This is a guide to doing research on US history at Boston College. For information on finding excellent scholarly material, check out the links below. For access to primary material, explore a diverse set of collections divided into colonial North America, Early Republic, 19th century (incudes Civil War), and contemporary (includes the First and Second World Wars as well as the Cold War) periods. Additional material is available on Indigenous History and History of the Caribbean as well as Boston History.
For biographies, encyclopedia, and handbooks, visit BC Libraries' Reference Shelf for U.S. history.
Your local libraries have excellent monographs and anthologies located in O'Neill library as well as through the BC libraries portal. Try searching for books (only books) through the WorldCat library system to see if we have what you need. If we don't, you can order material through Interlibrary Loan (ILL).
Explore these sources for reading suggestions.
BC is privileged to have access to a significant number of primary source collections. To provide guidance, those collections are divided into multiple subpages, including:
