Every student of history should locate and tour pertinent UO collections. To be a historian without close personal familiarity with libraries is like being a physicist without close personal familiarity with laboratories.
Here are some useful thoughts about "reading" in the academic setting. Hop to this [TXT], then come back here.
And here is a table of contents guiding you to eight rich UofO research/reading locations which you should know about. Some of them (especially the first three) will become your frequent haunt this term =
KNIGHT Reserve Book Room
KNIGHT MAP Room
KNIGHT Reference Division
KNIGHT stacks
KNIGHT Information Technology Center
Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art
Architecture & Allied Arts Library [W]
Jaqua Law School Library [W]
Hop directly to JANUS ELECTRONIC CATALOG
Materials on the Internet
For some suggestions about the internet as storehouse of information, try this Basket of Websites
The internet encyclopedia Wikipedia is a handy reference work always available when you are working "on-line". Here, as everywhere, but especially here, be cautious about what you find. Never cite Wikipedia in your journal, on any topic, without comparing the Wikipedia account with other reference or textbook sources, and/or SAC.
Archival guides
No attempt is made here to list a complete bibliography of archival guides, but one has been digitalized and is available on the web =
Grant, Steven A., and John H. Brown, The Russian Empire and Soviet Union: A Guide to Manuscripts and Archival Materials in the United States
KNIGHT LIBRARY reserve book room [RBR]
Access any course
reserve book room list.
You might want to print the list for this course, sorted BY AUTHOR.
Films (movies) of use to the historian, and housed in RBR
Notice how some of the items on reserve are also found in the KNIGHT stacks. From the stacks you may check out all but a few restricted titles for two weeks.
Click to connect directly to
JANUS ELECTRONIC CATALOG
(& other catalog services)
THE UO MAP LIBRARY or MAP ROOM [MAP]
Here you will find several globes. KNIGHT PERIODICALS ROOM also has a big metal (dented) globe of the world which would work very well for this little experiment (for one thing, you could be viewing this webpage on a computer just next to this dented globe). Look at Russia’s position and its bulk on any one of these largish globes. Lift the globe and position the southwestern Siberian city Novosibirsk in the center of your field of vision. Notice how much of the world land mass is located in the hemisphere before your eyes. Check the exact opposite hemisphere.
Using your fingers as a compass stretching over the oval surface of your globe, measure some of the following distances appropriate to the course:
- The Viking's favorite Ninth-century trip from, say, Stockholm to Constantinople [Istanbul] along the Baltic-Dvina-Dnepr-Black Sea route
- The train trip which became possible after 1903 when the Trans-Siberian Railroad was completed, from Vladivostok (just across the Sea of Japan from the Japanese main island) to Brest-Litovsk (on the current border with Poland). Consider the longer trip from London back to Vladivostok
- The 1942-1945 campaign of the Soviet Red Army from Stalingrad [Volgograd] on the lower Volga River to the Elbe River in Germany. Compare that stretch to the distance Allies fought from the Normandy beachhead to the same Elbe
Carry these manual compass stretches one at a time to Eugene OR ("transpose" these distances with your hand as compass) in order to see how far from Eugene you would have to go to equal those historical distances. Do the same for the distances among and between these European cities: (1) Moscow, (2) Berlin, (3) Paris, and (4) London.
Teach yourself how to sketch by hand the map or maps most essential to your work this term.
HIST 245 Click here to return to syllabus
HIST 303 Click here to return to syllabus
HIST 345 Click here to return to syllabus
HIST 346 Click here to return to syllabus for more MAP
ROOM exercises
KNIGHT REFERENCE DIVISION [REF]
- REF AE = Encyclopedias, particularly =
The Great Soviet Encyclopedia [GSE]. Always begin your search by looking up your keyword in the last, index volume of GSE.
- REF DK = The range of Russian historical reference
The Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet History [MERSH]
Notice how MERSH entries include bibliographies that could be of great use in your essays. FURTHERMORE =HERE IS AN ELECTRONIC TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR MERSH
Dictionary of Russian Historical Terms from the Eleventh Century to 1917 by Sergei Pushkarev
Dictionary of Literary Biography =
volume 150, "Early modern Russian writers: late-seventeenth and eighteenth c."
