Research Guides: HIST 100 Beyond the Plantation (Spring 2024): Finding Articles

Finding Articles

The Libraries have a LOT of e-journal subscriptions and hundreds of databases designed to help you find them. You can use PRIMO, the main catalog, to find interesting secondary sources (like articles!). For specialized US history topics, you may want to try America: History and Life. Both work in a similar manner.

America: History & Life with Full Text This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
This is excellent for targeted history searched, but be aware that there were be far fewer results than in PRIMO.

Provides full text coverage of the history and culture of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. Includes nearly 200 journals and 100 books, selective indexing for over 1,700 journals, and abstracts in English of foreign language articles.

PRIMO (Library catalog)
Very good multi-disciplinary database.
Pro: it searches almost everything we own, so you always get results.
Con: it searches almost everything we own, so you get a lot of unrelated results.

Let's try searches

In both databases, let's try searches using terms like
slave or enslaved
"skilled labor"
Seamstress/Tailor/Weaver
Blacksmith
Shoemaker/cobbler
Domestic Labor

Note how different results are in each database.

Compare Results

America: History & Life with Full Text This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Provides full text coverage of the history and culture of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. Includes nearly 200 journals and 100 books, selective indexing for over 1,700 journals, and abstracts in English of foreign language articles.
Google Scholar This link opens in a new window
Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines.

Sample search: Blacksmith* AND (enslaved OR slaves OR enslavement)