HIST 228-01: The Law, Economy, and Family in the Anglo-American Tradition
Research & Instruction Librarian
Strategic Searching
Before you start searching for resources, pause to think about what exactly you are searching for:
- Write down key words, phrases, names, and dates that might relate to you topic.
- Brainstorm synonyms or words with related meanings.
- Think about historical language as well as modern. How do you find historical terminology? Try searching the Oxford Historical Thesaurus, which is embedded in the Oxford English Dictionary tool.
Pro tip: as you find primary and secondary sources, see what language they use, and add new terms to your list to help you refine additional searches!
Getting started with research
Projects in this course often take a variety of approaches. You may want to start by looking for book-length treatments using Macalester's library catalog or shorter subject encyclopedia entries for topic overviews and bibliographies of important works as a way to get started.
Pro Tip: Reading the introduction and the conclusion of a book, along with using the table of contents and the index can go a long way toward helping you find the sections of most interest. You don't have to read every word! (Unless you want to.)
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Credo ReferenceAccess to general and subject-specific reference books (encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri and books of quotations and proverbs). Provides a graphics-based Concept Mapping option for topic exploration. Includes works such as: The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of the American Enlightenment; Encyclopedia of North American Indians; Encyclopedia of Women and American Politics; Handy Answer: Native American Almanac: More Than 50,000 Years of the Cultures and Histories of Indigenous Peoples; Encyclopedia of the United States in the Nineteenth Century; Enslaved Women In America: An Encyclopedia; and The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Business, Labor, and Economic History.
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Oxford Reference OnlineResource of reference materials such as dictionary, language reference, and subject reference works published by Oxford University Press. Provides database-wide searching, subject searching across sources, and individual title searching. Titles indexed include Oxford Encyclopedia of American Business, Labor, and Economic History; The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History; and The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Political and Legal History.
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eBooks (Gale)Search across a diversity of reference materials including the following titles: International Encyclopedia of Marriage and Family ; Encyclopedia of African American History; and Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender
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HeinOnline
Provides coverage of more than 2,600 law-related periodicals. Contains the entire Congressional Record, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, complete coverage of the U.S. Reports back to 1754, and entire databases dedicated to treaties, constitutions, case law, world trials, classic treatises, international trade, foreign relations, U.S. Presidents, and much more.
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Nexis Uni
Credible source for news, legal, and business sources that is updated daily. Includes access to print and online journals, television and radio broadcasts, newswires and blogs, as well as local, regional, national, and international newspapers, legal sources for federal and state cases and statutes, business information on U.S. and international companies and executives. For Business Nexis Uni covers company and industry news, detailed company financial data, and includes major accounting journals. In Law, the database provides texts of federal and state court decisions, federal and state agency regulations, and law journal articles.
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America: History and Life
Index of scholarly journals, books, and dissertations covering the history and culture of the United States and Canada from before European contact to the present.
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Historical Abstracts
Index covering world history (excluding the United States and Canada). It includes hundreds of history journals and books, plus useful features such as the ability to search by time period.
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Family & Society Studies Worldwide
Indexes journals, books, conference papers, government documents and research reports in the area of family studies.
Moving from individual sources to a literature review, these two databases can be particularly helpful.
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Google Scholar
Search across a wide range of scholarly literature from around the world. This custom link for Google Scholar includes the Macalester Library code and will display a "MACLINKS FULL TEXT" link next to resources available from Macalester Library. You will also see MACLINKS if you are logged in to the on-campus network. If you are off campus and don't use the above custom link, you can configure Google Scholar to display MACLINKS by customizing your library links settings.
Use the "Cited by" link under each reference to see works that use the original work in some way; this is a great way to see how scholarship influences subsequent research.
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Web of ScienceIndexes information covering disciplines in the sciences, arts and humanities, and social sciences. Includes six citation databases: the Science Citation Index, the Social Sciences Citation Index, the Arts & Humanities Citation Index, the Book Citation Index, Current Chemical Reactions, and Index Chemicus.
This database's superpower is citation tracing, both forward and backward. Be aware that the citation indexing for books can be spotty; talk to a librarian when you see something that you're not sure about.
Sometimes, Google Scholar will link you to Web of Science; take advantage of those opportunities to trace citations backwards in citation time. The number of citing sources in Web of Science will generally be lower than what you might see in Google Scholar because of differences in how each database defines "scholarly."