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Professor
Keith Williams
Library Liaison
Gwen Verkuilen
Contents
Introduction
Research Basics
Reference Sources for
Background Information
Search Tips
Find Books
Find Journal Articles
Selected Internet Resources
How to Cite Your Sources
Subject Guide
English
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This is a guide to selected sources of information related to the American Civil War course. It is meant as a starting point for your research. For further research assistance, please take advantage of the reference services available to you in Geisel Library.
The reference librarians have created a group of Web pages named Research Help, and a tutorial called Searchpath; both resources are designed to help teach you the basics of library research and to introduce you to Geisel Library. On the Research Help pages, you will find a guide on Research Basics and a helpful guide about evaluating your web sources. Please take advantage of these resources.
All of the titles listed below are located in Geisel Library's reference collection which is located on the first floor of the library next to the reference desk. Some titles have online equivalents; for those titles appearing in red, click on the title to access the electronic version.
General Reference Resources
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online
Find overviews on a wide variety of topics by searching this online encyclopedia. This is a good resource for obtaining background information on authors and for brainstorming keywords that represent your topic.
Oxford Reference Online
This database enables you to search within many of Oxford's highly-regarded reference works in the fields of literature and history, including the Oxford Companion to American Literature. This is a good place to get basic background information on an author or literary movement.
Literary Terms, Theory, and Themes
Critical Survey of Literary Theory
Ref PN45 .C74 1988
Dictionary of Literary Terms
Ref PN41 .C83
Dictionary of Literary Themes and Motifs (2 volumes)
Ref PN43 .D48
Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory
Ref PN44.5 .H37 1998
Genre & Literary Resources
Literature Resource Center
This database allows you to search for biographical information, bibliographic listings of authors' works, plot summaries, and literary criticism for 90,000 novelists, poets, essayists, journalists and other writers. This resource also provides the full text of articles from more than 100 literary journals and has links to Internet resources.
American Short-Fiction Criticism and Scholarship, 1959–1977: A Checklist
Ref PS374 S5W4
American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies (13 volumes, 1974–98)
Ref PS129 .A55
Articles on American Literature (3 volumes)
Ref PS88 .A77
A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South
Ref PS 261 .C555
Critical Survey of Short Fiction (7 volumes)
Ref PN3373 .C7
Critical Survey of Long Fiction (8 volumes)
Ref PN3451 .C7
Critical Temper: A Survey of Modern Criticism on English and American Literature from the Beginnings to the Twentieth Century (4 volumes)
Ref PR83.C764
Encyclopedia of Southern Literature
Ref PS 261 .S515
Facts on File Companion to the American Short Story
Ref PS374.S5 F33
Literary Criticism Series
Contemporary Literary Criticism (Ref PN94 .C65)
Nineteenth Century Literary Criticism (Ref PN761 .N56)
Twentieth Century Literary Criticism (Ref PN94 .T83)
To find out the volumes in which your author or literary work are covered, use the Gale Literary Index.
Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature
Popular World Fiction 1900–Present (4 volumes)
Ref PN3503.P586
Twentieth-Century Short Story Explication
Ref PN3373 .W33
Civil War History Resources
American Civil War: A Handbook of Literature and Research
E456 .A44 1996
The Civil War Day by Day: An Almanac 1861–1865
Ref E468.3 .L6
The Civil War in Books: An Analytical Bibliography
Ref E468 .E57
Dictionary of American History
Ref E174 .D52 2003
Encyclopedia of the American Civil War: A Political, Social, and Military History
Ref E468 .E53
Encyclopedia of the United States in the Nineteenth Century
Ref E169.1 E626
Historical Dictionary of the Civil War
Ref E468 .J777
Oxford Companion to United States History
Ref E174 .O94 (print version)
Oxford Companion to United States History
Ref E174 .O94 (print version)
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To search the library catalogs and databases listed below you will need to use Boolean operators (ANDs and ORs), truncation, and quotation marks to pull up books and articles on your topic. Here is a brief overview of how to use these search functions:
- AND – use AND to link together search concepts (women AND biography AND civil war)
- OR – use OR to link together synonyms and related terms (southern authors OR southern writers)
- * – use * to retrieve variant endings of a search term (enter: south* to retrieve articles containing the words south and southern)
- Quotation marks – When performing keyword searches use quotation marks to search for your keywords as an exact phrase (Type "slave narrative" to look for the exact phrase of: slave narrative. If you do not enclose your phrase with quotes the catalog will look for the term slave and narrative as separate words throughout the entire catalog record)
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Search the Geisel Library Catalog to locate books, government documents and web materials on your topic. There are 2 main ways to search the library catalog, by subject heading or by keyword. Each method has its own benefits and drawbacks, it is important therefore to know the best time to use each method.
Subject Headings Searches
Subject headings are keywords that are assigned to books to capture the item's key subject matter and themes. Use subject headings to look for books on broad concepts such as criticism on U.S. southern literature or books on the causes of the Civil War.
