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 Subjects and follow the links to find 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 resource type, language, or additional subjects.

Try out these keywords and subject headings:

• Keyword: American South
  • Associated subject: Southern States
  • Associated subject: Southern States -- History
  • Associated subject: Southern States -- Race relations

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

• Keyword: Southern authors
  • Associated subject: Authors, American -- Southern States

• Keyword: Southern women
  • Associated subject: Women -- Southern States

Bibliographies lists books, articles, and other sources, so they can save you time.  To identify 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 quotation marks to search for the words that are 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 the article link if it does not pop up automatically.

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

4) If none are available, click the request via interlibrary loan link to get a copy from another library.