volume 198, "Russian literature in the age of Pushkin and Gogol. Prose"
volume 205, "Russian literature in the age of Pushkin and Gogol. Poetry and drama"
volume 238, "Russian novelists in the age of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky"
volume 272, "Russian prose writers between the world wars"
volume 277, "Russian literature in the Age of Realism"
volume 285, "Russian writers since 1980"
volume 295, "Russian writers of the Silver Age, 1890-1925"Batalden, Stephen K. The newly independent states of Eurasia : handbook of former Soviet republics
Leaders of Russia and the Soviet Union [LR&S]
Biographical Dictionary of Dissidents [USSR], 1956-75
Check this University of Illinois GUIDE TO SOURCES ON RUSSIAN HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY
- E = The range of USA historical reference
Dictionary of American history New York : Scribner, c1976-c1978
A dictionary of American history / Thomas L. Purvis | Cambridge, Mass. : Blackwell, 1995
Click to connect directly to
JANUS ELECTRONIC CATALOG
(& other catalog services)
The range of European and world historical reference =
- REF D11 ....| Chronologies of world history
with excellent indexes, especially the following =
D11.CS74 | Chronology of the Modern World, 1763-1992
D11.M39 | Chronology of World History 4 vols
REF D21 ....| Encyclopedias of world history
REF D419... to D1051....| Encyclopedias and dictionaries of 20th-c. Europe
- REF D431.F67 = Encyclopedia of 20th-century Conflict
- REF D510... = about World War One
- REF D740... = about World War Two
- REF D804.3e53 1990 = Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (4v)
- REF D1051.U78 1996 = Dictionary of European History and Politics since 1945
- Dictionary of Literary Biography, v.242, "Twentieth-c. European cultural theorists"
KNIGHT Information Technology Center
For now, just find out where this facility is located, on the lowest level of the library, on the far western extreme of the building.
We may have occasion, as a whole class, to view films in the studios of the Media Services Division
KNIGHT stacks
Take five-ten minutes to browse a Knight Library shelf range that contains publications relating to the history of one large territorial nation-state pertinent to our course. I do want you to get a visual sense of just how big our topic is, as seen in our fine but not really huge library. But you need not be overwhelmed. In fact, I would like to help you relax a bit about this miniature, five-ten minute physical imitation of "research". If you had to ponder these shelves at length, searching for titles that might help you as a researcher (perhaps later for a seminar paper or senior thesis, etc.), you could do it. For now, you might notice when you sort the course reserve book list by call-number that many of the reserved titles cluster within one Library of Congress call-number range. That would be a good range to walk past. For one thing, there are copies of some reserve-book room titles on the regular shelves and thus available to you for the longer check-out period.
DK = (Russia and the peoples of the Russian and Soviet empires). Calm yourself about the overwhelming number of Russian history books there, and about the fact that so many of them are in Russian. Our course is an introductory undergraduate survey. But at the next level, foreign language is to history as calculus is to physics. But relax, we're not trying to reach that next level just yet.
If you were to take the next step as historian, after taking courses like ours, you would need reading fluency in English and two to four foreign languages, one of them at the highest possible level of competence. "Making" modern European history is not really possible without knowledge of English, French, German and Russian.
Here are some other ranges=
DA... (England and peoples of the British Isles)
DB... (Austria)
DC... (France)
DD... (Germany)
DH... & DJ... (Lowlands=Belgium, Netherlands)
DL... (Scandinavia=Norway, Sweden, Finland)
DP... (Spain)
DQ... (Switzerland)
DR... (Balkans:Serbia,Croatia, Bulgaria, etc.)
DS... (Asia--Central..., Near East)
DT... (Africa)
DU... (Austria and Pacific islands)
DX... (Romani [Gypsies])
These endless shelves seem overwhelming, and DK is just one of several concentration points of Russian culture and history in our library. You could check PG....
Then there is the whole new alpha-range=
E = (The Americas, including USA)
UO
JORDAN SCHNITZER MUSEUM OF ART [W]
(located just NE of Knight Library)
While walking from Knight Library to the Art and Architecture Library, drop in on the UO Art Museum. All historians of Russia should visit the Icon collection there. The Museum has recently felt compelled to limit access to the Russian Icon collection as part of an apparent general policy shift from viewing the Museum as a UO academic institution to viewing it as a gallery attractive to the wider public. Thus two good objectives are in current conflict with one another. If you cannot find your way to the icons in the Museum, consider the image from our collection below and content yourself with what you see and read in the A&AA Library [W].
Icon: Christ Pantocrator Enthroned
Rublev School. Late 15th Century
University of Oregon Museum of Art
Murray Warner Collection of Oriental Art
MWR34:17
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