Finding Sources

Sources for the history of policing can be found numerous classes of historical record.  This page lists a variety of such classes and offers links to resources for exploring them. We start with two general resources: HOLLIS and HathiTrust.

Searching in HOLLIS

To find books, periodicals, manuscripts, videos, etc., on a topic in HOLLIS, put in likely keywords and choose Library Catalog.  Look at pertinent records and find the terms under Subject. For example, searching medical experimentation prison* (the * retrieves prisons, prisoners) yields:

Acres of skin: human experiments at Holmesburg Prison: a true story of abuse and exploitation in the name of medical science, by Allen M. Hornblum. New York : Routledge, 1998, 297 pp.
Subjects:
Holmesburg Prison.
Convict labor -- Pennsylvania -- Philadelphia.
Dermatology -- Research -- Pennsylvania -- Philadelphia.
Human experimentation in medicine -- Pennsylvania -- Philadelphia.
Prisoners -- Medical care -- Pennsylvania -- Philadelphia.
Med. subject:
Holmesburg Prison.
Prisons
Dermatology
Human Experimentation
Human Experimentation - Philadelphia.
Prisons - Philadelphia.
Pennsylvania
Philadelphia
HOLLIS Record

Under Refine my results: Subject on the right of the results list there are more main terms (Informed consent; Medical ethics) to try, but not the terms after the dashes ( -- ) which are called subdivisions. NOTE: If you hit one of the terms in this Subject list, HOLLIS will find records with the term, say  "Informed consent", only on records in the set originally formed by searching medical experimentation prison*. 

Redo your search using any additional pertinent Subject terms.    Also, go to Starts with.../Browse (top black band) and put in Prisoners -- Medical care adjusting to Browse by Subject.  This is very useful in breaking down a large subject and in giving you more subdivisions, which can be applied to other Subject terms, to search.  Thus:

  • Human experimentation in medicine -- Moral and ethical aspects
  • Prisoners -- Medical care -- Moral and ethical aspects

Note that there are two different systems of subject terms: Subject produced by the Library of Congress; and Med. subj. produced by the National Library of Medicine.  Often the term for the same thing are different: Subject: Medical ethics; Med. subject: Ethics, medical.

Whenever you have a reference to a useful book, look it up in HOLLIS and see what the Subject terms are.

Searching in HathiTrust

Hathitrust is a huge general digital library similar to, and partly overlapping in content with, Google Books and Internet Archive but with some special features.  You can do a full text search over the whole collection of millions of books and journals and then effectively refine the results. Use Full Text Advanced Search. You can adjust the second box to Subject and put in Prisoners, in the top Full text box, put Experimentation.  This yields 1692 items with 640 full text.    Pre-1923 books and periodicals and many post-1923 government documents will be full text viewable as well as searchable. For copyrighted material, you can find out on what page your term occurs.

Making of Modern Law (Legal Treatises 1800-1926)

In Basic Search, adjusting the Search Type to Subject and searching Prisoners in Amercian treatises yields 37 books.

Other digital Libraries and Collections are listed in the Library Research Guide for History.

Lloyd Sealy Library Digital Collections at John Jay College of Criminal Justice

The overlapping lists in these four websites provide access to local digital collections:

Bibliographies

Look for specialized subject bibliographies in the HOLLIS Catalog: Search, for example, Subject contains: prison* bibliography.  The term Bibliography MUST be searched as a Subject keyword: Change Keywords anywhere to Limit to: subject. 

Medical experimentation on prisoners: an introductory bibliography on a neglected research topic, by Dretha M. Phillips. Monticello, Ill. : Vance Bibliographies, 1979, 8 p.
HOLLIS Record

American prisons: an annotated bibliography, by Elizabeth Huffmaster McConnell and Laura J. Moriarty. Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press, 1998, 321 p.
HOLLIS Record

Bioethics Literature

Explore Bioethics Topics

PubMed indexes periodical articles on health care and biomedical ethics, law and public policy. Includes the citations from BIOETHICSLINE (1973-2000) which has been discontinued and its contents, plus new indexing, incorporated into PubMed. 

To limit to bioethics sources in PubMed, select Topic-Specific Queries under PubMed Tools, then choose Bioethics under Subjects.

In PubMed, to see the MESH (Medical Subject Headings), open MeSH Terms.

