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HIST 203: Canada Since 1867

Research guide for HIST 203 (Winter 2024)

Finding Secondary Sources: Popular Articles

To find recent popular articles about Canadian history, use one of these databases:

 

 

Most of the magazines indexed in these indexes are popular ones, but review the points about scholarly and popular works to be sure.

As with all databases, one of the most useful things is to find the appropriate subject headings used.

As always, start with some words you know to be appropriate for your topic. Look at the “full record” for the articles you find. What are the subject headings? Which of the headings on the records is the most appropriate for the aspects of your topic that you want to study? Click on that heading and search for it.

Popular articles will rarely contain references to other secondary works. However, they will often have interesting insights into the subject that scholars may be reluctant to hazard, since they may involve speculation or leaps of logic that the primary sources cannot support.

Again, watch out for book reviews. While these can be very interesting and will tell you a lot about the subject and the specific book they are reviewing, a book review is not an article about a subject; it is an article about a book, and that is a different matter.

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