HIST 463/563 (Dr. Bosworth)

This guide will help students gather sources for their research projects in Professor Amy Bosworth's HIST 463/563 course. It provides links to resources where students will find information of the various sorts required for the assignment. 

Use the links on the left side of the guide to find lists of resources divided into separate pages for different kinds of information. Many of the resources are part of the University Libraries electronic collections; if you are working at a computer off campus, you will likely be prompted to log into them with your Ball State username and password. Some resources in this guide are freely available on the Internet. 

It is often useful, before you being searching for information, to think of potential search terms. Begin by identifying the key concepts - which could be people, places, events, periods, or social conditions - of your topic. Those will be your primary search terms. Then think of synonyms and related terms you associate with them. Those will be your alternate search terms. 

When looking for information about a specific person, their name will sometimes suffice. You might, however, also need to try variations on their name or various titles they held. In case you aren't able to find enough sources just using their name, you might also think of groups of people to which they belonged. For example: 

• Thomas Becket, Thomas a Becket, St. Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, clergy, clergymen, Lord Chancellor, government officials 

Likewise, if your research involves a specific city, town, or historical site, you can use its name as a search term, as well as the broader geographic areas around it. For instance: 

• Canterbury Cathedral, Canterbury, Kent, England

Searching for information about events, historical periods, or social conditions requires thinking about words that represent them. These also may be more or less broad. For example: 

• Rights of the Church, authority of the king, investiture contest, Constitutions of Clarendon 

Whatever your topic is, it might be multifaceted and you might find a number of research questions you want to investigate as part of your work. In order to manage your research, break your broad ideas into individual research questions and research them separately, one question at at time.