Researching the American South: Articles and Books

Start with a simple keyword search in the library catalog to identify one or more relevant books. Once you have located a relevant item, you can look at the item's Library of Congress Subject Headings within the item's full record tab and follow the subject heading links in the catalog to find other, similar or related books.
You can also refine your results by using the facets on the left side of the screen to narrow down by format, language, or additional subject headings.

Try out these keywords and subject headings:

• Keyword: American South
  • Associated subject heading: Southern states
  • Associated subject heading: Southern states -- history
  • Associated subject heading: Southern states -- race relations

• Keyword: North Carolina
  • Associated subject heading: North Carolina -- History
  • Associated subject heading: North Carolina -- Archival resources
  • These subject headings will work for any state, such as South Carolina or Georgia

• Keyword: Southern Authors
  • Associated subject heading: Authors, American -- Southern states

• Keyword: Southern women
  • Associated subject heading: Women -- Southern states

Bibliographies lists books, articles, and other sources, so they can save a researcher time.  To identify bibliographies, and even better, bibliographies of bibliographies, use broad-ranging, general guides to primary and secondary sources, such as the following:

You can also find bibliographies in the catalog, for example:   North Carolina labor bibliography 

When searching in databases, try these handy tips for better results:

• Use wildcard characters.  If searching for economic conditions, type the word econ* with an asterick. That will return economies, economic, economist and any word that starts with econ.
• Use quotes.  When searching for two words, quotes will search for the words when they're next to each other.  Thomas Jefferson will return articles with Thomas Payne and Jefferson Starship.  But when "Thomas Jefferson" is searched, only those articles with his name will be returned.

If an article search comes back that we don't have an item:

1) Click the button

2) If available, click an article link, if not, click the journal link

3) If not available online, then Search the UNC Libraries' catalog by Title/ISSN to see if we have the journal in print.

4) If none are available, click the request via interlibrary loan link