HIST 623 - Professor Alves

This guide will help students gather sources to cite in their review essays and final projects in Professor Abel Alves' HIST 623 course. It provides links to resources where students will find primary sources, journal articles, and books about witchcraft and natural philosophy in the Atlantic World. 

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.

When looking for information about a specific person, their name will sometimes suffice. In case you aren't able to find enough sources just using their name though, you might also think of groups of people to which they belonged. Likewise, if your research involves a specific city or town, you can think of the broader geographic areas around it. For instance: 

• Urbain Grandier, priests, clergymen, Catholic Church, Jesuits
• Loudun, Poitou, Nouvelle-Acquitaine, France

Searching for information about historical events or social conditions requires thinking about words - primary and alternate search terms - that represent them. These also may be more or less broad. Using the Loudun Possessions as an example again: 

• Nuns, convents, Ursulines, religious orders
• Witch trail, witch hunt, witches, witchcraft, moral panic, mass hysteria 

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.