Faculty Research

When conducting research in a particular area, it can be helpful to reach out to the professor(s) whose research interests most closely align with your topic and question. Below is a list of our faculty’s research specializations with links to their favorite databases and digital collections. You can also find their email addresses at the History Department website: https://www.astate.edu/college/liberal-arts/departments/history/faculty-staff/

Justin Castro

Research Specializations: Latin America, Mexico, History of Technology

Latin American Pamphlet Digital Collection (https://curiosity.lib.harvard.edu/latin-american-pamphlet-digital-collection)
US Office of the Historian Historical Documents (https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments)
Latin American Newspapers, Series 2 Collection (https://ezproxy.library.astate.edu/login?url=https://infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/readex?p=WHNPLAN2)

Lucy Barnhouse

Research Specializations: Medieval History, Medieval Medicine and Public Health, Medieval Religion, Medieval Gender

International Medieval Bibliography (https://ezproxy.library.astate.edu/login?url=http://apps.brepolis.net/LTool/Entrance.aspx?w=5)
Epistolae: Medieval Women’s Letters (https://epistolae.ctl.columbia.edu/)
Monasterium (https://www.monasterium.net/mom/home)
Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index (https://inpress.lib.uiowa.edu/feminae/WhatIsFeminae.aspx)
Internet Medieval Sourcebook (https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/sbook.asp)

Kellie Wilson Buford

Research Specializations: Military, Legal, 20th Century World, Women and Gender

WestLawNext (https://1-next-westlaw-com.ezproxy.library.astate.edu/) court cases and legal documents on all subjects by state and subject in American history.
America's Historical Newspapers (https://libguides.astate.edu/amhistnews)
Library of Congress Digital Collections (https://www.loc.gov/collections)
Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture, and Law (https://heinonline-org.ezproxy.library.astate.edu/HOL/Index?collection=slavery)
American Periodicals, 1740-1940(https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.library.astate.edu/americanperiodicals/)

Andrea Davis

Research Specializations: Modern Europe, Spain, Oral History, Digital Humanities

HathiTrust Digital Library (https://www.hathitrust.org/) is “a not-for-profit collaborative between academic and research libraries that preserves 17+ million digitized items.”
Europeana (https://www.europeana.eu/en) is an initiative of the European Union that “provides access to digital books, audio and film material, photos, paintings, maps, manuscripts, newspapers and archival documents” from Europe.
European History Primary Sources (http://primary-sources.eui.eu/) is an initiative of the European University Institute that provides “an easily searchable index of scholarly digital repositories that contain primary sources for the history of Europe.”
Biblioteca Digital Hispánica (http://www.bne.es/en/Catalogos/BibliotecaDigitalHispanica/Inicio/index.html) provides access to the digital collections of the Spanish National Library.
USC Shoa Foundation: Visual History Archive Online (https://vhaonline.usc.edu/login) “allows users to search through and view more than 54,000 video testimonies of survivors and witnesses of genocide.”

Gary Edwards

Research Specializations: U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction, Early American

Butler Center for Arkansas Studies (https://robertslibrary.org/collections/digital-collections/) emphasis on agriculture and military topics.
Library of Congress Early Presidential Collections (https://www.loc.gov/item/prn-20-085/library-of-congress-completes-digitization-of-23-early-presidential-collections/2020-12-17/ ) exhaustive collection of most Presidential papers from Washington to Coolidge.
Adams Papers (https://www.masshist.org/publications/adams-papers/) not available through Library of Congress.
Documenting the American South (https://docsouth.unc.edu/) “texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture.”
Civil War Soldiers and Sailors Database (https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/soldiers-and-sailors-database.htm) “information about the men who served in the Union and Confederate armies during the Civil War.”

Erik Gilbert

Research Specializations: Africa, Middle East, Global

Pamela Hronek

Research Specializations: American, 20th Century, Urban, Environmental

Aiqun Hu

Research Specializations: China, Global History

Cherisse Jones-Branch

Research Specializations: African-American, Civil Rights, Women’s History Rural History

African American Newspapers (https://infoweb-newsbank-com.ezproxy.library.astate.edu/apps/readex/welcome?p=EANAAA) contains a century and a half of African American newspapers.
Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers (https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/?&loclr=reclnk) contains newspapers from 1777-1963. Jointly sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress.
Gale Primary Sources, Women’s Studies Archive (https://go.gale.com/ps/start.do?p=WMNS&u=akstateu1) contains archival collections concerning women’s history from around the globe.
The HistoryMakers (https://da.thehistorymakers.org/home). This is the nation’s largest African American video oral history collection.
History Vault (https://hv.proquest.com/historyvault/hv.jsp;JSESSIONIDEXT=045C263F902E97CE06402CAEA89BE89E?pageid=home)
contains digitized letters, papers, photographs, scrapbooks, financial records, diaries, and many more primary source materials taken from the University Publications of America Collections.

Joe Key

Research Specializations: Native American, History of Sexuality, Early U.S.

Bill Maynard

Research Specializations: England, Scotland, Witchcraft, European military

Heather McNamee

Research Specializations: African-American, Civil Rights, U.S. South, Women

Arkansas Digital Archives (https://digitalheritage.arkansas.gov/)
Gilder Lerhman Institute of American History (https://www.gilderlehrman.org/collection)
The HistoryMakers (https://da.thehistorymakers.org/home). This is the nation’s largest African American video oral history collection.

Ed Salo

Research Specializations: 20th century U.S., Cold War, comic books, public history

Lauri Umansky

Research Specializations: disability history, motherhood, heritage

Sarah Wilkerson-Freeman

Research Specializations: American, Women, Southern

Documenting the American South (https://docsouth.unc.edu/ ) is a digital publishing initiative of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes sixteen thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs.”
Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 to 1938 (https://www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938/about-this-collection/) “contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) of the Works Progress Administration, later renamed Work Projects Administration (WPA).”
Ancestry (http://ancestry.com/) is the largest for-profit genealogy company in the world. For historical purposes, you can use the census or name search to automatically find other public docs for that person (military, birth, death certificates, marriage, probate, obits, yearbooks, newspaper articles, city directories, etc.).
Shelby County, TN Archive (https://register.shelby.tn.us/?page_id=505) is a local archive with digitized records on property, death, birth, marriage, divorce, court docs.
Densho (https://densho.org/) “Densho documents the testimonies of Japanese Americans who were unjustly incarcerated during World War II before their memories are extinguished.”