Digital Collections of the Bioethics Research Library (Georgetown University)

National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature

Commissions, Reports

United States Commission on Civil Rights: reports on the police, ed. by Gabriel J. Chin. Buffalo, N.Y. : Hein, 2005. 3 v.
FindIt@Harvard

U.S. National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, or commonly the Wickersham Commission, established in 1929 by President Herbert Hoover, headed by former U.S. Attorney General George W. Wickersham.

United States. Wickersham Commission. Publications, 1930-31. 14 v.
FindIt@Harvard
Online version
--Volume Vol. 9 is  Report on Penal Institutions Probation and Parole, 1931.

American police systems, by Raymond B. Fosdick. New York, Century Co., 1920, x, 408 p. fold. diagrs.
HathiTrust Full Text 
FindIt@Harvard
Publications of the Bureau of Social Hygiene.

Criminological Literature

Listed on the Criminological Literature page.

Diaries and Other Personal Writings

Many diaries, letters and  other personal writings are available in print or full text online.

To find them in HOLLIS search: Policewomen AND (diaries OR archives OR correspondence OR Interviews)..

Memoirs of American prisons : an annotated bibliography, by Daniel Suvak. Metuchen, N.J. : Scarecrow Press, 1979. viii, 227 p.
FindIt@Harvard

American prisoners and ex-prisoners, their writings : an annotated bibliography of published works, 1798-1981, by H. Bruce Franklin. Westport, Conn. : L. Hill, 1982, 53 p.
FindIt@Harvard

Examples:

Law enforcement, race relations, 1930-1960 : an interview, Robert B. Powers ; conducted by Amelia R. Fry. (Earl Warren Oral History Project) Berkeley : University of California, Bancroft Library/Berkeley, Regional Oral History Office, 1971, xii, 180 leaves,
Appendices (p. 77-177) include photocopied newspaper clippings and correspondence.
FindIt@Harvard
Online version
--The Earl Warren Oral History Project Offers other oral history interviews on California law enforcement
--Robert B. Powers (1900-1976) was a prominent California police officer

Autobiographies usually bear the Subject term Biography, and so are not distinguished from biographies. The search Autobiographies OR Autobiography yields many autobiographies, but by no means all.

Oral History Online indexes oral history collections, with links to interview-level bibliographic records and to full-text materials, audio files and visual files where these are available.

Films/Videos

To find films in HOLLIS, search your topic keywords, then on the left side of the results screen, look at Resource Type and choose video/film.

To find books about films about your topic, search Topic keywords AND "in motion pictures"

The WGBH Open Vault includes many police-related videos.

Other sources for film and video are listed in the Library Research Guide for History, which also has pages for television and radio.

Government Sources

ProQuest Congressional provides indexing for Congressional publications dating from 1790 to the present. Post-1970, full-text access is often available. Publications included are Committee Hearings, House and Senate Documents, House and Senate Reports, Senate Executive Reports, Senate Executive Treaty Documents, Legislative Histories, Serial Set Maps, Serial Set. More information from ProQuest. ProQuest has a Research Guide to Government Documents.

Federal Bureau of Prisons https://www.bop.gov/

FBI Records: The Vault

Images

ARTstor offers innumerable images from art but also from a variety of humanities and social science fields. Other. sources for images are listed in the Library Research Guide for History.

Combining your topical words with the phrase "Pictorial Works" in HOLLIS yields books that are largely composed of pictures.

 

Legal Sources

See Research Guide for History 97g: "What is Legal History?"

Magazines

Sources for magazines (popular periodicals) are listed on the in the General and Popular Indexes pages of Finding Articles in General and Popular Periodicals (North America and Western Europe).

African American press

Ethnic NewsWatch (1959- ) offers full-text of 90 newspapers and other periodicals (1990- ) and of 30 African American, Hispanic American, and Native American newspapers and other periodicals (1959-1989). Includes book/film/television reviews. More about content.

African American Periodicals, 1825-1995 offers over 170 periodicals from 26 states including academic and political journals, commercial magazines, institutional newsletters, organizations’ bulletins, annual reports, etc.

Ebony in Google magazines (1959-2008)

International Index to Black Periodicals (1902- ; some full-text 1998- ) indexes over 150 scholarly and popular journals, newspapers and newsletters from the United States, Africa and the Caribbean.

News Sources

See Guide to Newspapers and Newspaper Indexes

Broadcast news:

Boston TV News Digital Library (1960-2000)

Television News of the Civil Rights Era, 1950-1970 offers television news footage from the nightly news from two local television stations in Virginia.

Television News Archive (Vanderbilt University) (1968-) indexes the collection of network television news programs at Vanderbilt University. Abstracts searchable by keyword to find information and/or request videotape loans. Online video is available for CNN news broadcasts from October 1995 to the present.

