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HIST 2380: The Social and Cultural History of Food in Europe

Research Guide for Professor Valenze's HIST 2380 course (Spring 2024)

Thinking About Search Terms

Some possible search terms  when researching food history include: 

You will find a range of articles, cookbooks, and food histories by searching the following: 

  • Cooking, European
  • Cooking, (region, country)
    • example: Cooking, France; Cooking, Southern (Italy)​​​​​​
  • Cooking (ingredient, commodity, etc.)​​​​​​​
    • ​​​​​​​example: Cooking (Cod); Cooking (Olive Oil)

OR

  • Cookery, (region, country, ingredient, commodity, etc.)
    *proceed as above
  •  

For interdisciplinary materials including food histories, analyses, cultural information, etc. try using: 

  • Foodways, 
  • Food History (of course)
    *with this term you will uncover results comprising social, cultural, anthropological, economic aspects of the topic you are researching. Combine these term combining this with regions, ingredients, countries, etc. 
  • food and colonialism "OR" imperialism
    *try this with your specific country, region
  • Food technology
  • Food industry and trade, etc.

CLIO Catalog Searching

CLIO Catalog

CLIO is the online catalog to Columbia University Libraries (including Barnard), but excluding Teacher's College and the Law Library who maintain their own catalogs. CLIO contains over 7 million records for books, online resources, journals & newspapers, conference proceedings, sound recordings & scores, videos, archival collections & oral history transcripts, online databases, maps & images, and more!

CLIO Search Tips:
  • Use the Catalog Search to find books, journal and newspaper titles, media materials, musical scores, archival collections and databases (but not articles within databases). You can also find maps and atlases.
  • Article Search allows you to search articles indexed in all of Columbia's databases
  • Search for specific e-journal titles using the E-journal Title search
  • Use the link to Borrow Direct or Interlibrary Loan when the book or media item is checked out.

Search Tips

Boolean searching is based on an algebraic system of logic formulated by George Boole, a 19th century English mathematician.

In a Boolean keyword search, the terms are combined by the operators AND, OR and NOT to narrow or broaden the search (in CLIO, Ovid, and some other databases, you DO have to enter them in capitals).  This type of search is possible in most library catalogs and databases, but Google and other Web search engines do not carry out OR and NOT searches properly.

These Venn diagrams help to visualize the meaning of AND, OR and NOT; the colored area indicates the items that will be retrieved in each case.

AND

The operator AND narrows the search by instructing the search engine to search for all the records containing the first keyword, then for all the records containing the second keyword, and show only those records that contain both.

OR

The operator OR broadens the search to include records containing either keyword, or both.
The OR search is particularly useful when there are several common synonyms for a concept, or variant spellings of a word.

Examples using OR:
medieval OR "middle ages"
"heart attack" OR "myocardial infarction"
vergil OR virgil   

NOT

Combining search terms with the NOT operator narrows the search by excluding unwanted terms.

 

Examples using combinations of the three operators:
puritans AND women AND (massachusetts OR connecticut OR "rhode island" OR "new hampshire")
(adolescen* OR teen*) AND (cigarettes OR smok*)
reagan AND "star wars" NOT (movie OR film OR cinema OR "motion picture")
"zora neale hurston" AND (correspondence OR letter* OR diar* OR autobiograph* OR memoir*)