HIST 3384 - Palestine & the Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict

Resources for Dr. Takriti's course.

Search Tips

Not sure how to construct the right kind of search for finding specific eras, events, or people? Try to focus your search on three keyword concepts: Event, Text, and Topic. See examples below.

KEYWORD CONCEPTS	TIPS	EXAMPLES
Event	Start with the general event, and then narrow it down to specifics. Look for key people involved	Partition Intifada 6 Day War Yasser Arafat Oil Embargo
Text	Primary sources Secondary sources	Letters, treaties, diaries (primary source databases) Biographies, scholarly articles, historiography (Historical Abstracts, JSTOR)
Topic	Use a topic related to your central argument, such as: Event(s) Country Religion Politics Economy or Trade Exploration	Muslims Zionism Settlements Terrorism OPEC

Then, think about how you can combine your keywords using AND or OR.

So how does this translate? Let's say you were writing a paper on Yasser Arafat. Some of the searches you could try include:

Yasser Arafat AND PLO OR Palestine Liberation Organization
Yasser Arafat AND Golda Meir (lower case will work, too - usually you don't need to capitalize)

Quotation Marks

Use these to limit your search to an exact phrase.

Example: "oil embargo" limits your search to the topic. (**Try Googling your name, or your professor's name, with and without question marks around the name).

Truncation

You can use truncation to search for all the endings of a word in one search. Most search tools use the asterisk (*), but some use and exclamation point (!) or dollar sign ($). Check the help function if your search isn't working.

Example: Shakespear* searches for Shakespear, Shakespeare, Shakespearean, Shakespeare's, etc.

Combining Search Terms

In an "Advanced Search" option, you can connect search terms the following ways:

AND - narrows your search results by looking for two (or more) keywords at the same time.
Example: "inquisition" AND "spain" gets results that include both terms. Add a third term, for example, AND "moor*" to get even more specific results. (Note that "moor" has an asterisk - this gives you all variations of the word (see Truncation below).

OR - expands your search results by searching for more than one keyword at a time.
Example: "england" OR "great britain" searches for results that include either term.

NOT - narrows your search results by excluding specific words from your results.
Example: "medieval" NOT "gothic" will return results that mention medieval, but does not include "gothic." This option helps you eliminate irrelevant results from your search results.

Tip: use ONE search term per search box.

Wildcard

A wildcard lets you search for different letters in a word. This can be useful to search for plurals and alternate spellings, especially in foreign languages. A question mark is used in place of the letter.

Example: "wom?n" searches for "woman," "women," and "womyn."