AM Explorer: Global Humanities: Searching guide

Watch this short video for the basics of running a search across all AM titles in the Global Humanities plan.

If you want to find a document from within our collections, you can do this by using the main search bar on the homepage, or within the header.

• For example, searching for ‘coffee’ will pull up every document where ‘coffee’ is mentioned in the metadata or, where available, within the text itself.
• When doing a search that is a phrase or longer than one word, use double quotation marks to ensure you return accurate results. For example, entering “United States” in quotation marks will return a list of results where United States appears as a joined-up phrase, rather than ‘United’ OR ‘States’

The Collections page lists all the collections available to you from across AM.

• Scroll down the page to view them all, and click on the tile of the collection you are interested in to open it in a new tab.
• To help you find collections relevant to your research, use the filters to look at specific collections within a theme, time period or region.

• Consider how place names and spellings may have changed over time. For example, Sri Lanka was renamed from Ceylon in 1972; searching for ‘Ceylon OR “Sri Lanka”’ is likely to return more results.
• Historical events are often referred to in different ways by modern authors than they were in primary source material from the period. For example, the First World War was often referred to as The Great War during the period. So running a search for “Great War” is likely to bring up more primary source documents from the period.
• Think about the language and terminology within your search. Please be aware, due to the historical nature of this material, the language that is used to refer to marginalized peoples is often derogatory or offensive by modern standards. For example, searching for ‘runaway slaves’ or ‘runaways’ can provide useful search results for enslaved people making attempts to seek freedom. While this is problematic, consider that those words and terms may return search results and can thus be used to uncover attitudes held both within society during the period, and by the writers who authored the documents.