Constitutional History

Books:

Encyclopedia of the American Constitution 342.73 E 5th floor, Mid-Manhattan History Reference Collection – Excellent multi-volume reference work on the US Constitution. Offers extensive entries on landmark cases (Plessy v. Ferguson, Gibbons v. Ogden), constitution concepts (war powers, voting rights), individuals (Earl Warren, Louis Brandeis), historical moments (women’s suffrage, World War I) and amendments. Every entry is cross-referenced for further study with a bibiliography of additional resrources for further study.

In addition to the Encyclopedia of the American Constituion, we have additional reference works on Law and the US Constitution including:

Landmark Supreme Court Cases 342.73 L 5th Floor, Mid-Manhattan Reference Collection

Constitutional Law 342.73 C 5th Floor, Mid-Manhattan Reference Collection

American Constitutional Law 342.73A 5th Floor, Mid-Manhattan Reference Collection

In addition, the following books are available for check-out. The 342.73 section at the Mid-Manhattan Library can prove helpful for issues surrounding Constitutional History.

Constitutional Analysis in a Nutshell 342.73 B 5th Floor, Mid-Manhattan

Constitutional Law in a Nutshell 342.73 C 5th Floor, Mid-Manhattan

Constitutional Law and Young Adults 342.73 R 5th Floor, Mid-Manhattan

Power and Rights in US Constitutional Law 342.73 L 5th Floor, Mid-Manhattan

Databases Offered through www.nypl.org:

History Resource Center – Offers several introductory essays and articles about basic constitutional concepts (“second amendment” “war powers”). This database can be accessed at home with a valid NYPL Library Card # and PIN # (you can get your PIN # at any branch location throughout Manhattan, Bronx, Staten Island).

Academic Search Premier - Great resource for researching full text articles about constitutional questions that are in the news today. This database can be accessed at home with a valid NYPL Library Card # and PIN # (you can get your PIN # at any branch location throughout Manhattan, Bronx, Staten Island).

Web Resources:

Cornell University Law School Annotated Constitution

[www.law.cornell.edu/constitution]

This resource breaks down the entire US Constitution by Articles, Sections and Amendments with multi-paragraph annotations that document the history and context of each itemized principle. Every annotation is thoroughly sourced.

Documents from the Continental Congress

The Library of Congress has placed a large collection of documents from the Continental Congress as well as the Constitutional Convention Broadsides on the Internet. This web site is key word searchable and has useful links to chronology, bibliographies and important links to documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution.

Wikipedia

[www.wikipedia.com]

Wikipedia is great for initial steps you may need to take for your research–but it is unwise to rely on the source for hard information; much less citations in your paper.

Wikipedia can prove very useful in beginning your research on Constitutional History. Most major constitutional concepts and history can be found in the online encyclopedia. However, it is best to use Wikipedia first as a launching pad to more reputable, traditional sources.

For example, if we were to search for the “elastic clause” in Wikipedia we would learn:

1. the elastic clause is more formally known as the “necessary and proper” clause
2. it is found strictly at Article I, Section 8, Clause 18 in the US Constitution
3. the US Supreme Court Case McCulloch v. Maryland was an important first test of the elastic clause

Now, with this information, we have some guidelines that will help steer our search in books, databases and reputable websites…

For instance, we know that if we are not having any luck searching with the term “elastic clause,” we should probably try “necessary and proper.” In addition, if we would like to see the original source text of the elastic clause, we now have the exact citation. And finally, it would probably be shrewd to investigate the background and legacy of McCulloch v. Maryland.

It is always best to consult your instructor about the proper use of Wikipedia in your research…

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History Resource Center U.S.

Using History Resource Center U.S.

History Resource Center is a great resource for information on introductory concepts in American History. Full text essays are articles are reproduced from printed reference works. The essays are broken down into easy-to-read sections and all contain notes with a bibliography for further study.

To begin using History Resource Center, first go to www.nypl.org:

From nypl.org, click on “Articles and Databases” found under Books & Materials, this will take you the main Database page:

From the Database page, click-on “History and Social Sciences” found under Databases by Subject. This will list all the Databases related to History. We want to scroll down to H for History Resource Center U.S:

If you click on this link and your are not in a NYPL branch, you will need to enter your valid NYPL Barcode # and your PIN #. If you do not have library card, or you do not know your PIN #, you can visit any NYPL branch. We should now see the introductory page for History Resource Center. Now we can type any of our terms into the Basic Search box:

To search History Resource Center, hink of historical figures (James Madison, Huey P. Newton, Susan B. Anthony), historical events (Civil Rights, Palmer Raids, Reconstruction) or issues/controversies (abortion, censorship, slavery). Here is a search for the union activist “Joe Hill”:

Searching for Union activist “Joe Hill” yields the following articles:

Clicking on anyone of these titles will produce the full text of that document.

