Dirty War Project, Fall 2021 (AP Spanish, Monnerat): Home

When doing research, we strongly recommend that you start with authoritative sources and library resources (print books from our library and/or information from library databases)

1)  Brainstorm keywords to help you find resources

• Consider synonyms, similar terms, or related terms, all which provide different ways to search
• Think of broader terms, or in some cases, more specific terms
• Sometimes it helps to search for the keyword in Spanish (and/or English, if it's a Spanish word)

2)  Start your research with authoritative sources

• Books from our library (search Destiny Discover, our online book catalog)
• Library databases (see suggested library databases in the block below this one)
• Recommended websites (see suggested websites at the bottom of this column)
   

3) Please do not begin your research with a Google search

• You should always start with authoritative sources
• If you have searched the library book catalog, searched the library databases, and looked at the recommended websites, and you can't find information, think about the keywords you are using
• If you know you're using the correct keywords, but still are not finding information, you can ask Ms. Jewell or Ms. Burke for recommendations and/or assistance
• If you still need additional information after trying all the above, and you choose to use a website that is not on the recommended list below, do not include it in your research unless you have accurately evaluated the website, and are able to point to specific evidence why the website is reliable and authoritative 

When you search library databases, don't search in complete sentences.  Databases are not like Google.  

• Use a couple of keywords, combined with the word AND:
  • Argentina and desaparecidos
• Don't put more than three keywords together in the same search 
• If you want to search a phrase, put quotation marks around it:
  • "Dirty War"
     

Library database page on the library website. To access to the library databases from home, use the following:
Username: visi
Password: library2019!

Recommended library databases that may be helpful, depending on your topic are:

• EBSCO Discovery Search: searches almost all of our library databases at once. This can retrieve an overwhelming amount of results, so if you're having difficulties finding useful information via the EBSCO Discovery Search, try searching a single database instead of all at once
   
• EBSCO Ebooks Academic edition (ebooks)
  You can search the full database for your specific topics, however, here are a few titles that give an overview of issues with the Dirty War that might be helpful (use the option to search within on the left hand side of the book to look inside the book for your keywords):
  • The chapter "The Art of Disappearance: Remembering Political Violence in Argentina and Chile" (Chapter 3) from Cinema of the Dark Side: Atrocity and the Ethics of Film Spectatorship
  • The chapters "The Dirty War in Argentina" (Chapter 4) and "Argentina: The Sinuous Path of Transitional Justice" (Chapter 5) from State Terrorism in Latin America : Chile, Argentina, and International Human Rights
  • The chapter "Disappeared, Argentina" (Chapter 7), from the book Missing: Persons and Politics 
  • The book Argentina's Missing Bones: Revisiting the History of the Dirty War
  • The book Guerrillas and Generals: The 'Dirty War' in Argentina
  • The book A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture (revised and updated)
  • The book The Official History of the Falklands Campaign: Volume 1: The Origins of the Falklands War
  • The book The Official History of the Falklands Campaign: Volume 2 : War and Diplomacy
  • The book Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America   

• JSTOR (scholarly journal articles)
   
• Academic Search Ultimate (magazine, newspapers, and some scholarly journal articles)
   
• Gale eBooks (reference books in electronic format)
   
• The ABC-Clio History databases (search all 16 at once)
  • For better results, put quotation marks around phrases when searching
  • ABC-Clio is the publisher name; each of the databases have their own name. The information in these databases are original content to the database, and not published in print​

You may want to look at some of the following websites to find information on your topics.  This is not a complete list of every available resource on the topic, so you will have to do additional research on your own

National Security Archive website: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/, specifically:

• "State Department Opens Files on Argentina's Dirty War: National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 73 - Part I" -- contains 15 documents related to the Dirty War
• "Argentine Military Believed U.S. Gave Go-Ahead for Dirty War: National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 73 - Part II" -- contains 13 documents related to the Dirty War
• "New Declassified Details on Repression and U.S. Support for Military Dictatorship" -- 14 documents on the Dirty War, broken into 3 sections: 1) The U.S., the Argentine Military and the Coup; 2) Operation Condor: The Machinery of the Dirty War; and 3) Casualties of Repression: Accounting for the Dead and Disappeared
• "Obama Brings 'Declassified Diplomacy' To Argentina: Briefing Book #545" -- 16 documents relating to the Dirty War. You might also want to look at the related links on the left hand side of the page for additional resources
• "Obama Declassification Holds Promise of Uncovering New Evidence on Argentina's Dirty War: Briefing Book #546" -- 5 documents relating to the Dirty War
• "Timerman Case Threatened Argentine Military Regime" -- documents related to Jacobo Timerman
• "US Declassified Documents: Argentine Junta Security Forces Killed, Disappeared Activists, Mothers and Nuns" -- contains 16 documents on the Dirty War, including information on the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and the disappearance of the French Nuns (Leonie Duquet and Alice Domon)
   

