Research Tools

The GHI subscribes to a large number of databases and electronic journals. Below is only a small number of our resources, to help find a starting point for your research. A full title list of all available electronic journals can be found in the Electronic Journals Library (EZB). The EZB is the fastest way to determine whether an electronic journal is accessible at the GHI. The database catalog DBIS (in German only) allows you to search for available databases by title or subject.

Please note that access to most electronic resources is IP-based, so requires you to be connected to the GHI network either by connecting to our wifi or by using one of the computers available in our reading room.

Journal Articles


Academic Search Premier belongs to the EBSCO Host platform. It contains indexing and abstracts for more than 8,500 journals, with full text for more than 4,600 of those titles. PDF backfiles to 1975 or further are available for over one hundred journals. It allows access to multiple disciplines such as area and cultural studies, biology, business, chemistry, engineering, history, language and literature, physics, psychology, religion & theology.


America: History and Life covers the history and culture of the United States and Canada, from prehistory to the present. Indexing 1,700 journals starting around 1910, the database also includes citations and links to book and media reviews. Beyond English language journals, abstracts in English of articles published in more than 40 languages are provided.


Brill Journal Archive Online offers access to the backfiles of 150 journals published by Brill Academic. The database covers many subject fields, with an emphasis on the humanities and social sciences. It has a special focus on ancient history, theology and religious history, as well as culture and history of the Middle East.


Cambridge University Press currently publishes almost 400 peer-reviewed academic journals which are accessible online. The database includes the humanities and social sciences, covering issues up to the year 2017. Topics include history, political science, international relations, regional studies, ancient history as well as language and literary studies. The main website displays a full list of all CUP journals, it can be filtered to display only those accessible for GHI scholars and visitors.


DigiZeitschriftenis funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and provides libraries with full access to digitalized German magazines and research journals. The website is available in English as well. The archive content is updated continuously to fill gaps and add new data. Journals lists can be browsed by title or by topical collection.


Historical Abstract is a resource that covers the history of the world (excluding the United States and Canada) focusing on the 15th century forward, including World History, Military History, Women's History, History of Education, etc. It provides indexing of ca. 3,100 academic historical journals in several languages, dating back to 1955. The database provides bibliographic information for articles in journals, collected volumes, monographs and dissertations, including abstracts for each title.


Internationale Bibliographie der Zeitschriftenliteratur (International Bibliography of Periodical Literature) is an interdisciplinary reference work documenting academic periodical literature in the humanities and social sciences. The articles are analyzed by the standardized subject headings in German and English. Users therefore have access to a multiplicity of topics irrespective of the original language of an indexed article. The database is updated weekly and includes publications from 40 countries in more than 40 languages.


JSTOR digital archive includes roughly 1,500 academic journals in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, as well as selected monographs and other materials for academic work. Additional collections include primary source content. It is full-text searchable, offers search term highlighting, includes high-quality images, and is interlinked by citations and references.
Available collections: Arts & Sciences I- VI, and Arts & Sciences Complement Collections.


Oxford Journals Collection includes the archives of more than 300 journals from a broad range of subjects. This collection license covers issues until 2017.


Periodicals Index Online / PIO 1739-2000contains bibliographic information on articles published in over 6,000 periodicals concerning the arts, humanities and social sciences. Starting with the year 1665, it enables researchers to locate articles relevant to their particular field of study.


SAGE Journals Online Deep Backfile allows access to previous issues of about 750 titles from Sage Publications. Current issues are not included; there is a two-year moving wall to access articles.


SpringerLink includes full texts of both journals and books published with Springer. Journal articles are usually available until publication year 2002. Some reference works are updated continuously.


Wiley Online Library allows access to journals and books from Wiley-Blackwell and can be searched either by subject or publication name. The GHI has access to the full portfolio of Wiley's online journals.

Newspapers and Periodicals


America's Historical Newspapers allows users to search more than 1,000 U.S. historical newspapers published between 1690 and 1922, including titles from all 50 states. Through partnerships with the American Antiquarian Society, Library of Congress, and others, it enables researchers to explore America during the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. Access to "American State Papers, 1789-1838" is also included.


