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HI 127: Guide

Here is the guide for HI127: History of the United States to 1877.

Introduction

Here is the library guide for HI 127: History of the United States to 1877. Look below for research steps, useful databases, and relevant journals.

Databases

Print Resources

200's Religion

300's for Social Sciences

970 History of North America

973 History of the United States

Research Steps

Basic Search

  • Use broad search terms on Google or a database to get an idea of what is out there. At this point you're not trying to secure any sources, you're just trying to learn. So, it's okay to get information to less formal sources as long as you can back up the information you find later with scholarly ones.

Advanced Search

  • Now we're only using databases. We have figured out what keywords we want to use in the databases to find what we need. You can engage the Boolean operators to help refine your results.

Filtering Results

  •  Often even with specific key words, you can still get thousands of results. And who wants to scroll through thousands of results? You can use the filtering options (usually on the left side of the web page) to get those numbers down. Some options are filtering by publication year, full-text availability, and by author. 

Choosing Articles

  • Now start choosing which articles you think will best support your argument. Remember: you cannot save EBSCO articles by their link; you have to either download the PDF or make a free EBSCO account and the save the article to a folder. Make sure that the articles you're choosing are ones you have the time to read (or at the very least skim).

Do it all again!

  • The most important part of doing research is knowing that you'll have to do multiple steps multiple times. Maybe the first database you've tried doesn't have what you want, so you need to go to a new one. Maybe you tried a filtering option that ended up giving you too few results. Or you've found some articles that you thought would be useful but turns out they're not, or maybe they're too difficult to read. Never be afraid to toss out an article that's not working for you and find a new one.

Journals