Researching and finding "scholarly" resources can be a pain.
But it doesn't have to be, and you don't...necessarily need to have used the pages you see for research anyway.
The limited search engines of the school or perhaps their blocking of Wikipedia has been a real hampering for your ability to find the first starting resources of a researched essay or report.
Fear not, for you see there is a secret weapon for you:
The Digitized Collection of the Library of Congress.
Newspapers, Almanacs, Books, and Film.
Anything you want, especially anything released to the public eye is in the Library of Congress; the best part? You don't have to be american to use it.
This huge extra resource is online!
Here's a quick search I did through their entire collection of newspapers for "Jack the Ripper" Look at how it even highlights where my keywords are in the text and offers them in all of those formats!
You can find pretty much anything digitized by the library of congress as a PDF;
(you need an account to see links)
Literally put in a search term, and select a type of media and you will likely find something SUPER HELPFUL.
They've even got Collections of items all pertaining to specific subjects and many are quite common research topics at all levels of schooling.
Seriously, if you aren't really in to researching via library time and scouring the internet the Library of Congress is an amazing starting point.
Especially their ABSOLUTELY MASSIVE Newspaper archives, if you want on the ground, real current times stuff newspapers are amazing for it.
So impress your teachers today!