century African-American newspaper holdings on microfilm -- e.g. Pittsburgh Courier, New York Amsterdam News, Philadelphia Tribune -- Temple students and scholars can now study first-hand the entire sweep of American print media published by people of color for people of color. African-American Newspapers supports the study of social, political, and military history, African-American studies, literature, and a number of other humanities and social sciences disciplines. It does not provide analysis of the primary documents it contains. Instead, students should turn to the secondary literature, scholarly books and journal articles, to help contextualize the articles found in African-American Newspapers. Part IX of this database, acquired recently by the Libraries, brings full-text coverage of The Christian Recorder up to 1887.

--David C. Murray

Faculty often require students to read specific books and journal articles for class. The easiest way to ensure that all students have equal access to the required material is to use Library Reserves. Required books can still be placed on physical reserve in Access Services at the Circulation Desk in Tuttleman. As indicated below, journal articles will now be made available through e-reserves only. Visit this page for more information about e-reserves and to fill out the online form. Students can access articles here.

The following is a message from Penelope Myers, Head of Access Services:

"Effective Spring 2006 semester Paley reserves will supply articles as e-reserves only. We will have backups of all articles on CD should Diamond ever go down. This is being done as we anticipate that so many students will be wanting to access materials remotely rather than coming into Paley/Tuttleman to check out photocopies, and also with the advent of e-z proxy remote access issues having largely disappeared."

--David C. Murray