Useful Websites
1. How to Cite Sources in a Scholarly Paper
All writing for this course must abide by the style conventions of the Chicago Manual of Style. I will only accept papers that use footnotes and a bibliography, i.e., no endnotes or parenthetical text citations.
For details on how to cite information in history papers according to the Chicago Manual of Style, use the following links:
The Chicago Manual of Style Online
Research and Documentation Online
The Library of Congress site on how to cite on-line sources
2. Primary Sources
The History Office at NASA has published a series of seven volumes under the general title Exploring the Unknown. These thick volumes contain hundreds of primary sources related to NASA's history. All of them are available in pdf format from the NASA History Office website here. In general, the NASA History Office is a great resource for both primary and secondary information on the U.S. space program.
For the U.S. military and intelligence programs, you can obtain many declassified documents from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) site hosted by the CIA here.
If you are doing research on the popular culture of the space race, a great place to begin is the archives of the magazine, Popular Science. See here.
Various primary and secondary sources on the Russian/Soviet space program can be found here for download.
A general guide on using primary sources on the web is here.
3. Online Secondary Sources
To find scholarly journal articles on various topics, please go to databases accessible through the Caltech Library portal here.
JSTOR
Other secondary sources:
You can find general essays on many different topics on the history of spaceflight here.
Find many entries on space exploration at the Encyclopedia of Science.