Spark 001 - Life & Death in the Old West (Torres-Rouff)

As you read your newspaper, what place, people, activities, themes, and issues are surfaced?  Consider using these terms in searching for books or articles.

Place (city/state/region): San Francisco, Idaho, “mining camp”, “Boise Basin”, rural, frontier, "American West", "Central Valley"

People: common folk, Chinese, Mormons, migrants, Native Americans, French Argonauts, working class, farmworkers, laborers

Occupation: butcher, merchant, blacksmith, miner, laundress

Activity: Gold Rush, farming, strike, concerts/entertainment, travel, entrepreneurship, martial law

Organization: unions, law enforcement

Themes or Issues: property distribution/ownership, economy, jobs, unskilled labor, transient, mobility, wages, martial law, discrimination, class, stratification

" "

To search for specific phrases, enclose them in quotation marks. The database will search for those words together in that order.

Examples:

“Boise basin”

"property ownership"

"19th century"

AND, OR

Join together search terms in a logical manner.

AND - narrows searches, used to join dissimilar terms
 

Sample Searches Using AND:

Search #1
farming AND drought

Search #2

violence

AND

strike

OR

Join together search terms in a logical manner.
OR - broadens searches, used to join similar terms

Sample Searches Using OR/AND:

Search #1
wages OR salary

Search #2
government

AND

policies OR regulation OR legislation

AND

"San Francisco"

Search #3

violence OR fight

AND

strike OR walkout

TRUNCATION

Truncate a word in order to search for different forms of the same word. Many database use the asterisk * as the truncation symbol.

Examples:

Truncate the word econom* and you will search for economy, economic, economics, economical etc.

Add the truncation symbol to the word politic* to search for politics, political, politician,  etc.