HIST 17A: Early North America (Henderson, Fall 2025): Keywords & Subject Headings

• Keywords are the essential words that best describe your topic. These are your own words -- they can be people, places, themes, characters, time periods, or any other concrete term. 

• Avoid using adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions, and other terms that are not considered essential to your topic. 

• Use quotation marks to search for exact phrases:
  • "hudson's bay company" 
  • "louisiana purchase"
  • "printing press"

• Using keywords allows you to combine different concepts. Each concept is separated by AND. Your results will include all the words that you include:

  • "Native Americans" AND treaties

  • "boston tea party" AND tax*

• The asterisk* symbol will include alternate endings to your root word: 

  • coloni* will retrieve records with word such as colonies, colonial, colonialism, colonialist.
  • tax* will retrieve records with tax, taxation, taxpayer, taxes

• Use OR to include synonyms and similar terms. This will increase your results by retrieving any of the terms that are separated by OR:
  •  "French and Indian War" OR "seven years' war"
  • "native americans" OR "indigenous peoples" OR "north american indians"

Subject headings are predefined terms that are assigned to books and other printed material in the library catalog. I've listed some examples below.

While it is always worth looking at the subject headings that have been given to items, searching exclusively by these is not as flexible nor as comprehensive as doing keyword searches.

**Note that subject headings can sometimes use outdated terminology that can be potentially hurtful or offensive.