HIST 212: The History of the African American Family (Spring 2025)

The Libraries have a large collection of books about the History of African American families,  as well as African Americans Civil Rights and African American history generally. Generally you will need to narrow your search by adding an addition keyword or subject term to make the results more navigable.

• Be sure to limit to books and ebooks
• Use subject headings as often as possible.
• Pay attention to publication date -- there are a lot of outdated books in there.
• Remember that books tend to be broader in scope than articles.
• Pay attention to chapters

Very frequently you will have a topic that is too broad to be the subject of an article, but not the topic of a full book. 
When you search in the catalog, skim the top results even if the title doesn't seem related to your search.

Example, my search for "African American families" AND Religion returns results that don't look helpful until I look at the tables of content

• African American families
• Civil Rights
• African Americans -- History
• African Americans -- Civil rights

When conducting keyword searches, pay attention to subjects

If you're having difficulty finding books, you can use the subject headings above to look in WorldCat.

Example

Books we don't own can be ordered via ILL