From the home page of American History, it would be best to scroll through the time period pictures until you get to the one that says GILDED AGE to WORLD WAR I, 1870-1920. Under that photo you can click on one of four subtopics, including The Gilded Age, 1870-1914. The next page will show you a general article on the era and to the left of it will be boxes with names like: Explore, Analyze, Research, Media, Documents and Library. You can go straight to a topic, a biography, photographs, cartoons, government documents, etc., all within the subtopic you've chosen.
*NOTE: Under the main article, if you scroll all the way down you'll see a box called Primary Sources. You can click on "highlighted primary sources for this time period" to go to a list of resources chosen from the database.
Each database article shows you the MLA citation style at the bottom.
From the opening search page of American History you can skip doing a search in the search box by looking at the boxes to the right of the page. Under "Topic Centers," "By Era" you'll see a link for The Gilded Age. If you click the link you'll see the topic page that looks like the link I've included here. You can choose a subtopic article from the list (or a suggested research topic from the list at the bottom) or choose from the boxes to the right: videos and slideshows, primary source documents, maps and charts or a timeline that has almost 1300 entries. If you don't find what you're looking for, as always you may do your own search. Take a look at the page by clicking below.
When searching the e-reference book collection of the GVRL, it's best if you can narrow by subject area using the list to the right on the main search page. For this assignment, choose "History." Then, within the same search box to the right, perform your search within the history collection. It cuts down the number of articles you'd have to wade through, many of which may have nothing to do with your search. You can also find a book (or set of books) and choose that item to search exclusively. *The more you can narrow down your search field the closer and faster you can get to the results you seek.
Historical Newspapers opens with a search page where you may type in a term and, if you like, choose a decade in which you believe there are related articles (example: type "Tammany Hall" and choose 1880s below it). OR you may choose the tab next to "SEARCH," called "TOPICS." Two of your choices will be "Westward expansion and Imperialism" and "Industrial age." Clicking on one of them will take you to a subtopic list. Clicking on Spanish-American War, for example, would take you to a list of 33 related articles.
The NYT is also a good place to search for obituaries of famous people.
It has always been suggested that you search JSTOR (scholarly journal articles) using the "advanced search" feature. You may enter two or three search terms in the boxes provided, choose English as the language, click on "articles" and, MOST IMPORTANTLY, choose from the Journal Filter selections at the bottom. For this project you might start by clicking on American Studies (137 titles) and History (511 titles). This way the database is searching through only 648 journals that are the most likely to contain articles of value based on your search terms. You can always re-do the search later by unclicking your choices or by clicking on different ones.