Historians rely on what other scholars have already researched and written about a chosen topic. These are called as secondary sources. A book-length treatment of a topic, called a monograph, is a type of secondary source. Scholarly articles are also considered secondary sources for historical research.
What is meant by “historical” monograph is not that the book was written during the period that you are studying, but rather that the author is writing more recently about the past you are studying. Usually, that author is a professional historian who has done original research on the topic and is writing to help students and other historians understand that topic.
Mono, meaning one, is used because this type of book only has one author. Graph, meaning book or writing, signifies what the format is. So together, monograph means a single-authored book.
The best place to search for a historical monograph is the Library Catalogue, which contains records for all of the books and eBooks available at the McGill Libraries.
Begin by keyword searching, thinking about the concepts or terms that are most likely to appear in every book that will be of interest to you. This will likely include a geographical description as well as a chronological description, and perhaps another term focused on your topic. For example:
Tips:
For Part 4 of your book review, you must answer the questions:
To answer these questions, you will need to contextualize your monograph by doing some further reading.
To identify useful books to compare your monograph to, there are 3 methods you may want to try:
First, find the catalogue record for your book in the Library Catalogue. Then, scroll down to find the Subject Headings labeled "Library of Congress Subject Headings." Click on the subject heading that is most relevant to your topic. Limit your search to Format: Books on the lefthand side.
This will allow you to identify other monographs on the same topic(s) as yours.
First, navigate to scholar.google.com. Then, type in the title of your monograph. After searching, it should be the first result you see. At the bottom of the record, click the link that reads "Related Articles". This will run a search for items that Google Scholar thinks are related to your topic.
Note that some of these results will be books, but others will be articles, dissertations, even conference proceedings. Additionally, not all of the items will necessarily be written by historians -- Google Scholar is multidisciplinary.
Scholarly articles can also help contextualize your monograph.
Tips:
History as a discipline uses the Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition) for citations, and usually the Notes-Bibliography form. This requires creating properly formatted footnotes footnotes and a Bibliography for your assignments. Resources to understand the Chicago style of citations are included below.
Note: Chicago Manual of Style will update to the 18th edition in September 2024.
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