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HIST665C Culture Wars in American Schools

Professor Tracy Steffes

Getting Started

The Library offers a number of starting points for resources, depending on what you are looking for and where you are in your research process:

BruKnow is the general search box on the library homepage casts a wide net and is a good place to start research. Searches across numerous tools and results displayed by format, i.e., Books/eBooks, Journal Articles, Video, Theses/Dissertations. The results can be large.

Database Search A-Z: use an interdisciplinary database such as Academic Search Premier or JSTOR to search by keyword for literature on your topic.

Google ScholarAlso casts a wide net and produces high numbers of results. Direct links to full text resources at Brown, gray literature, book citations. Can be difficult to narrow the search effectively.

Subject Searching

Books can be searched by subject. These subjects are most often assigned by the Library of Congress and that is how books are organized in libraries. Sometimes the subjects are obvious, other times they are not. Generally the start general and become more specific left to right.

Strategy: if you have a book that you know is on topic for what you are looking for, look it up in the catalog and find out what subjects it has been assigned, and find more books like it.

For example, the following book has the subject heading School integration -- Delaware -- New Castle County.

Green, Robert Lee., and Frances S Thomas. Metropolitan Desegregation. New York: Plenum Press, 1985.

This subject heading gives you a pretty good idea of what the book is about. When you click on the subject heading, you will get other books with that subject.

Examples of Subject Headings

Dartt, Rebecca H. Women Activists In the Fight for Georgia School Desegregation, 1958-1961. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2008. [link]

School integration -- Georgia -- History -- 20th century

Public schools -- Georgia -- History -- 20th century

African Americans -- Education -- Georgia -- History -- 20th century Women -- Political activity -- Georgia -- History -- 20th century

Freeman, Susan Kathleen. Sex Goes to School: Girls and Sex Education before the 1960s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. [link]

Sex instruction -- United States -- History -- 20th century.

Sex instruction for girls -- United States -- History -- 20th century.

Levine, Susan, School Lunch Politics: The Surprising History of America's Favorite Welfare Program. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. [link]

National school lunch program.

School children -- Food -- United States.

Children -- Nutrition -- United States.

Prucha, Francis Paul. The Churches and the Indian Schools, 1888-1912. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979. [link]

Indians of North America -- Education

Indians of North America -- Missions Church schools -- United States

Church and state -- United States