What are the differences between websites and library databases?
1. Generally, websites and library databases both can contain:
NOTE: Researchers should take the time to verify research results by checking several other reliable sources before using it or acting on it. (See more about how to determine what types of sources are credible at PPLD's LibGuide on Finding Good Information here.)
2. Library databases do not generally use natural language to search, but use specialized wording and symbols. One of the benefits of using library databases is that they give more precise results than websites or web searches, which may include duplicate or irrelevant results.
3. In addition, library databases contain content that is sometimes only available by paying for it. The library pays for access to that information on behalf of the community it serves.
4. Online web searches often do use natural language, but the results may not be exactly what a researcher is looking for.
5. The order of an online result list is also often based on the priorities of the companies who offer the search (usually at no out-of-pocket cost), rather than the priorities of the researcher.
For a more detailed discussion of researching best practices, see PPLD's LibGuide on Information and Media Literacy here.
Available as an eBook and eAudiobook for checkout through Hoopla, and (as featured here) an eBook for checkout through Libby/OverDrive
On May 7, 1945, journalist Edward Kennedy bypassed military censorship to be the first to break the news of the Nazi surrender executed in Reims, France. While, at the behest of Soviet leaders, Allied authorities prohibited release of the story, Kennedy stuck to his journalistic principles and refused to manage information he believed the world had a right to know. No action by an American correspondent during the war proved more controversial. The Paris press corps was furious at what it took to be Kennedy's unethical betrayal; military authorities threatened court-martial before expelling him from Europe. Kennedy defended himself, insisting the news was being withheld for suspect political reasons unrelated to military security. After prolonged national debate, Kennedy's career was in ruins. This story of Kennedy's surrender dispatch and the meddling by Allied Command, which was already being called a fiasco in May 1945, revises what we know about media-military relations. Discarding "Good War" nostalgia, Fine challenges the accepted view that relations between the media and the military were amicable during World War II and only later ran off the rails during the Vietnam War. This book reveals one of the earliest chapters of tension between reporters committed to informing the public and generals tasked with managing a war.
Available as a streaming eBook through Biblioboard
This book contains a historical look at black journalism in America.
Available as a print book for checkout and as (as featured here) an eBook and eAudiobook for checkout through Libby/OverDrive
An essential history of women in American journalism, showcasing exceptional careers from 1840 to the present.
Undaunted is a representative history of the American women who surmounted every impediment put in their way to do journalism's most valued work. From Margaret Fuller's improbable success to the highly paid reporters of the mid-nineteenth century to the breakthrough investigative triumphs of Nellie Bly, Ida Tarbell, and Ida B. Wells, Brooke Kroeger examines the lives of the best-remembered and long-forgotten woman journalists. She explores the careers of standout woman reporters who covered the major news stories and every conflict at home and abroad since before the Civil War, and she celebrates those exceptional careers up to the present, including those of Martha Gellhorn, Rachel Carson, Janet Malcolm, Joan Didion, Cokie Roberts, and Charlayne Hunter-Gault.
As Kroeger chronicles the lives of journalists and newsroom leaders in every medium, a larger story develops: the nearly two-centuries-old struggle for women's rights. Here as well is the collective fight for equity from the gentle stirrings of the late 1800s through the legal battles of the 1970s to the #MeToo movement and today's racial and gender disparities.
Undaunted unveils the huge and singular impact women have had on a vital profession still dominated by men.
Available as a streaming video through Kanopy
"News Matters" follows the desperate attempt by Colorado journalists to save the 125-year-old Denver Post from slow death at the hands of hedge fund owner Alden Global Capital, while trying to cut through the noise of social media and opinion news outlets. Chuck Plunkett captures national attention when he leads a revolt against The Denver Post's hedge fund owners, all while the newspaper industry crumbles and while journalists are being called the enemy of the people.
Available as a print book for checkout and as (as featured here) an eBook and an eAudiobook for checkout through Libby/OverDrive
From New York Times bestselling author Molly Guptill Manning comes The War of Words, the captivating story of how American troops in World War II wielded pens to tell their own stories as they made history. At a time when civilian periodicals faced strict censorship, US Army Chief of Staff George Marshall won the support of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to create an expansive troop-newspaper program. Both Marshall and FDR recognized that there was a second struggle taking place outside the battlefields of World War II—the war of words. While Hitler inundated the globe with propaganda, morale across the US Army dwindled. As the Axis blurred the lines between truth and fiction, the best defense was for American troops to bring the truth into focus by writing it down and disseminating it themselves. By war's end, over 4,600 unique GI publications had been printed around the world. In newsprint, troops made sense of their hardships, losses, and reasons for fighting. These newspapers—by and for the troops—became the heart and soul of a unit. From Normandy to the shores of Japan, American soldiers exercised a level of free speech the military had never known nor would again. It was an extraordinary chapter in American democracy and military history. In the war for "four freedoms," it was remarkably fitting that troops fought not only with guns but with their pens. This stunning volume includes fourteen pages of photographs and illustrations.