DDR-Presse is an archive that allows access to 3 newspapers: Neues Deutschland (23. April 1946 - 3. Oktober 1990); Berliner Zeitung (21. Mai 1945 - 31. Dezember 1993), Neue Zeit (22. Juli 1945 - 5. Juli 1994). Please ask the librarian for access or register yourself via xlogon.net.


DIZ-Medienport is the archive of the Süddeutsche Zeitung. It also provides material from other important German newspapers. Newspaper articles from other sources are available text-only, SZ articles can also be viewed in the original layout with pictures.


Financial Times Historical Archive delivers the complete searchable run of the daily business newspaper. Every item printed in the paper, from 1888-2008, can be searched and browsed. Also included are the "Financial Times Magazine" and "How to spend it." The full texts are completely searchable online and all statistics and graphics can be downloaded.


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung archive gives access to the full run of the newspaper from 11/01/1949 to today. Articles can be viewed and downloaded both as text and in the original newspaper layout.


New York Times ist available both in print and digitally.


Periodicals Archive Online, PAO 1802-2000 is an archive of digitized journals published in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. It provides researchers with access to 700 journals and over 14 million article pages in 37 key subject areas. Additionally, it includes more than 100 foreign-language titles.


Proquest Historical Newspapers gives access to 8 newspapers:

  • The Guardian (1821-1900)

  • The Observer (1791-1900)

  • The New York Times (1851-1922)

  • Boston Globe (1872-1922)

  • The Wall Street Journal (1889-1922)

  • Washington Post (1877-1922)

  • Chicago Tribune (1849-1922)

  • Los Angeles Times (1881-1922)


Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive 1902-2005 contains every page of every copy of the TLS published between 1902 and 2007. The uses can either browse by date, title, author, illustrator, etc., or search for an entire document or keyword. For access to current articles in TLS, please contact a librarian.

 

Source Collections


 

African Writers Series publishes the key texts of modern African literature, including over 250 volumes of fiction, poetry, drama and non-fictional prose. Most of the works come from English-speaking countries in Western, Southern and Eastern Africa, but there are also a number of volumes translated from French, Portuguese, Zulu, Swahili, etc.


American State Papers, 1789-1838 enables scholars to search and browse legislative and executive documents of the first fourteen U.S. Congresses and more. Part of the America's Historical Government Publications suite of collections and complement to the digital U.S. Congressional Serial Set, 1817-1994. American State Papers is also cross-searchable with the digital U.S. Congressional Serial Set and all other Readex Archive of Americana collections.


Deutschsprachige Frauenliteratur des 18. & 19. Jahrhundert (German-language women's literature of the 18th and 19th century) contains more than 220,000 pages drawn from 848 monographs written by 19th century women writers. The digital collection of these monographs contains digitally improved facsimiles of the historical book pages, including links to relevant text passages within the respective work. The collection is mainly comprised of short stories, dramas, travel literature, children's books, biographies, and memoirs.


The Digital National Security Archive contains declassified government documents since 1945, including 38 collections consisting of over 94,000 documents. It covers critical world events, countries, and U.S. policy decisions from post-World War II through the 21st century, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Berlin Crisis, Afghanistan, or the Kissinger Transcripts.


The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is an all-digital library that aggregates metadata - or information describing an item - and thumbnails for millions of photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more from libraries, archives, and museums around the United States.


Early American Imprints, Series II (1801-1819) includes searchable monographs, pamphlets, broadsides, government documents and ephemera.


The Holocaust Collection documents the repatriation of Jews' personal possessions that were seized by the Nazis during the Holocaust, concentration camp records including administrative reports, releases, and deaths, a background on each camp, a map, a timeline of events, and an account of key events. Additionally, more than 600 stories of individual victims and survivors are available through a partnership with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Users can easily search for a name or browse the entire collection.


The EIU Country Reports Archive is comprised of all Country Reports by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) from 1996 to 2015. These Reports contain information on economic and political situations and developments, as well as trade and specific economic information as per country. The site is searchable by country or continent.


Empire Online is a collection of original documents relating to Empire Studies, sourced from libraries and archives around the world. It uses images of the texts rather than transcriptions, but each section features thematic essays by leading scholars in the field. Mostly, the entire document, complete manuscript or volume of a rare publication is included. Searchable by relevant People, Century, Topic, or Geographical Region.


