HIST 9: Native American History & Public Practices (Lovely, 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:
  • "indian removal act" 
  • "trail of tears"

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

  • "heritage sites" AND california

  • "cherokee nations" AND "boarding schools"

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

  • coloni* will retrieve records with words 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 because your search will look for any one of these terms
  •  "French and Indian War" OR "seven years' war"
  • "native americans" OR "indigenous peoples" OR "american indians"
  •  monument* OR marker* OR plaque* OR commemora* OR memorial*

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**Note that subject headings can sometimes use outdated terminology that can be potentially hurtful or offensive.