LibGuides: Local History: Home

Finding Articles

A complete list of all of the library databases is available. The following databases will be useful for research on local history:

Academic Search Complete (EBSCO)
Designed for academic institutions, this database is a leading resource for scholarly research. It supports high-level research in the key areas of academic study by providing journals, periodicals, reports, books and more. Subjects include: Animal science, anthropology, astronomy, biology, chemistry, engineering, ethnic and multicultural studies, general science, geography, geology, law, mathematics, music, pharmaceutical sciences, physics, psychology, religion and philosophy, science and technology, veterinary science, women's studies, zoology and more.

Digital Commonwealth
This site provides access to photographs, manuscripts, books, audio recordings, and other materials of historical interest that have been digitized and made available by members of Digital Commonwealth, a statewide consortium of libraries, museums, archives, and historical societies from across Massachusetts.

Boston Globe (1980 - Present) This link opens in a new window
Full text of the Boston Globe newspaper offers authoritative coverage of local, national and international news (1980-). Text-only articles (not page reproductions). Does not contain all content found in the published version of the Globe, such as advertisements, charts, classified ads, graphs, most images, and non-staff written items. Updated daily by 8 a.m.
HeritageQuest Online (Proquest)
This database searches within over 4.4 billion historical and genealogical records from the 1700s to present day. It is best used to understand ancestry and a location's history. For more information please see the ProQuest help guide.
Military & Government Collection (EBSCO)
Military & Government Collection is a database of full-text journals and periodicals pertaining to all branches of the military and government. It is designed to offer current news to military members, analysts, policy makers, students and researchers. A strong source for military news and research, this database includes cover-to-cover full text, indexing and abstracts for hundreds of journals and periodicals. Many full-text titles are available in searchable PDF or scanned-in-color.
Salem History Series
Provides access to the Salem Decades, Great Events from history and Innovator series.
U.S. History (Gale in Context) This link opens in a new window
Gale U.S. History in Context includes Gale's authoritative reference content with full-text magazines, academic journals, news articles, primary source documents, images, videos, audio files and links to vetted websites organized into a user-friendly portal experience.

Massachusetts Defined

Massachusetts Museums, Historical Societies, Historical Homes

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Isabella Stewart Gardner collected and carefully displayed a collection comprised of more than 7500 paintings, sculptures, furniture, textiles, silver, ceramics, 1500 rare books, and 7000 archival objects-from ancient Rome, Medieval Europe, Renaissance Italy, Asia, the Islamic world and 19th-century France and America.
New England Historical Society
Massachusetts Art Museums
Massachusetts Historical Society
Massachusetts Historic Houses and Homes
Massachusetts Local Historical Societies
National Park Service: List of Massachusetts Sites
Massachusetts Town Histories

Family History

HeritageQuest Online
Login using your library account.

Searching Outside of MCC

These are internet-based scholarly resources that are outside of MCC's database lists and do not require our login.

Boston Public Library eCard
Massachusetts residents can get a free ecard which will allow you access to a wide range of databases (https://www.bpl.org/resource/#azindex) beyond what you have access to through MCC.
Directory of Open Source Journals
DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals. DOAJ is independent.
Google Scholar
Search for articles.
HathiTrust
Founded in 2008, HathiTrust is a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries preserving 17+ million digitized items. HathiTrust offers reading access to the fullest extent allowable by U.S. copyright law, computational access to the entire corpus for scholarly research, and other emerging services based on the combined collection. HathiTrust members steward the collection — the largest set of digitized books managed by academic and research libraries — under the aims of scholarly, not corporate, interests.
History Hub (National Archives & Records Administration)
We are pleased to announce History Hub has successfully been migrated to its new home!
Internet Archive
Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.
Internet Archive Scholar
This fulltext search index includes over 25 million research articles and other scholarly documents preserved in the Internet Archive. The collection spans from digitized copies of eighteenth century journals though the latest Open Access conference proceedings and pre-prints crawled from the World Wide Web.
JournalTOCs
JournalTOCs is the largest, free collection of scholarly journal Tables of Contents (TOCs): 31,211 journals including 14,845 selected Open Access journals and 11,797 Hybrid journals, from 3305 publishers.
JURN
JURN is a free online search tool for the finding and downloading of free full-text scholarly works.
Open Library of Humanities
The Open Library of Humanities journal publishes internationally-leading, rigorous and peer-reviewed scholarship across the humanities disciplines: from classics, theology and philosophy, to modern languages and literatures, film and media studies, anthropology, political theory and sociology.

Access to Library Resources from Off-Campus

You can watch videos, access articles and eBooks from off-campus but students may be asked for their A number and library password. Faculty and staff will be asked for their user name and library password.

Contact Us

Chat with a Librarian| Send us an email| Library Help & Services|

Bedford Campus Reference Desk 781 280 3705 Lowell Campus Reference Desk 978 656 3005

Send us a text: 978 241 7884