Help

• Browse
• Search Tips
• Advanced Search
• Viewing Items
  • Search Results
  • Break Results Down
• Search History
• Why login?
• Additional Resources

Browse

A navigation area to the right hand side on the home page provides three ways to browse American Social History Online: Collections, Places, and Times. Each heading is independently expandable/collapsible by clicking the arrow to the left. Expanding a heading reveals a tree view of the relevant list. Clicking the heading itself displays the browse list in the main part of the window. When you click Browse in the main navigation bar, Collections is active by default.

• Collections: a list of all the collections accesible from American Social History Online.
• Times: Resources accessible in American Social History Online, grouped by decades, with individual years available in the tree view under decades.
• Places: Resources accessible in American Social History Online, grouped by state, with headings available in the tree view under state.

Search Tips

To do a simple search, type one or more words into the search box located in the upper right corner of every page, then click the "go" button.

• By default, searching on multiple keywords retrieves items in which ALL of the keywords occur.Entering a multiple keyword search will work like Boolean AND. Results will be returned only when ALL of the keywords appear. For example: war contraband will retrieve items with both war and contraband
• Use quotes [" "] to search for an exact phrase. For example: "chinese immigrants", "Charles Cushman".
  
• An asterisk [*] can be used as a wildcard to replace one or many characters (truncation). For example: cemeta* will retrieve cemetary, cemetaries.
• Searches are not case-sensitive; a search for "Abraham Lincoln" or "abraham lincoln" will return the same results.

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Advanced Search

Advanced search supports Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT). For example, churches AND immigrants. Immigrants and NOT Irish

Date Range Search

You may limit your search by date range. Enter a beginning and an end date. Leaving the end date blank means an open ended search.

Collection

You may limit your search to specific collections.

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Viewing Items

Search Results

Clicking on the title of any individual result will take you out of the American Social History Online site to the site of the collection (and the individual result).

Clicking on the full record link will take you to an individual record with additional information about the item, such as physical description and classification.

Clicking on the Subject url in the full record display will initiate a search under that subject.

List View/Image View - Clicking 'List View' displays all search results in a single column. Clicking 'Image View' displays search results in a grid layout.

Results per page: You can choose how many items to display on the page if you are logged in.

Sort by: The default sort order is by relevance. You may also sort by date ascending, date descending, and title.

Use the boxes to the left of Years: to enter the beginning and end date of the range of years you would like to search. Leaving the second box blank leaves the search open ended.

Break Results Down

After an initial keyword search, results can be narrowed by using the "Break results down" feature, including subject (broader heading), topic (more specific heading), place, name, city, state, genre, decade, year, collection, language, and media type.

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Why login to American Social History Online?

Logging in using OpenID allows you to keep a profile of your searches, including records viewed and records selected.

Additional Resources

On American Social History Online results pages, you will find at the bottom of the page a list of possible other sites with results corresponding to your keyword search. Some of these, such as Amazon Books and Google Books, can be accessed without a license. Sites such as Ebsco, Elsevier and Web of Science can be accessed if your institution subscribes to these publishers. In all cases, when you click on one of these links, you leave the American Social History Online site.

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