First of all let me say that if this is the wrong sub please point me in the right direction (I will be posting in r/history also).
For my history coursework at college I need to write a discussion of a pre-decided historical work which in my case is A.J.P Taylor's "The Struggle for mastery in Europe 1848-1914".
I've managed to find a few criticisms of the work but a majority of the pages I've seen have been poorly referenced or reference texts which seem to have disappeared completely.
Any suggestions welcome, Thanks in advance.
The best way to do this is to engage in the advanced search functions of various databases such as Jstor through your the portal of your university's library.
What this entails is to be able to navigate through the at times counterintuitive search functions. Take Jstor's advanced search. Not only will you have to enter in "The Struggle for mastery in Europe 1848-1914" into the main search bar, under "narrow by", you will need to limit findings to reviews. Without the limiter, I get a wide search result including a Sudan bibliography. Some hits are related to Taylor, others are not. Limiting to reviews gets a more focused result.
The next step is to access the articles. Not all libraries' databases are equal. Some databases' advanced search functions limit hits to those that are accessible via your subscription. If you cannot read the review directly, there are two major options:
You can try and do it the old-fashioned way and read the physical copy. Especially since Taylor's book is an older work, there might be a physical copy whose contents have not been digitized.
The other option is interlibrary loan. Your Uni's librarian should be able to help you with this as they will send out a request to another library that does have access to this article- physical or digital- and they will relay it back to you via your email or library account. This process takes time, so do not procrastinate.
Another tip is that Taylor was a public intellectual of his era so some of the critiques of his book were not limited to the academic press. A newspaper database like ProQuest might have some nuggets of criticism. The printed reference work Book Review Digest- if you can find it and keep in mind that most of their collected book reviews are in the volume a year after the book was published- might also give some of the reviews of the book. The "cited by" feature in Google Scholar can also give you some idea of where other writers have cited Taylor, either to praise or condemn him.
Remember, this type of research is not always a quick and easy process. Databases can lead to dead-ends or inaccessible hits. Give yourself time to find them.
Hi - we as mods have approved this thread, because while this is a homework question, it is asking for clarification or resources, rather than the answer itself, which is fine according to our rules. This policy is further explained in this Rules Roundtable thread and this META Thread.
As a result, we'd also like to remind potential answerers to follow our rules on homework - please make sure that your answers focus appropriately on clarifications and detailing the resources that OP could be using.
Additionally, while users may be able to help you out with specifics relating to your question, we also have plenty of information on /r/AskHistorians on how to find and understand good sources in general. For instance, please check out our six-part series, "Finding and Understanding Sources", which has a wealth of information that may be useful for finding and understanding information for your essay.