Guides: Philadelphia History: Secondary Sources

Books

Franklin is your guide to books here at Penn Libraries. Searching by subject heading (the topic of the book) will yield the best results, once you have identified the subject heading of interest. Some useful subject headings include:

WorldCat is a valuable resource for searching the catalogs of other libraries. WorldCat can be searched using the same subject headings you used in Franklin. If you find something not held at Penn, you may request it via BorrowDirect, EZBorrow, or Interlibrary Loan.

Article Databases

America: History and Life
A bibliographic database indexing books, book chapters, and over 1,800 journals relating to the history of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present.
Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals
Covers architecture, architectural design, archeology, furniture and decoration, historic preservation, the history of architecture, interior design, landscape architecture, urban planning.
Urban Studies Abstracts
Bibliographic citations with abstracts describing scholarly literature in all aspects of urban studies. Topics include trends in urbanization, urban history, architecture and urban design, housing and real estate, urban development and redevelopment, urban planning and land use, environment and resource conservation, transporation and communication, crime and law enforcement, urban economics, social services and public services, politics and government, urban fiscal and budgetary policy, and social issues.

Online Journals

Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
1877-present.
Pennsylvania History
1934-present.
Pennsylvania Legacies
2001-2007.

Dissertations

Proquest Dissertations and Theses Fulltext (formerly Dissertation Abstracts)
Indexing (since 1861) and abstracting (since 1980) for doctoral-level dissertations completed at North American universities. Fulltext of all available dissertations from 1997 to present, with some earlier dissertations. Search for Philadelphia as a Subject.