For a long time, people have considered the history book review as a terrific aspect of journal literature. The problem is that undergraduates have a hard time finding and using reviews. America History and Life makes it easy to find. One of the field tags is “book review” as “document type”.  Easy peazy.  But there are several other tricks to finding book reviews. Using BrandeisScholar, using the “history” quickset, type in the words book review before your search term. Supposed you want book reviews to find a great book on Abraham Lincoln. You might try typing “book review lincoln” as a search. It’s not the only way to do this, but it picks up quite a number of book review essays in the journal literature on Lincoln, both in journals and newspapers. If you create your own history quickset, then you can also use this trick to search within your selected databases as well. For more information on finding book reviews, visit http://brandeis.libguides.com/content.php?pid=11480&sid=91223

Besides the American history collection, we have quite a few items down in Goldfarb 3 on European history. But before you lumber over to the library, go visit the Cambridge Histories Online. This is a tremendous resource and you’ll be glad you bookmark on your computer. First, it’s enormous. There are multivolume works on the histories of countries, with detail. These are not simple encyclopedia entries… these are entire books devoted to the history of a country that are fully searchable. These are authoritative books on a wide variety of historical periods and regions. Through this database acquired by LTS, you’ll have an amazing amount of material at your fingertips! Beside the benefits of using Cambridge Histories Online for your research papers, these online digital books will give the reader hours of fascinating browsing.

Welcome to Pinnolis Prattle… occasional ramblings about resources, interesting tidbits, and other things related to libraries, history, and … more.

Today, Pinnolis Prattle’s first entry is about the terrific historical exhibit at the Farber Archive at Brandeis on “Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War”.  All in HONOR of ABE LINCOLN’s 200th Birthday.  If you are on campus and haven’t seen it, you definitely should stop by. This exhibit will be up this Spring Semester, 2009. This exhibit is from a private collector, and the items are rarely seen by the public.  Original artifacts from the time of Lincoln including portraits of Lincoln, Mary Lincoln, Civil War Generals, John Wilkes Booth and other villians and good guys, depending on who your ancestors were.  There are pictures, postcard envelopes, pipes, ribbons, lockets, carte d’viste, banners and more. One of our very own students, Zack Matusheski who works at the library, turns out to be a descendent of Lincoln’s first V-P, Hannibal Hamlin.  Cool.  Zack and fellow grad student Jordan Rothman both gave some very interesting talks yesterday at the opening reception program.  The exhibit is located on the second floor (one floor down!) in the Goldfarb Main Library. I have put a virtual book exhibit on my libguide, for ya’ll to read some books on the late great Prez   http://brandeis.libguides.com/AmericanHistory