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History 399: The Iraq War

If you have questions about any of this, or need help finding what you need, please contact me:
John Russell, johnruss@uoregon.edu, 541-346-2689, AIM: uohistlib

Finding Newspaper Articles

The following databases will be most helpful to you:

Tips for Effective Web Searching

Use Technorati or Google Blog Search for searching blog content.

Target your searches by using the site: feature. For example, the search "Iraq War" site:gov will only return U.S. government web pages that contain the phrase "Iraq War." You can also modify this to search a specific website - for example Fallujah site:alternet.org will return all instances of the word Fallujah on any of the webpages in the alternet.org domain. You can also combine searches if you think it might be useful: for example, if you wanted to compare discussions of the bombing of the Askariya Shrine in 2006 using The Economist and the Brookings Institution, you could search "Askariya Shrine" site:brookings.edu OR site:economist.com (Yahoo! or AltaVista work best when you have more than 2 sites that you'd like to include; Google doesn't seem to be able to deal with more than 2).

Google has a useful internet searching cheat sheet, and Yahoo! also has a search help page.

Also consider taking a look at the Congressional Research Service reports (these reports, created by government researchers for members of Congress, are summaries of current topics); you can find these by searching the Federation of American Scientists page (www.fas.org) or browse the FAS CRS Reports by topic: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/index.html. These reports are also made available online via the State Department: http://fpc.state.gov/c18183.htm. OpenCRS is another option for finding CRS reports and they offer alerts for recently added content.

Another useful web resource is Docuticker, a daily source of documents from government agencies (including the military), NGOs, and other groups. There is a search box on the main page. Examples of documents mentioned: On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign: The United States Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom, May 2003-January 2005, Senate Intelligence Committee Unveils Final Phase II Reports on Prewar Iraq Intelligence, Choosing War: The Decision to Invade Iraq and Its Aftermath.

Maintained by: John Russell, johnruss@uoregon.edu
Last Modified: 08/25/2009