American History in Video has numerous modern documentaries together with newsreels from 1929 to the present.

Internet Archive includes films, radio audio clips, news clips, educational films, advertisements, industry films, etc.

African American Newspapers

ProQuest Historical Newspapers include illustrations, editorials, and advertising. African-American papers are listed below. To search them all at once open ProQuest Historical Newspapers, open Databases in the gray top bar, and deselect all but the following:

African American Newspapers, 1827-1998 includes 270 newspapers from 36 states. It is a subset of America's Historical Newspapers (Readex).

The Afro American – National Edition  (1902 – 1957)  --  Afro American – Ledger (October 1906 – June 1917)  --  Baltimore Afro – American (1943 – 2003)  --  Washington Afro – American (August 1938 – June 1988

The Black Panther: Newspaper of the Black Panther Party is available in Black Thought and Culture (ca. 1840-1975)

Organizations

Prison Abolition Syllabus

Carceral Studies Network

Equal Justice Initiative

Prison Legal News

Prison Policy Initiative

Vera Institute of Justics

Women's Prison Association

Policy Literature, Working Papers, Think Tank Reports

Policy institute, think tanks and related organizations often publish their reports themselves so they do not appear in the ordinary sources. These two sources offer access to this literature.

PolicyFile (1990-). offers public policy reports and studies published by think tanks, university research programs, research organizations including the OECD, IMF, World Bank, the Rand Corporation, and a number of federal agencies.  Go to  the Subject List and choose Law Enforcement. Then check U.S. Domestic.

Policy Archive is a digital library of public policy research containing over 30,000 documents.

Think Tank Search - from the Kennedy School of Government, a customized Google search of documents produced by think tanks.

Google advanced search. You can limit by domain: .org

Political Science/Public Policy

International bibliography of political science (1953- ), included in International Bibliography of the Social Sciences, is a bibliography of periodical articles, books, essays in books, and government publications.

JSTOR includes the full text of 119 political science journals from their date of inception to about 5 years ago. Use Advanced search to limit to Political Science journals.

PAIS covers many public affairs-related disciplines, including material from scholarly articles, governmental and non-governmental publications, research reports, websites, etc.

Worldwide Political Science Abstracts contains international literature in political science and related fields. Covers 1975-Present.

Psychology

PsycINFO (1887- ) includes Psychological abstracts (1927- ), Psychological index (1894-1935), abstracts from the Psychological Bulletin (1921-26) and all other American Psychological Association journals (pre-1927), and the American Journal of Psychology (1887-1926). Worldwide coverage (but most indexed publications are in English) of over 1300 periodicals plus (from 1987 only) books, essays in books, and dissertations. No book reviews.

Statistics and Opinion Polls

Bureau of Justice Statistics

National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NACJD)
HOLLIS Record

Uniform Crime Reports FBI 1930-2005 (incomplete). A few years missing supplied.

--How to use the Uniform crime reports. 1947
--Uniform crime reporting handbook. FBI 1984
--Ten year index Uniform crime reports, for the United States and its possessions. FBI 1930-1939.

Note that in Hathitrust Advanced Full Text Search, you can put the phrase “Uniform crime reports” in the Title field and search your keywords in the Full Text field. 

Uniform crime reports for the United States (1930-1997)
HOLLIS Record

Bureau of Social Hygiene project and research files [1918-1940] : a collection of the Rockefeller Archive Center of Rockefeller University. 31 reels
Microforms (Lamont) Film A 310
Microforms (Lamont) INDEX Film A 310 (Printed guide tells you contents of the reels)
--Reel 9 documents the development of the Uniform Crime Reports system

Sourcebook of criminal justice statistics. Dept. of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1973-2005
LLMC version
Heinonline version
HOLLIS Record

Race of prisoners admitted to state and federal institutions, 1926-1986, by Patrick A. Langan. Washington, D.C. : U.S. Dept. of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1991, 54 p.
HOLLIS Record

Public Opinion Data Resources

United States Census Data Resources

Other sources for statistics and data are listed in the Library Research Guide for History.

Sociology/Social Welfare/Urban Studies

Applied Social Sciences Index and Abstracts: ASSIA (largely 1987- )

International Bibliography of the Social Sciences(1951- ) includes: International bibliography of sociology

Social Services Abstracts (1980- (Social Service Review back to 1927))

Sociological Abstracts (1952-)

Urban Studies Abstracts (1973 - )