Research

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speaks in Eutaw, Alabama, in June 1965. (AP Photo)

You can access books from Dension's library and other libraries in Ohio.

• The CONSORT Library Catalog gives you access to books at Denison, Kenyon, Ohio Wesleyan and the College of Wooster.
• OhioLINK allows you to find and request books in other university libraries in Ohio. They arrive in 3-6 days.
• WorldCat is a catalog of materials held worldwide. Materials in WorldCat that are not available through CONSORT and OhioLINK can be requested through Interlibrary Loan.

Use a 'keyword' search to find materials inside a book or a 'subject' search to look for books by subject.

Malcom X chats with unidentified people outside the Justice Department on 9th Street in Washington D.C. on June 14, 1963. (AP Photo/Bob Schutz)

Online sources can be databases of articles, indexes, reference works, primary documents, and more! Use this list as starting points to find information on your topic, but you can also explore the list of Online Resources or the Black Studies or the U.S. History, or English subject pages linked from the Doane Library Home Page.

Reference Sources

• Oxford Reference Online is a multi-work reference database with excellent encyclopedia-like articles on many topics. Use their History Collection to narrow your search.
  
• American History: e-reference books offers a variety of online reference books. African American Frontiers : Slave Narratives and Oral Histories and African American Writers might be especially useful.
  

Journal Articles

• America: History and Life lists articles on the history and culture of the United States and Canada and gives abstracts and citations for articles appearing in over 2,000 journals.
• Historical Abstracts indexes key historical journals from virtually every major country and is a good place to find articles on any historical subject.
• MLA International Bibliography is an index to books and articles published on modern languages, literatures, folklore, and linguistics.
• Humanities International Complete provides indexing, abstracting, and full text of journals, books and other important reference sources in the humanities.
• Academic Search Complete is a good general, multi-disciplinary database that includes full-text of over 5,300 periodicals and indexing for 10,900 publications.

Primary Documents

• Primary Sources in African American History from LexisNexis offers documents such as U.S. Supreme Court decisions, colonial legislation on race and slavery, autobiographies, speeches, and scholarly articles.
• Black Thought and Culture contains 1297 sources with 1100 authors, covering the non-fiction published works of leading African Americans. Many (although not all) of the sources here are primary sources, written by people who lived through or witnessed the events. Try browsing by author, year, or subject.
  
• African American History from the Library of Congress' American Memory project includes papers from important historical figures, slave narratives, legal documents, and more. Browse using LC subject headings or do a keyword search.
  

Resources

• Five Criteria for Evaluating Webpages from Cornell University makes getting the basics right easy and simple.
  
• The MLA Citation Guide from OSU gives you the basics.
  

Mourners pass Emmett Till's casket in Chicago Sept. 3, 1955. (AP Photo/Chicago Tribune)

Use Reference materials for basic and background information and for finding information on other useful sources on your topic (such as through a bibliography).

To find reference sources, choose 'advanced search' in CONSORT and then select 'DEN Reference' from the 'location' drop-down menu before doing a keyword or subject search.  You can also browse the E185 range in the reference section.

Some good reference sources are:

• Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History: The Black Experience in the Americas, 2nd edition / E185 .E54 2006 (6 vols.)
  
• Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass / E185 .E545 2006 (3 vols.)
• The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Civil Rights:  From Emancipation to the Twenty-First Century / E 185.61 .E54 2003 (2 vols.)