Possible Subject Headings include:
- United States Civil War Biographies
- United States Civil War Campaigns
- United States Civil War Causes
- United States Civil War Influences
- United States Civil War Social Aspects
- American Literature Southern States Criticism
- Southern States in Literature
- United States Civil War Fiction
- United States Civil War Personal Narratives
Keyword Searches
Keyword Searches work best if you are researching a narrow concept or if you have an author or title that you would like criticism on. Keyword searches will look for your search term(s) in the citation, subject headings, and chapter titles (if available). Many books on literary criticism have chapters on specific authors or works, this search method will pull up those materials.
Possible Keyword searches include:
- Whitman AND criticism
- reconstruction AND literature
- "Civil War" AND poetry
- south* AND literature OR authors
If you searched the Geisel Library Catalog but could not locate a book on your topic try searching WorldCat, a database that allows you to search the collections of libraries throughout the United States. If you find a book that you want you can request it through interlibrary loan (ILL) by clicking on the ILL icon in the book's catalog record.
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Core English Research Databases
Literature Resource Center
Find biographical information on authors, as well as bibliographies, plot summaries, and literary criticism of their works. This resource also provides the full text of articles from more than 100 literary journals.
MLA International Bibliography
Produced by the Modern Language Association of America, this electronic index consists of bibliographic records pertaining to literature, language, linguistics, and folklore. (1963–present) User Guide
Academic Search Premier
Academic Search Premier indexes articles from a wide range of disciplines including the social sciences, humanities, and the hard sciences. You can use Academic Search Premier to locate scholarly and popular research on authors, specific works, or the time periods in which an author was writing or the time period(s) in which a book's story takes place.
Project MUSE
Project MUSE provides full text access to more than 200 journals in the arts and humanities, social sciences, and hard sciences. As an interdisciplinary database you will be able to pull up research on your topic from a variety of different disciplines. Titles of interest to this course include: American Literary History, Civil War History, and Comparative Literature Studies.
JSTOR
Geisel Library subscribes to four JSTOR collections: Arts & Sciences I, II, III, and Biological Sciences. These are large collections of the full text back issues to major journals in the humanities and social sciences, including Nineteenth-Century Literature, American Literature, and American Literary History. Coverage is generally from the beginning of publication to within 5 years of the current issue. User Guide
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Searching the Internet can yield a vast amount of information, but in terms of quality and reliability, your results may be uneven at best. The ease and speed with which individuals can publish information on the web, regardless of accuracy or quality makes it imperative that when doing research on the web you know how to evaluate the information you find. To learn more, see Judging What You Find.
If you locate books or articles on the Internet that you would like to view please check with a reference librarian to see if the items can be located in Geisel Library's print or electronic collection or through Interlibrary Loan.
Electronic Book Collections
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg allows you to read ebook versions of novels for free on its website. Search by author, title, or genre to locate a book of your choosing. To search by genre, click the Bookshelf link on the left side of the screen. Books are limited to those works that are no longer copyright protected.
Google Book Search
Google Books also lets you read digitized books on its website. To search for full text versions of works:
- Click Advanced Book Search
- Enter in your keywords
- Click the "Full View" radio button
By selecting Full View you are limiting your search to only those books that are available in full text in the Google Books collection. Full View books are limited to those works that are no longer copyright protected.
Websites
Civil War at the Smithsonian (Smithsonian Institution/National Portrait Gallery)
This website gains you access to the Smithsonian Institution's collection on the American Civil War. A section of particular value is the "Collections" section through which you can view images of major Civil War figures and events as well as view primary source documents including diaries and letters. There is also a helpful timeline which can be used for quick reference.
Documenting the American South (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Search through UNC Chapel Hill's digital collection of narratives, fiction, images, and oral histories of southern culture. The collection is not limited to Civil War materials making this a useful resource to understand what led up to and what followed the Civil War. Click on the Collection link at the top of the page to browse their collections; collections of particular interest to this course include: First Person Narratives of the American South, Library of Southern Literature, North American Slave Narratives, and The Southern Homefront, 1861–1865.
The Civil War Website (Public Broadcasting Company)
This web companion to the Ken Burns documentary The Civil War has access to clips from the film as well as access to interactive digitized images and documents that contributed to the making of the film. The "Images of the Civil War" and "The War" sections will be especially helpful in gaining insight into the social, political, and military realities of the American Civil War.
The United States Civil War Center (Louisiana State University)
Hosted by Louisiana State University (LSU) and founded by LSU English professor David Madden, The United States Civil War Center website has a wealth of information to get you in touch with the events and literature of the Civil War. Browse The Civil War Index by subject to locate links to other Civil War collections and information on the Internet. Another useful resource is the Civil War Book Review which lets you browse through, and read reviews of, Civil War fiction and non-fiction books.
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See the library's How To Cite Your Sources guide for resources on how to properly cite research materials. Always confirm the style required by your instructor.
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