ETHN 178: Race and World War II (Hazard): History Research Basics

There are a number of different databases that could prove useful to you in this class. Exactly which ones will depend on the exact focus of your research. That said, those listed below are likely to be of use to most of you!

The first two listed are primarily useful for the SECONDARY journal literature of history. It is possible, however, that within some of these articles, for example, primary sources could be reproduced. And, both of these databases could help you discover books of primary sources.

The databases below are all ways to find magazine and newspaper articles that could constitute PRIMARY sources, depending on your specific topic, because they will lead you to articles published before, during, and right after WWII.

The databases listed below are quite different. They offer access to mostly PRIMARY sources in their focused subject areas.

The most difficult part of using library databases is figuring out the language to use. For example, look at this description of a book in the library catalog, OSCAR: Fighting for America : Black soldiers-- the unsung heroes of World War II

That book is about African-American soldiers in World War II. If you wanted to see if we had more books about that same topic, you might be tempted to do this Simple Search:

black soldiers world war ii

Try that now and see what you get. Notice that there are some interesting, relevant books, but, sadly, there are a whole lot more, and maybe better, books if you take a few minutes to look more closely at the OSCAR description of that book. In other words, there are different words to use to represent those THREE main ideas, and you can find some of them by looking at the SUBJECTS:

For the IDEA of black
you see African American

For the IDEA of soldiers
you see soldiers & also Armed Forces

For the IDEA of World War II
you see World War, 1939-1945

So, if you want to combine the idea of WWII with another idea in an OSCAR search, you would want to put this in the top box of an Advanced Search search:  "world war 1939-1945"

Then, if I wanted to combine the idea of WWII with another idea, say the participation of Native Americans, I would have to think of different ways of expressing the idea of Native Americans in the 2nd box, enclosed in parentheses, separated by ORs, like this:

The point I am trying to make here is that you need to really look closely at the language used in whatever database you are using and be prepared to do multiple searches trying different language. Otherwise, you could easily miss out on the most important material! 

When you find a good secondary source, book or journal article, always mine it for additional primary and secondary sources by reading the footnotes and references thoughtfully. A couple of tips and examples:

Exhibit One below here is an article in a journal. To find it, you would look the journal title up in the library's list of Journals & Magazines from the library's homepage. That list will tell you where/how you could locate the Winter 1986 issue and look up that specific article.

Exhibit Two below is referring to a chapter, "Patriots and Pawns", in a book, The State of Native America. To get this, you need to look the book up in OSCAR.