Things you can add to your searches to help databases understand you better:
A database brings together lots of information and makes it searchable. In libraries, a database can contain a collection of e-books or articles on general or specific topics. Searching in a database is similar to Googling something, but instead of searching the entire internet, you are searching that database's collection of articles.
This page focuses on using databases to find scholarly articles. In the academic world, an "article" is a long formal essay published in a journal. A journal is like a scholarly magazine on a specific topic. Like there are fashion, home decor, or cooking magazines, there are journals in history, chemistry, psychology, and other topics. Journals were traditionally printed physically, but nowadays they are mainly online and can be found in databases. A database may have access to hundreds of journals with thousands of articles each. You can search all of a database's articles at once by keyword, title, author, journal title, etc.
Learn more about how to search in databases below.
Poems from 1750-1900 including Lucy Terry Prince, Phillis Wheatley, Jupiter Hammon, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and more.
Articles, critical essays, work and topic overviews, full-text works, and biographies covering authors, their works, and literary movements.
1,600 documents, including primary sources, covering the history of Black Freedom.
The ultimate cross-disciplinary research tool, ProQuest Central brings together 30 of our most highly used databases to create the largest single academic research resource available today.
62 of the most important African-American poets of the last century: Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Imamu Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde and Rita Dove.