"Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it."

George Santayana was a Spanish-born American philosopher, poet, and essayist. He is most widely known today as the author of the aphorism "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

We cannot remember what we don't know in the first place, so I'd like to introduce you to a great resource for learning history: the Gale in Context - World History database. This database is free to read when you log in to the library's website with your library card.

What can you find there?

• Do you like reading about the battles of World War II? 
• Perhaps you want to know how doctors treated the sick during the American colonial period?
• Or I bet you love stained glass and want to learn how it was made over the centuries? 
• Or maybe you're looking for information about apples: varieties, myths, propagation?
• Who was Emperor when Commodore Mathew Perry and his Black Ships sailed to Japan? 
• What happened at Thermopylae? 
• What is known about the 11,500-year-old girl whose remains were found in Alaska?
• When did the women's rights movement start?

I started my research by looking for information about clothing styles and production in the Middle Ages. After I navigated to the database, and entered my library card number to log in, I typed "medieval dress" (including the quotation marks) into the World History search box and clicked on the magnifying-glass icon to initiate the search.

My results: 1 reference article (from a Gale database: Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion), 1 magazine article, 2 items in the news, and 3 articles from academic journals.

I have diverse interests, so then I clicked on Advanced Search, and typed in "bronze age" and selected "Subject" in the drop-down list of categories to search. I limited my search by typing "weapons" in the next row and selected "Keyword" as the category to search.

My results: 5 reference articles, 1 magazine article, and 10 articles from academic journals.

When I removed "weapons" from the search criteria, and searched again, my result set expanded: 26 reference articles, 1 audio recording, 11 magazine articles, 8 items from the news, and 111 articles from academic journals.

An audio recording? Interesting…!

I clicked on it and found a reference to the NPR radio program "All Things Considered" called "Everyday Life in a Bronze Age Village Emerges in U.K. Excavation". By clicking on "All Things Considered" I could browse hundreds of shows. I clicked, instead, on the article's title. This led me to the NPR website, and there I could read the transcript or listen to the original newscast of an extraordinary Bronze Age archaeological dig at Must Farm Quarry, north of London, England.

Just as I did with my Bronze Age search, sometimes you will have to add or remove search terms to get a result set perfectly tailored for your needs. You can save your searches by clicking on Get Link in the upper right corner of the search page.

Perhaps an article uses a word you're unfamiliar with? Double-click it and a small window will pop-up, giving you the option of highlighting the word (in various colors) or looking up its definition.

You can also make notes so you can remember important points or set reminders to do further research:  

After you highlight some terms or add your own annotations to the article, you might want to review  a list of your additions:

If you're researching for a school assignment, you're going to need the cite your sources. Gale in Context - World History gives you the tools to do this in several formats:

You're also going to want to know which articles were most recently published, to see the current thinking about a topic.

The database gives the publication date of each article but you can also filter your results so you are only shown material published, for example, in the last five years.  Or you can choose only those articles published in a specific journal. Or only those easy to read ("Lexile Measure"):

But you say you need more information?  What do you do now?  Gale in Context -World History has a link called "More Like This", where you can find related topics.

So let your mind wander back in time. Pick a topic of interest to you, perhaps American, British, Japanese, Egyptian, Nigerian, or Ancient Roman or Mayan history, or the history of important cultural changes from all over the world. 

Learn something from the past and tell us all about it!