Scholarly Articles and Secondary Sources
Scholarly Articles, otherwise known as secondary sources, interpret the events and texts of the Civil Rights Movement from a distanced, scholarly perspective. Examples include today’s historians reflecting back on the Civil Rights Movement, literary scholars analyzing the texts and culture of the movement, and sociologists considering the relationships between the races and classes during the 1960s.
The following databases are good places to look if you have a particular topic that you would like to research and/or if you need to find secondary sources to complete an assignment.
Topic Specific Databases
Race Relations Abstracts allows you to find articles from over 49,500 scholarly papers dedicated to race relations. To limit your results to peer-reviewed journals, click on “Advanced Search” and check “Scholarly (Peer-Reviewed) Journals” under “Limit Your Results.” The results are abstracts, descriptions of the article rather than the full-text. When you have found an article that looks interesting to you, click the MGetIt button to search for the full-text online. If you have any problems, librarians are available to help!
America: History & Life allows you to search for articles from over 1,700 journals dedicated to American History and Culture. If you click on “CLIO Notes” in the blue menu bar, you can select “The Sixties” and pull up a guide with links to information on the Civil Rights Movement. These pages include a chronology of events, information on key civil rights organizations, an overview of protest tactics and a guide to rulings and legislation. In addition to providing a good overview, the CLIO Notes pages suggest search terms to find articles on each subtopic.
Multidisciplinary Databases
Through ProQuest, the University of Michigan Library has access to over 70 databases across the whole spectrum of scholarly disciplines. Searching through the main ProQuest page allows you to search all of them at once. ProQuest can be a great place to start gathering information, especially if you would like to search for articles about the Civil Rights Movement from a variety of perspectives.
JSTOR allows you to simultaneously search through every volume of over 2000 important arts, humanities, social science and science journals. JSTOR can be a great place to start if you are looking for information on the Civil Rights Movement through the lens of the humanities and social sciences. JSTOR contains full-text articles.
Humanities and Social Sciences Index is another great resource for articles on the Civil Rights Movement from the perspective of the humanities and social sciences. This resource indexes over 1,500 journals covering a broad range of topics across these disciplines.
ArticlesPlus is a feature on the MLibrary website that allows you to search through thousands of journals at the same time. ArticlesPlus can be a great place to start looking for information about any topic. After you have searched, the results can be filtered using the menu on the left side of the page. You can limit your results to scholarly journals, a particular language or subject, etc.