Reference articles help you understand the basic facts of a topic. Read closely for:
Who:
What:
Why:
When and Where:
And:
Wikipedia often comes up as the first / an early result if you search any of these topics on the web. But unlike the academic reference articles linked on this page, the articles in Wikipedia are not automatically written and edited by experts. Anyone can write for and edit Wikipedia!
This makes it difficult to trust Wikipedia to give us the level of subject expertise we need to use for college-level research. It's much better to choose a relevant article from an academic subject encyclopedia instead.
Atlas of African-American History by 
African American Eras by 
Encyclopedia of Race and Racism by 
Encyclopedia of Racism in the United States by 
Encyclopedia of African American HistoryStart with the following online library databases to gather background information (who, what, where, why, etc.) on your topic.
These academic resources are more reliable than Wikipedia. Why not Wikipedia? While Wikipedia is easy to find and use (and a great public project), articles in Wikipedia are anonymous and openly edited. That means for academic purposes, Wikipedia is not an authoritative resource.
(GVRL, U.S. History in Context, or Opposing Viewpoints in Context)
You will enter your topic (your choice from the list to the left) in the search box. Use "quotation marks" if your topic is more than one word, to keep the phrase together. Make sure the "Keyword" search option is selected, and hit "Search."
Look near the top of your article results list to see how many results your search found. The article title will appear on top of the encyclopedia title. You can select an article by clicking on the article title to open. (Avoid clicking on the encyclopedia title.)
In order to choose a good background article, look for an article that covers your topic from an encyclopedia related to the ideas from the book March. In the search results below, I would select an article from the Encyclopedia of African American History and Culture or Race and Racism in the United States as results that match themes from the book.
I would NOT choose the result from a literature encyclopedia, because literature is the study of fiction, and the events in March are real-life events.
