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American Studies

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For resources from Carleton and St. Olaf

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To search for books by someone, use the Advanced Search and do an AUTHOR search. To search for books about someone, use that person's name (last name first) as a SUBJECT.

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Key Reference Sources

Reference sources are efficient ways to get started with most research questions. They give you an overview of your topic and give you lots and lots of clues about how to move forward with your research.

Look for:

  • Key names and vocabulary associated with your topics
  • Related topics
  • Bibliographies or "further reading
  • Any sense of what is known vs what is controversial.

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Finding Dissertations

While not considered formally published, dissertations can provide a lot of really useful information. They are especially useful as pointing tools, since their literature reviews and bibliographies are usually very rich sources of information.

I also list them separately here because the FindIt button doesn't work well to link you to the full text of dissertations, so if you come across one in a research database it's best to bring the citation information directly to one of these specialized collections of dissertations in order to find the full text.

The 1619 Project (New York Times)

The 1619 Project is an initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It was originally published as an interactive website and an August 18, 2019 special issue of the New York Times Magazine.