World history: Recommended starting points

What's here

This guide focuses on principal research resources in a subfield of history, supplementing the main subject guide for the field and the comprehensive guide to online primary historical sources.

This landing page is organized into these sections: Background sources; Indexes to scholarly historical literature; full-text journal archives, and Indexes to popular periodicals.

It identifies selected Primary sources online and reproduces portions of Bruce Pencek's other subject guides: Area studies & comparative politics; Advice for searching/citing/engaging scholarly literatures; and Accessing VT Libraries' resources from off campus.

World history brings a global perspective to the study of historical events anywhere, but information resources tend to treat world history as a catch-all, geographically as history of everywhere-outside-North-America and chronologically as beginning in the European Renaissance. For earlier periods, see the Classical studies and Medieval and early modern studies subject guides.  For prehistory and archaeology, see the guide for anthropology.

Background: overviews and themes in world history

Finding the scholarly literature and sources

Academic journal archives (could be primary or secondary, depending on use)

Indexes to popular literatures