Sometimes the articles may not completely focus on your subject. For that reason, it’s best to review the titles carefully. The first article looks like a good choice. Clicking on it we can read this entry:

This entry offers a nice overview of our subject, in addition, at the bottom of our entry we find FURTHER READINGS:

• Gibbs M. Smith, Joe Hill (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1969);
• Wallace Stegner, Joe Hill, A Biographical Novel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1950).

If we would like additional information, we can look for these titles in the LEO Circulating catalog at www.nypl.org. The above titles link to their records in the LEO Catalog.

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Introduction to JSTOR

JSTOR – “Journal Storage”

JSTOR remains one of the most comprehensive electronic resources available for scholarly research. There are over 80 full text journals related to History in JSTOR–all with extensive coverage that often extends back to the title’s first publication year. All articles are reproduced as PDF image scans that capture the original appearance of the document.

However, JSTOR is not a “current issues” database!!! There usually is a 1-5 year publication lag before an article is made available in JSTOR. If you are looking for articles published within the past month… or year, JSTOR is not a suitable resource.

JSTOR aims to function more like a library shelf of old journals rather than a typical search database. JSTOR was created so libraries would not have to worry about maintaining space for hundreds of journals from the 19th century. That is, JSTOR is not intended to be a Google-like tool for searching older issues. For that reason, JSTOR can prove frustrating if you insist on performing open ended subject related searches (“What does JSTOR offer related to Abraham Lincoln?”) because the articles are not organized by subject, abstract or keywords. Searching JSTOR can yield positive results, but

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“Does the library have my Journal?”

Electronic Journal Portal

A good deal of access to journals, magazines and articles begins with a search of the library’s electronic holdings. From our main database page, we offer an E-Journal Portal tool that provides guidance to all of our digital journals.

To begin use of the E-Journal Portal, start at www.nypl.org:

Once at our homepage, simply click on “Articles and Databases,” The following page should appear:

On the left of the page in the grey menu, you will see two options for the E-Journal Portal:

• E-Journal Portal [from Home]
• E-Journal Portal [from the Branch Libraries]

The home E-Journal Portal will outline all of the journals available remotely, outside of an NYPL library.

The in-library E-Journal Portal offers links to all of the journals that are available within a branch or research library.

While several electronic resources can be accessed at home, many databases can only be accessed from within a library.

To use the E-Journal Portal simply type in the name of journal you are looking for.

Let’s say we would like to track down the following article:

Carson, Clayborne. “Two Cheers for Brown v. Board of Education.” The Journal of American History. 91.1 (2004): 26-31.

To retrieve this article, we need to locate The Journal of American History with coverage from 2004. Let’s type “Journal of American History” into the E-Journal Portal and click “Search”:

Here we are offered 3 separate databases that provide access to this journal:

We need to pay close attention to the time spans for coverage–if your article was published in 2004, JSTOR would be of little help to you. For an article from 2004, we would need to use Proquest Research Library or Academic Search Premier. Clicking on any one of these links will instantly begin a session with that database.

If we click on Proquest Research Library we will see:

 We are now searching within The Journal of American History.  Any search term that we type into the field 1. will look for those terms strictly within the journal.  So we could type in “Carson Clayborne” or “Two Cheers for Brown v. Board of Education” and that should point us to our article.

In addition, we can simply click on the appropriate issue that contains our article.  This link can be found at 2: our article is found in Volume 9 Issue 1 of The Journal of American History.

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Introduction to Academic Search Premier

Academic Search Premier – Getting Started

To begin a search for articles, start at www.nypl.org:

Once at our homepage, simply click on “databases.” The following page should appear:

Under Databases by Subject we want to click on History and Social Sciences. This will generate a list of all the History databases offered by NYPL. The databases are all organized alphabetically, so the link for Academic Search Premier will be near the top of this list–click on this!:

This is the basic search screen for Academic Search Premier:

Search Options

We’re going to continue our search by first clicking on the Advanced Search tab to provide us with added options and precision with our search terms:

Advanced Search options:

With Advanced Search, we can chose the exact precision of our search terms.

SU Subject searches yield the best results, but demand that our keywords match up exactly with the article’s assigned subject headings.

AB Abstract searches cast a wider net and retrieve more articles, however our results might not be quite as precise as with a subject search.

Select a Field will look for our terms anywhere within the article, which is identical to a typical “keyword” search.

As a general strategy, first try a SU Subject search, then an AB Abstract search and if you are still not retrieving results, finish with a Select a Field search. After settling on your terms, simply click the Search button.

