Menlo School Library: World War II: WWII: Databases

Databases overview

Tips for successful searching:

Use quotation marks to combine words into phrases, ie "atomic bomb" not atomic bomb

Use important keywords, not sentences, ie "atomic bomb" Hiroshima, not "why was the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima"

Use synonyms to expand your results. "Atomic bomb", "Manhattan Project", Hiroshima, Nagasaki, "Little Boy" will lead similar results though they will not all be the same.

To narrow your search results, use Advanced Search or Limiter options whenever they are available

Many of the examples provided are properly capitalized, however capitalization does not matter when doing a search

Most useful databases:

Academic Search Ultimate (EBSCO)
Provides full text access to over 4600 academic journals (secondary sources).
America's Historical Newspapers (Newsbank)
- Why search here?
  Look here for newspaper articles from many cities across the US.
- What’s included?
  350 years of newspapers and broadsheets.
Churchill Archive
- Why search here?
  Find primary source materials from two hundred years leading up to and during Churchill’s life.
- What’s included?
  Documents on a wide variety of political, religious and social issues.
Historical Newspapers: U.S. Major Dailies (ProQuest)
Read newspaper articles from the New York Times and other papers published during the war. Use advanced search features to limit your search to the dates of WWII, and search terms from the lists on this page.
History Reference Source (EBSCO)
Tertiary articles show up at the top of the list. For journal (secondary source) articles, check the "peer reviewed" box on the left panel. If applicable, select "primary source documents" to view primary sources.
JSTOR
- Why search here?
  This database provides quick access to authoritative secondary source material. Primary sources are now available too—under Refine Results, scroll to Primary source content to select source types.
- What’s included?
  Look here for a very large collection of peer-reviewed journal articles and images, plus a smaller collection of e-books and technical reports. Use Advanced Search to select articles from a particular topical area. Now has primary source content too.
Map as History
Select World War II from the menu to access animated maps and audio descriptions.
World History: The Modern Era (ABC-Clio)
Primary sources and tertiary (overview) articles. Use the filters to the left to limit your results

Atomic bomb

Search terms:

"Manhattan project"
Trinity
"atom bomb"
"Robert Oppenheimer"
Hiroshima
Nagasaki

Fascism

Search terms:

Fascism
Totalitarianism
Nazism
Third Reich
Hitler
Mussolini

Japanese war crimes

Search terms:

Nanjing
Nanking
"Rape of Nanjing" (or Nanking)
Yasukuni Shrine
"Comfort women"
"Bataan death march"
Unit 731

Allied war crimes

Search terms:

"Battle of Okinawa"
"Battle of Monte Cassino"
"Operation Overlord" and Britain or "British troops"
WWII and German POWs or Japanese POWs or Italian POWs

Wikipedia has a list of massacres and useful citations on both Allied and Axis war crimes.

Nuremberg trials

Search terms:

"Nuremberg trials"
"War crimes" Nazi

Wikipedia has a long article that provides names of participants and of smaller trials. Many of these terms can be used to find authoritative information in our databases.

Pearl Harbor

Search terms:

"Pearl Harbor"
"Imperial Japanese Navy"
"Admiral Yamamoto"
"Takeo Yoshikawa"

United Nations

Search terms:

"1945 San Francisco Conference"
"Atlantic Charter"
"united nations"