Department of History

Databases for Middle Eastern History

USMA Library subscribes to over 100 history-related databases.

The following suggestions are intended to help you get started.

Databases - Primary Sources

• Archives Unbound Browse a topically focused digitized collection of historical documents. The collections cover a broad range of topics from the Middle Ages forward-from Witchcraft to World War II to twentieth-century political history. Particular strengths of this resource include U.S. foreign policy; U.S. civil rights; global affairs and colonial studies; and modern history.
• Issues & Controversies in History - Users will find background, outcome, and contemporary points of view for every major debate and conflict in history. Topics are presented in a pro/con format that clearly explains both sides of the historical dispute, each article is supported by a timeline and a wealth of primary sources.
• Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Daily Reports - Discover translated transcripts of foreign radio and television broadcasts, news agency transmissions, newspapers, periodicals, and government statements. The reports are from 1974-1996 and contain political, military, economic, environmental, and sociological news and information.
• MideastWire.com -This resource is an Internet-based news service established in 2005 in Beirut, Lebanon that employs a team of translators around the region to gather important stories from and about the Middle East. Currently covering news from all 22 Arab countries and the Arab media Diaspora.
• Archives Direct: Confidential Print- Middle East - Contains British Foreign and Colonial Office documents concerning the Middle East between c. 1820 and 1970. Resources in this collection range from single-page letters or telegrams to comprehensive dispatches, investigative reports and texts of treaties.
• Arab-Israeli Relations, 1917-1970 - Discover primary source documents from the British National Archives that chronicle the history of the Palestine Mandate and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Some of the topics covered include the British capture of Jerusalem, the milestones in the Palestine-Zionist tension and their impact on British policy leading to the Partition of 1948, Jewish terror groups, the background to the establishment of the State of Israel as a Jewish national home, the Border wars of the 1950s, formation of the United Arab Republic, the Cold War in the Middle East and Black September.

• Iraq, 1914-1974 - Source material from the British Foreign Office, Colonial Office, War Office and Cabinet Papers covering the period from the Anglo-Indian landing in Basra in 1914 through the British Mandate in Iraq of 1920-32 to the rise of Saddam Hussein in 1974.

Databases - Secondary Sources 

• CIAO: Columbia International Affairs Online - View a comprehensive source for theory and research in international affairs with scholarship ranging from university research institutes, NGOs, foundation-funded research projects, conferences proceedings, books, journals and policy briefs. This contains a wide range of scholarship from 1991 onward.
• EBSCOhost Provides access to a wide range of databases, many with full text. Chose to search one database or search all.
• JSTOR - Provides access to scholarly journals and books in a wide range of disciplines 
• Cambridge Histories Online - This collection consists of over 300 volumes from the Cambridge Histories series. The volumes are grouped by specific subject areas, making it quick and easy to search and browse through an array of historical topics.