Women's & Gender Studies 121:
Reading Elvis Presley and 1950s America

Fall 2009 · Professor Elena Creef

Contents:

Find background information
Find books
Find scholarly journal articles
Key websites
Evaluating what you find

• St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture
• Oxford Music Online - The most comprehensive and authoritative encyclopedia on music overall, covering classical music, jazz, world music, and popular music.
• Sage eReference - A collection of 80+ encyclopedias and handbooks in the Sciences, Social Sciences, and Humanities. Includes American Masculinities: A Historic Encyclopedia and Encyclopedia of Gender and Society
• CREDO Reference - You can search a collection of over 400 reference works, covering multiple disciplines, in one place.
• Encyclopedia of American Studies - Clapp Reference E169.1 E625
• Encyclopedia of American Social History - Clapp Reference HN57 .E58 1993
• American Decades - Clapp Reference E169.12 .A419 1994

Use the Wellesley library catalog to find books, videos, and journals (not individual articles).

a few tips:

• use a keyword search for simple concepts
  
  - find a book that looks useful, click on the title, then click on the Full Record tab to see the subject terms
  - click on each subject term to find "more like this"
  - for example: a keyword search for rock gender leads to these subject terms (and more books on your topic):
  
  
• Gender identity in music
• Masculinity in music
• Rock music -- social aspects
• Sex in music
  
• for a more complex search, use Advanced Search and combine multiple concepts using AND for best results
• use synonyms to find all the ways your topic is expressed  (language or communication or speech)
• use truncation to save time (assimilat* for assimilation, assimilating)
• use parentheses to enclose each concept "string"

Some generally useful subject headings for this course might be:

• Presley Elvis 1935 1977
• Presley Elvis 1935 1977 Criticism And Interpretation
• Presley, Elvis, 1935-1977 -- Influence
• Presley Elvis 1935 1977 Public Opinion
• Music and race

• You can copy & paste these subject headings into other online catalogs -- like NExpress, and WorldCat -- and do subject searches to find books we don't own.

• if our copy of a book is checked out, click on to the right of the title to request a book quickly (2-4 days)
• Search WorldCat to find material we don’t own, click on and request through ILL (interlibrary loan)
• In a hurry? Get a BLC card and borrow the book directly from a nearby library. You can search BLC libraries' catalogs here.

tips:

• to find the full text of an article, click on the title for the full record, then look for the Find It! @ Wellesley button to link to the full text (online if we have it, or in print, or to the Interlibrary loan request if we don't own the journal)
  
  
• do your searching early and place interlibrary loan requests NOW for books and articles we don't have -- then, when you're ready to start reading and writing, you'll have a great selection of materials. If you wait, your choices will be very limited.

the most useful databases

• Multidisciplinary databases
• JSTOR - This is a collection of full-text articles in the fields of humanities, social science and natural science. Does not include the most recent five years.
• Project Muse - Academic journals in the humanities & social sciences, from the past five years - see JSTOR for prior years
• Academic Search Complete - The world's largest scholarly, multi-disciplinary full text database.

• History
• America History and Life - U.S. & Canadian history articles, prehistory to present, written from 1964 to present.

• Music
• RILM Abstracts of Music Literature - Citations and summaries, 1967 to date
• RoJaRo - Citations for articles on rock music, 1992 to date

• Women's and Gender Studies
• Women's Studies International - Indexes journal articles and books on women's studies, feminism, and gender studies, 1972 to present
       
  
• Google Scholar
        - excellent tool for interdisciplinary topics that "fall through the cracks" of databases - click on "Find It @ Wellesley" to link directly to our databases if we have the full text, or to request through Interlibrary Loan if we don't

 key scholarly e-journals

• Full list of music journals Wellesley subscribes to

find performance, music and film reviews

• Reader's Guide Retrospective - Articles in US & Canadian popular magazines, 1890 to 1982. You may need to search for some of these in print or on microfilm once you have citations. NOTE: For complete coverage, search both RG Retrospective and Reader's Guide Full Text
• Periodicals Index Online - Index to articles from periodicals, 1665-1995.
• New York Times Historical - 1851-2003
• MLA Bibliography - from 1963
• News research guide - Wellesley College library
• Cinema and Media Studies research guide - Wellesley College library

• When Nixon Met Elvis - from the National Archives
• National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution - Search for portraits of Elvis; this blog entry from the NPG is also helpful
• Rolling Stone's coverage of Elvis
• Literature and Culture of the American 1950s - This site from Professor Filreis at UPenn has various links to information on the cold war, McCarthyism, the Stalin era and 1950's culture. There are also links to reprints of texts published in the 1950's.
  

Criteria to keep in mind when choosing and using soures:

• Accuracy - Does the author cite her/his sources and are they legitimate?
• Authority - Who wrote the source? Are they credible?
• Objectivity - Does the author have a bias, political or commercial or persuasive?
• Currency - Is this information new or based on outdated sources? Can you tell how current it is?

Wellesley College Library • WCIS • Alana Kumbier • last modified: October 20, 2009