America: History & Life is a database focusing on the history and culture of North American places covering prehistory to the present. The database includes citations, from the early 20th century to the present, to articles in history journals and other allied social sciences disciplines as they relate to the study of history. It indexes both peer-reviewed articles and articles from popular history journals.
It is often difficult to tell from the database record if an article is peer-reviewed, but look for two things:
When you find an article you want, check to see if the database has a link to the full text. If not, click on the link or button (
) to see if the article is available somewhere else in full text.
JSTOR contains full text of both journal articles and books. See these tips for making the most effective use of JSTOR to discover journal articles and books or book chapters on your topic:
1. Try using the FIELDS to limit your search terms. If you do not use the fields to limit your search, JSTOR will look for your search terms anywhere in the full text of the article. (Sometimes this is helpful, but most of the time, it results in too many irrelevant results.)
Tip: Think of synonyms and use the OR search operator to combine terms. Example: disease OR plague OR epidemic
Tip: Use the * as a truncation symbol to retrieve search terms with variant endings, for example: disease*
2. If you want to limit results to just articles or just books, after you see the results list, check one of the boxes to show a specific type of content:
3. After you see the results list, use the subject limit (on the left) to find content in a specific discipline: 