Available as an eBook for checkout through Libby/OverDrive
An unprecedented examination of how news stories, editorials and photographs in the American press--and the journalists responsible for them--profoundly changed the nation's thinking about civil rights in the South during the 1950s and '60s.
Roberts and Klibanoff draw on private correspondence, notes from secret meetings, unpublished articles, and interviews to show how a dedicated cadre of newsmen--black and white--revealed to a nation its most shameful shortcomings that compelled its citizens to act. Meticulously researched and vividly rendered, The Race Beat is an extraordinary account of one of the most calamitous periods in our nation's history, as told by those who covered it.
Available as a print book for checkout
The BBC has broadcast to over two hundred countries and in more than forty languages. Its history is a broad cultural panorama of the twentieth century itself, often, although not always, delivered in a mellifluous Oxford accent. With special access to the BBC's archives, historian David Hendy presents a dazzling portrait of a unique institution whose cultural influence is greater than any other media organization.
Mixing politics, espionage, the arts, social change, and everyday life, The BBC is a vivid social history of the organization that has provided both background commentary and screen-grabbing headlines--woven so deeply into the culture and politics of the past century that almost none of us has been left untouched by it.
Available for on-site reference at PPLD's Regional History & Genealogy stacks
This book is not meant to be an academic dates-and-places report of the pioneer journals of Western America. While great pains have been taken to establish historical authenticity, the author's chief goal has been to recreate the flavor and the atmosphere of newspapering on the frontier.
Available as an eAudiobook for checkout through Libby/OverDrive and (as featured here) as a print book for checkout
For over a century, The New York Times has been an iconic institution in American journalism, one whose history is intertwined with the events that it chronicles--a newspaper read by millions of people every day to stay informed about events that have taken place across the globe.
In The Times, Adam Nagourney, who's worked at The New York Times since 1996, examines four decades of the newspaper's history, from the final years of Arthur "Punch" Sulzberger's reign as publisher to the election of Donald Trump in November 2016. Nagourney recounts the paper's triumphs--the coverage of September 11, the explosion of the U.S. Challenger , the scandal of a New York governor snared in a prostitution case--as well as failures that threatened the paper's standing and reputation, including the discredited coverage of the war in Iraq, the resignation of Judith Miller, the plagiarism scandal of Jayson Blair, and the high-profile ouster of two of its executive editors.
Drawing on hundreds of interviews and thousands of documents and letters contained in the newspaper's archives and the private papers of editors and reporters, The Times is an inside look at the essential years that shaped the newspaper. Nagourney paints a vivid picture of a divided newsroom, fraught with tension as it struggled to move into the digital age, while confronting its scandals, shortcomings, and swelling criticism from conservatives and many of its own readers alike. Along the way we meet the memorable personalities--including Abe Rosenthal, Max Frankel, Howell Raines, Joe Lelyveld, Bill Keller, Jill Abramson, Dean Baquet, Punch Sulzberger and Arthur Sulzberger Jr.--who shaped the paper as we know it today. We see the battles between the newsroom and the business operations side, the fight between old and new media, the tension between journalists who tried to hold on to the traditional model of a print newspaper and a new generation of reporters who are eager to embrace the new digital world.
Immersive, meticulously researched, and filled with powerful stories of the rise and fall of the men and women who ran the most important newspaper in the nation, The Times is a definitive account of the most pivotal years in New York Times history.
Available an eAudiobook for checkout through Hoopla, as an eAudiobook for checkout through Libby/OverDrive, an eBook for checkout through Freading, and (as featured here) as a print book for checkout
A fascinating history of the rise and fall of influential Gilded Age magazine McClure's and the two unlikely outsiders at its helm--as well as a timely, full-throated defense of investigative journalism in America.
The president of the United States made headlines around the world when he publicly attacked the press, denouncing reporters who threatened his reputation as "muckrakers" and "forces for evil." The year was 1906, the president was Theodore Roosevelt--and the publication that provoked his fury was McClure's magazine.
One of the most influential magazines in American history, McClure's drew over 400,000 readers and published the groundbreaking stories that defined the Gilded Age, including the investigation of Standard Oil that toppled the Rockefeller monopoly. Driving this revolutionary publication were two improbable newcomers united by single-minded ambition. S. S. McClure was an Irish immigrant, who, despite bouts of mania, overthrew his impoverished upbringing and bent the New York media world to his will. His steadying hand and star reporter was Ida Tarbell, a woman who defied gender expectations and became a notoriously fearless journalist.
PPLD Resource Guide
PPLD Databases
For general history databases, see PPLD's General History Research tab (click here or on the blue General History Research tab at the top of the screen on mobile devices or at the left of the screen on computers).
Recommended Websites
For general history websites, see PPLD's General History Research (click here or on the blue General History Research tab at the top of the screen on mobile devices or at the left of the screen on computers).