HIS 4973 / AMS 4973: Madness & American Society (Clinton)

Research tips and resources for the study of the history of madness in American society

Research Tips

Relevant Bibliographies

Oxford Bibliographies Online logoBibliographies, or lists of sources, can be a useful starting point for your research. Oxford Bibliographies Online (OBO) is a database that contains bibliographies on almost any subject with recommendations for scholarship at all levels, whether encyclopedias and textbooks or journal articles and primary sources. For each topic in OBO, you'll find bibliographic essays and annotated citations. The content is selective and peer-reviewed, chosen by experts in their disciplines.

The first two links below go to specific topics in Oxford Bibliographies Online that may be particularly useful for this course because they focus on History. You may also wish to search the entire OBO database (third link below) using terms such as: madness, insanity, mental health, mental illness, psychology, psychiatry, etc.

Finding Secondary Sources

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Selected Peer Reviewed Journals

Selected Books

An Unquiet Mind

Kay Redfield Jamison

Unspeakable: The Story of Junius Wilson

Susan Burch; Hannah Joyner

Madness in America: Cultural and Medical Perceptions of Mental Illness before 1914

Lynn Gamwell; Nancy Tomes

"In this book, Lynn Gamwell and Nancy Tomes explore the historical roots of Americans' understanding of madness today. "[The authors] observe telling differences in the ways in which patients of different genders, races, and classes have been diagnosed and treated. The authors demonstrate how definitions of madness figured in national debates over abolitionism, women's rights, and alternative medicine."

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