Here are sample results for a Subject search on “George W. Bush”:

Reviewing an Article

Here is a sample citation:

This article provides us with full text access. That is, we can read the entire article right here. The link for HTML Full Text reproduces the article’s text.

Looking at a sample article:

1. This contains all of the information about the article for your Works Cited, or Bibliography. The title, author and journal information will always be found here.

2. Here we find all of the Subject Terms that are discussed within the article. Often these subjects can provide a clue for additional searches related to your topic. The subjects are all links–clicking on them will generate another search for articles.

3. This is the article’s abstract. The abstract offers a brief description of the article’s contents. If you ever perform an abstract search, this is where Academic Search Premier looks for its matching search terms.

4. Finally we see the start of the article’s text.

Citation Only, No Full Text

While Academic Search Premier offers a wealth of full-text materials, some times you will encounter citations that look like this:

This citation is simply an abstract. That is, Academic Search Premier is informing us that this article exists out there somewhere in library land, and you are welcome to go track it down, but the database is not offering full text of this material at this time.

What to do?

If we wanted to read this article, we would need to either 1. Find another database that offers full text of The Nation (and the library does offer such a database; to discover what titles are covered in all of our databases, you will want to investigate the Electronic Journal Portal). or 2. Locate the original, physical copy of the journal. You can do journal searches with the Branch Libraries through LEO or the Research Libraries with CATNYP.

“Can I take this article with me?”

At the top of our article, we have the ability to Print, E-Mail, or Save our source:

Print: You can print articles from the library. Every day the library grants you 10 free pages of printing. If your article(s) exceed 10 pages, you will need to purchase a copy card to cover the difference.

E-mail: You can email an entire article right to your inbox. This is often the simplest and most efficient way to reproduce an article.

Save: You also can save the article to a removable storage device. At the library, only flash drive (i.e. junk drives, memory sticks…) are recognized.

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Philosophy – General Resources

Contemporary Philosophy
April 01, 2000
by Staff, History Collection, Mid-Manhattan Library

This pathfinder provides a guide to reference sources in contemporary philosophy, mainly in the post-World War II period, of both Western and Eastern traditions. These resources are available in the History and Social Sciences Department of the Mid-Manhattan Library. You can search by subject, name of philosophical school or movement, name of philosopher and by geographic region for material on a specific country or ethnic group.

Examples of Terms to Use for Subject Searching:

On philosophical schools and movements:

* humanism -20th century
* logical positivism
* naturalism
* hermeneutics
* pragmatism
* critical theory
* realism
* marxist criticism
* existentialism
* neo-scholasticism
* phenomenology
* transcendentalism

On philosophical subject areas:

* history-philosophy history-20th century
* ethics
* cognition
* knowledge, theory of
* aesthetics
* law-philosophy
* logic
* metaphysics
* morality

On individual philosophers:
Search under the philosopher’s name for works by, about and criticism of the thinker’s work.

On philosophy of different time periods, gender, country or ethnic group:
philosophy, modern-20th century
women philosophers
philosophers– [and name of country]
philosophy– [and name of nationality: Islamic, Indic, Swedish, etc.]

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Immigration – Books and Resources

The Mid-Manhattan Library has a wide range of materials relating to the subject of immigration. This includes items covering, but not limited to, immigration history, patterns and waves of immigration, illegal immigrants, citizenship, and immigration law and policy to name a few. In order to access all of the relevant information on this topic you will need to consult a number of areas in the Dewey Decimal classification system and make use of both the History and Social Sciences Department on the 5th floor and the Education and Job Information Center Departments on the 2nd floor.

Dewey Decimal Classification System

Different aspects of immigration will be located in separate numbered areas in the Dewey system.

Books with call numbers in the following areas will be found in the History and Social Sciences Department on the 5th floor:

304.873, 305.8 – 305.9 Browse here for immigration histories and American ethnicities

323.6 Browse here for immigration and government policy

325’s Browse here for general works on immigration and emigration as well as international migration

342.7308 Browse here for immigration law

973.04 Browse here for histories of American immigrant groups

Books on citizenship (323.6097, 323.623, 342.7308) including how to become a citizen, visa and green card information, working permits, etc. may be found in the History and Social Sciences Department on the 5th floor as well as the Education and Job Information Center Departments on the 2nd floor. See also the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services website listed in the selected websites and the end of this pathfinder.

Print Resources

Dictionaries/Encyclopedias

Dictionary of American Immigration History. Francisco Cordasco, editor. Metuchen, N.J: Scarecrow Press, 1990.
REF 325.7303 D (5th Floor)