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A Guide to American Culture Studies

This page brings together various information resources on the subject of American Culture Studies

Reference Works - A Place to Begin

Reference works - such as encyclopedia, handbooks, bibliographies, or companions - are often a good place to start your research. Not only will entries give you a broad overview of a subject, they may, depending the depth of the entry, provide some outlines of the academic discussion on the topic and frequently provide a bibliography, which can lead you to more sources. While Wikipedia is fairly accurate and contains citations as well, the encyclopedia listed below and others you can find through the WUSTL Libraries' catalog are written by academic professionals and point to the most important works in the field. 

"Bibliography" is also a Library of Congress subject subheading that occurs at the end of a subject string (e.g., "Catholic Church -- United States -- History -- Bibliography").

Academic Journal Databases

Subject-specific databases

EBSCO

ProQuest

Multi-disciplinary Databases

Primary Sources

Primary Source Collections in Print

Library catalogers use the subheading "Sources" at the end of a string of subheadings to indicate anthologies of primary sources. However, cataloging is not a perfect science, so not every collection of primary sources has this subheading. For example, a search for the keyword phrase "documentary sourcebook" in the WU Libraries' catalog produces seven titles, only three of which have "sources" as a subheading. In other words, performing a subject search will not produce a complete list of all primary source collections. Sometimes the source one wants to find is not in an anthology but cited in a bibliography of another work. You might want to try an advanced search with a combination of subject headings and keywords like “sources,” "sourcebook," "primary sources," "primary documents," etc.  Other subheadings which indicate bound, primary source collections include personal narrativescorrespondencemanuscriptsmapsliterary collectionsbiography, et. al. 

Proprietary Primary Source Digital Collections

Guide to all U.S. History Primary Source Databases

Newspapers & Magazines

Historical

Contemporary

Statistics

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