Research Guide for History Workshop: From Slavery to Freedom, Prof. Erica Dunbar

A benefit of QuickSearch is that it searches very broadly. The downside of that you can often get a very large search result, sometimes many thousands of items. Use the limits on the left to refine your search.

For your paper, for secondary articles, you can only use peer-reviewed journals. There's a limit for that. You can also limit by Resource Type. Government Documents, for example, can be great primary resources.

Like most resources, QuickSearch arranges your search result in Relevance order, tries to put the most important on top. You might want to change that to Date-Oldest, that is, sort the results chronologically. Or use Creation Date limit to limit to primary resources.

There are certain subject headings that are assigned only to primary sources. You can use them in your search to focus just on primary sources. For example, in the first search box, you could search: "fugitive slave" AND (act OR law OR bill) in any field (remember to capitalize AND, OR). Then in the next search box, search for subject headings denoting primary sources.

Some subject headings relevant to this course, are:
sources OR diaries OR correspondence OR speeches OR personal narratives