HIST 150: WWII Britain: The People's War (Spring 2025)

JSTOR is brilliant because it is a keyword-searchable collection of major databases.
The problem with JSTOR is that it lacks metadata or meaningful indexing, so it's limited to keyword searches only.
EXAMPLE
If I'm interested in women's education in Virginia during the 19th century, I'd use the search
women AND virginia AND (Education OR schools) AND 19th
As you see, JSTOR gives me tons of results because it's keyword searching the entire article/record for those terms.

Conversely, a specialized databases like America: History & Life narrows the results just to history journals. It also uses metadata fields to provide more focused searches. Compare to the results for the exact same search in A:H&L

The only time you may want to use JSTOR is if you're looking for something very specific, like the name of an under-studied individual or idea -- someone who may be mentioned in an article but isn't well-studied enough to be the topic of an article (ex. Professor Harvey B. Lane of Wesleyan University).

• Break you topic into key terms. Example: I turned history of education for women in 19th century virginia into: women AND virginia AND (Education OR schools) AND 19th  you may need to play around a bit to find the right terms.
• Using the historical period filter instead of typing out the century. If I'm interested in higher education in Virginia  between 1800-1850, I can use the the Historical period filter without using wonky terms like "early half of the 19th century" or whatever. 
  
  
• **Be sure to fix the advanced settings** before a search. Okay here's the deal: EBSCO, in it's wisdom, has decided researchers cannot be trusted to figure out databases, and automatically defaults to the broadest search possible. So when I search women AND virginia AND (Education OR schools) AND 19th the database actually searches (women's education Virginia 19th century) OR (female education Virginia history) OR (19th century women's schooling Virginia) OR (education opportunities for women Virginia 1800s) OR (historical analysis women's education Virginia) OR (history of women's education in 19th century Virginia) OR (educational opportunities for women in Virginia during the 1800s) OR (impact of 19th century reforms on female education in Virginia) OR (role of women in Virginia's educational institutions in the 19th century) OR (challenges faced by women seeking education in 19th century Virginia) OR (womens education in virginia during the 19th century) which is why the database gives me over 9,000 results, most of which are NOT what I want.
  • TO FIX THIS, go into Advanced setting, Search options, and DESELECT "Expanders." Doing so fixes the system and returns the results I actually want.

Please note that I'm working with Library IT to fix this issue, hopefully we'll have a solution soon. Thanks!