LibGuides: Early Modern World: Getting Started

Introduction

The term "Early Modern" designates the historical period of globalization, during which sustained interaction between different regions of the world occurred as a result of exploration or conquest and colonization. Transfers and exchanges of ideas, arts, technologies, and human populations between those regions are an important object of study: material and visual culture, performance, languages and literatures, systems of belief, and narratives of the past can all be viewed from diverse vantage points. (Source)

Using this Guide

This is by no means a comprehensive guide to all the resources available for the study of the Early Modern World. However, this guide does contain many carefully curated resources that can serve as entry points to the Early Modern World. The menu on the left-hand side of this guide can be used to navigate the resources available here. All these resources are grouped by the following:

Reference Sources: Background information generally comes from reference sources, which provide a scholarly discussion that summarizes and synthesizes secondary sources. These sources provide important background and contextual information on your subject. Reference sources include bibliographies, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and handbooks. You can use this type of source to help narrow your research topic, find data to support your thesis, and identify keywords and main ideas to use as search terms.
Secondary sources - A secondary source is a scholarly discussion based on primary sources. Typically, a secondary source contains original research. Secondary sources include articles, blogs, books, lectures, podcasts, and scientific reports. Secondary sources are useful for in-depth analysis of your topic and for learning about scholarly perspectives on your topic.
Primary sources - A primary source is a document, image, artifact, or dataset that provides first-hand testimony or direct evidence concerning the object of research. Primary sources may include, but are not limited to, artwork, correspondence, diaries, interviews, literary texts, material artifacts, newspapers, speeches, statistics, and videos. Primary sources are useful for providing evidence on your topic.