Entscheidungssammlungen: Entscheidungen des Reichsgerichts in Zivilsachen und Strafsachen consists of the complete collection of verdicts that have been made by the Reichsgericht in Civil Law between 1880 and 1945. It provides 172 volumes of more than 15,000 verdicts printed on 91,000 pages. The site is searchable by entering the volume number, the date the verdict has been issued, or by means of the file reference number as well as by entering specific keywords.


Findbuch für die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus contains records about NS disappropriation and Austrian compensation and restitution measures. The collection is based on finding aids of Austrian archives, libraries and publishers. Please ask librarian for access.


Fold3 contains primary source documents from the holdings of the United States National Archives relating to all aspects of American history, from the Revolutionary War, to the Civil War, WWI, WWII, Presidents, historical newspapers and naturalization documents. Highlights include Papers of the Continental Congress (1774-89), records of the Constitutional Convention, the Matthew B. Brady Collection of Civil War Photographs, and the Investigative Case Files of the Bureau of Investigation, 1908-1922. This database includes newspaper archives.


The Gerritsen Collection of Aletta H. Jacobs, physicist and feminist, is a full text database for the history of women and feminism with more than 4,700 publications from continental Europe, the U.S., the United Kingdom, Canada, and New Zealand, dating from 1543-1945. 
The Gerritsen Collection consists of two segments: the Periodical Series and the Monograph Language Series.


Making of Modern Law: Legal Treatises, derived from two essential reference collections for historical and more contemporary legal studies-the Nineteenth-Century Legal Treatises and Twentieth-Century Legal Treatises microfilm collections, features a fully searchable database of approximately 10 million pages and more than 21,000 works on legal treaties between 1800 and 1926.

The Making of Modern Law: Trials 1600-1926 allows researchers to browse for authors and works within the full-text collection of Anglo-American trials from 1600 to 1926, as well as documents, reports, and secondary literature on the topic.

Making of Modern Law: U.S. Supreme Court Records, and Briefs, 1832-1978 features a fully searchable database of approximately 11 million pages and more than 350,000 separate documents. Approximately 150,000 Supreme Court cases are available for 1832 (when printed Court records began) through 1915, with documents based primarily on the holdings of the Jenkins Memorial Law Library, and for 1915 to 1978, with documents from the Library of the Association of the Bar in New York City.


Making the Modern World: Economics, Politics and Industry is a comprehensive collection of economic literature written between 1460 and 1850. Two important collections are the source for this database: Goldsmiths' Library of Economic Literature at University of London and Kress Library of Business and Economics at Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration. The emphasis is on Economics, including Political Science, History and Sociology.


National Socialism, Holocaust, Resistance and Exile provides access to selected sources of the Nazi period. The sources include the speeches, writings and orders of Adolf Hitler, the diaries of Joseph Goebbels, deportation lists, and opposition publications. In addition to the source material, the database also includes biographical articles of victims and perpetrators, inventories of archival materials and introductory texts to source collections.


North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries and Oral Histories includes 2,162 authors and approximately 100,000 pages of information, providing a personal view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada between 1800 and 1950. It is composed of contemporaneous letters and diaries, oral histories, interviews, and other personal narratives and in selected cases, users will be able to hear the actual audio voices of the immigrants.


Post-War Europe: Refugees, Exile and Resettlement 1945-1950 is an online archive that delivers essential primary sources for the study and understanding of the challenges facing the European peoples in the aftermath of World War II. It covers the politics and administration of the refugee crisis in Europe after World War II as well as the day-to-day survival of the refugees themselves. The database contains about 3000 documents from the Wiener Library in London and from the National Archives of the UK.


Testaments to the Holocaust offers fully searchable personal accounts of life in Nazi Germany, along with photographs, propaganda materials such as school text books, limited circulation publications and rare serials, enabling research into the domestic policies of Nazi Germany, Jewish life in Germany from 1933 to after the war, propaganda, life in the concentration camps, in hiding, emigration and refugee life.


U.S. Congressional Serial Set, 1817-1980 includes reports, documents and journals of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. The set also includes a segment of maps.