"Argentina Declassification Project: The "Dirty War" (1976-83)," which is part of the Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room webpage of the CIA's website -- this website contains 40 pages of various documents related to the Dirty War that have been declassified. It includes documents about:

• Operation Condor (use the search box at the top of the document page to search for that keyword)
• Jacobo Timerman (sometimes listed as Timmerman), on page 1 listed above, as well as page 41

The New York Times -- search for newspaper articles relating to the Dirty War, and your specific topics (for instance, Juan Gelman's obituary was published in the The New York Times). To read multiple articles and/or articles from the archives, you will need an account with The New York Times, and you will need to renew your access for this school year by following the directions on the library password exceptions and instructions document.
 

Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo: the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo's website

"Argentina Belatedly Celebrates a Journalist Hero" -- an article in Time written by Uki Goñi about Robert Cox
 

"Children of the Dirty War" -- an article from the March 2012 issue of The New Yorker
 

"Disappeared Children in Argentina: Rita Arditti’s Interviews with the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo," from the Digital Collections of Joseph P. Healey Library, UMass Boston
 

Nunca Más (Never Again): Report of CONADEP (National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons), translated from the Spanish

You always need to cite what sources you used in your research.

The MLA page on our library website has more details on how to cite sources, including works cited sample sheets, as well as a link to citation help from Purdue's Online Writing Lab (OWL).

You might find it helpful to complete a MLA Template to create a citation for each source you used for this project. 

As you create your citations, we know that some library databases give sample citations at the bottom of the page.  Sometimes that information is incomplete or incorrect (for example, the citations provided by many of the EBSCO databases are incorrect).  Use the information from the sample citation to help create your own version of the citation for the source. Don't copy and paste the citation provided from the database into a Word document. 

If you are citing a source in a library database, almost all of the databases have information that was originally in print.  On the MLA Practice Template, you put all the original information about the book in the first section (book, reference source, scholarly journal, magazine, image), and then the information about the library database you used would be in the 2nd half of the template (where all the information in the first part of the template is repeated). (Two exceptions are Britannica School and all of the databases published by ABC-Clio.  Content from those databases were never in print, so all the info would be in container 1)

If you found an article in an online database, the additional information you need to include after you cite all the information about the print source is:

• the title of the container (database)
• the publisher of the source (database publisher)
• the date of the database
• the URL of the database (if required by your teacher).  Use a short version of the URL (typically up to the .com, .org, etc.).  Do not include http:// in the URL

After you have created a citation for each of your sources, you can create a works cited list based on the MLA Templates you filled out. Type out each MLA Template entry in a Word document in the exact order as written on the template, complete with punctuation at the end of each line.  Then, format the works cited list by making sure it has the following:

• The entire works cited list is double spaced, with one inch margins on each side
• The heading Works Cited is centered at the top of the works cited list
• The entries in the works cited list are in alphabetical order
• The first line of each citation is flush to the left, then each subsequent line of the citation is indented

You can download a copy of the MLA Template to your computer using the link above this block

Below are four examples of a MLA Template and the labeled pages so you can see an example of sources cited using the MLA Template.  

If you need to do a general Google search, you can limit your searches to specific websites by using the search limiter: site:

For instance, if you only wanted to search for the term Dirty War on The New York Times website, you could type into Google:
Dirty War site:www.nytimes.com

You can also use site: to limit your results to websites that either end in .gov or .edu

• Dirty war site:.gov  (don't put a space between the site: and .gov)
• Dirty war site:.edu

This can sometimes be helpful to your research because .gov and .edu sites tend to be more authoritative.  For sites that end in .edu, you still have to evaluate the site to make sure it's not a student paper published on a university website, or a blog entry on a university website, but it's a nice starting point