American History and Life is described by EBSCO as: the definitive index of literature covering the history and culture of the United States and Canada, from prehistory to the present. With indexing for 1,700 journals from as far back as 1910, this database is without question the most important bibliographic reference tool for students and scholars of U.S. and Canadian history he database also includes citations and links to book and media reviews. Strong English-language journal coverage is balanced by an international perspective on topics and events, including abstracts in English of articles published in more than 40 languages.
Made up of indexing, abstracts, and full text. The copyright of the abstracts and indexing is owned by EBSCO Publishing and solely for the use of the individual patron of the licensing party.AHL is I agree with the review by Tom Gilsom in the Charleston Adviser that the database is a great resource but takes quite a while to learn to use effectively. It is worth learning, because despite its high cost Gilsom) it must package well, as it is widely available at institutions.
Searches are conducted through Boolean Operators (AND, OR, and NOT): and can be limited to a specific title; and/or restrict a particular publication year… Stopwords (articles, pronouns, and prepositions) and Parentheses control searches and without parentheses, a search is executed from left to right. The default fields for unqualified searches consist of the following: Abstract, Author/Editor, Country of Publication, Journal Title, Review Author, Series Title, Subject Terms, Time Period of Event, Title, and Translated Title. Index browsing allows the user to view all values that occur in specified fields in a database, along with corresponding hit counts. Tags for all fields included in the index browse feature. An Index Browse can also be completed by Author, Author supplied Keywords, Document type; Entry date; Geographic Terms, Headings, ISBN, Language, Publication Name and Year of Publication.
AHL is organized and structured following historical organizational methodology. The entries are instructional as well as informational using common periodization. Designed for student and academic researchers, they provide suggestions for key resources in the subject area.
My experience with AHL is that specificity or prior knowledge works best when searching this database, but the results are more general knowledge and sources then deeply academic.
Ebsco Host http://support.ebsco.com/help/?int=ehost&lang=en&feature_id=Databases&TOC_ID=Always&SI=0&BU=0&GU=1&PS=0&ver=live&dbs=,ahl Accessed 9/29/17
Gilson, Tom. “America: History and Life — Web Database Review.” The Charleston Advisor, vol. 1, no. 1, July 1999, pp. 11–12., Accessed 9/29/2017. Charleston.publisher.ingentaconnect.com/content/charleston/chadv/1999/00000001/00000001/art00006#expand/collapse.
