If you know the disciplinary or topical area you're researching in, you can use these databases to hone in on scholarship in those areas. (That way you don't have to use narrowing facets or keywords to get at these frameworks in the broader databases--you can just use keywords related to your specific topic.)
Index of literature covering the history and culture of the United States and Canada, from prehistory to the present. The database indexes journals from 1964 to present and includes citations and links to book and media reviews.
American Studies is very interdisciplinary, so you can do searching in broad databases and/or choose to narrow in on discipline- or topic-specific databases based on your particular research. These are some good bets for general and cross-disciplinary searching for scholarly articles.
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. It is also very useful for seeing if other scholars have cited a book, article, etc. Search on the title, and then follow the "Cited by ..." link.
