Finding Books
There are several ways to locate books which explore this important time period in American History. This guide will walk you through a few strategies in locating books on this topic through King Library's OneSearch catalog.
Using a Boolean search to Locate Books
You can use a "Boolean" search in the OneSearch bar on King Library's online catalog. This technique enables you to widen or narrow your search using a handful of search operators in between search terms:
- "AND" only retrieves items which contain both or all of your search terms (i.e. "civil rights" AND "black power" only retrieves books that have both "civil rights" and the "black power" movements in as keywords.) This operator narrows your search.
- "OR" retrieves items which contains one or the other of your search terms. (i.e. a search of "civil rights" OR "Black Power" would return results that had just, "civil rights" as keywords, PLUS those that had just "black power" as keywords, PLUS materials that contain both phrases as subjects. This would broaden your search.
- "NOT" is used to exclude certain terms from your search. For example in OneSearch: "King NOT Library NOT Monarch*" would exclude any materials which reference "King Library" as a subject and would exclude materials which mention kings as male monarchical rulers. (This search string actually returns results concerning Elvis Presley; titles of works or art and music; and references to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr!) This technique can be used to focus your search when keywords have more than one use or meaning.
- The asterisk at the end of "monarch" in the last example, is an example of truncation. In the above example, the asterisk prompts the search engine to also exclude "monarchs," "monarchy," and "monarchies" as well as "monarch" in the search results.
Using Library of Congress Subject headings to locate books
If you have a specific topic in mind, and have located at least one book covering this topic, you can use the Library of Congress Subject Headings included in the details of each record to locate more books on that topic.
Useful Books and Encyclopedias for this Course
Here are a few books and tertiary sourced which can help provide some important background for this period in history.
Recommended Books:
- Branch, T. (1988). Parting the waters: America in the King years, 1954-63. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.
Parting the Waters (along with the other books in this series: Pillar of Fire and At Canaan's Edge) covers the years that make up the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Parting the Waters won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1989.
- Foner, E., & Sitkoff, H. (1993). The struggle for black equality, 1954-1992 (Rev. ed., American century series). New York, NY: Hill and Wang.
The Struggle for Freedom follows the civil rights movement from the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954 to the intense social events and upheavals of the 1960s. This books also follows the effects and more recent incarnations of Jim Crow policies through the 1980s into1990s.
- Hampton, H., Fayer, S., & Flynn, S. (1990). Voices of freedom: An oral history of the civil rights movement from the 1950s through the 1980s. New York, NY: Bantam Books.
This resource provides primary source accounts of the civil rights movement, covering the groundswell that marked the start of the movement on through the civil rights events of the 1970s and 1980s. This companion book to the critically acclaimed Eyes on the Prize television series, delivers valuable insight into the people and events that made the civil rights movement a transformative moment in United States history.
Recommended Encyclopedias:
- Appiah, H., Gates, A., & Appiah, Anthony. (2005). Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience (2nd ed.). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
- Brown, N., & Stentiford, B. (2008). The Jim Crow Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
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