An Extensive and Valuable Resource

My experience with Oxford Bibliographies was wonderful. I was able to utilize this resource in my research of a Prohibition era attorney from Toledo, Ohio. Oxford Bibs helped me to locate the resources necessary to understanding the contexts surrounding the era and its relationship to organized crime. Wayne Hall and Sarah Yeates’ page on Alcohol and Drug Prohibition was especially helpful in my search for sources that would provide an historical overview and various perspectives on prohibition policy. Jay S. Albanese’s page on Organized Crime also offered several intriguing biographies from both criminal and police perspectives. These resources assisted me in immersing myself in the culture and complex relationships surrounding prohibition policy, crime and law enforcement.

I found Oxford Bibs website to be user friendly and easy to navigate. Especially helpful was the sidebar which displayed related articles to the ones I was viewing. This feature helped me further explore strands of literature I may not have stumbled upon myself. I am very grateful for the opportunity to use this invaluable resource, and it is a site I would readily recommend to fellow researchers.

A Great Place to Begin Research

I have many different research areas and Oxford Bib was a great place for me to go for sources. One of my topics is Lake Erie Businesses during World War II. Oxford bib has a wealth of sources in regards to World War II and war mobilization. There were also sources on the wine industry in America.  One book, A History of Wine in America from the Beginnings to Prohibition, by Thomas Pinney is a fantastic source documenting the wine industry in America. This find on Oxford Bib led to Pinney’s second volume in his history of wine series. While I found success in this area, I did not have luck finding sources on Lake Erie. While there are source sets on the War of 1812 and issues of pollution on the Lake, there is not much on other modern topics in regard to the lake and there is not much on the businesses and ports on the lake. This is something that I would have liked to see more of.

Another research area was the filibuster movement in Latin American and William Walker. I was unable to find any information on Walker. Oxford bib has many sources on Latin American History, but I was unable to find any sources n this specific person and his filibuster movement in Nicaragua. I will agree with my peers and say that it is very easy to get lost among the sources and it can take some digging to find the sources needed.

Overall, Oxford Bib is a great place to start in research and the source sets can lead to more sources in specific areas of interest. 

Faith-based business: a historiography of historiographies

My master's thesis analyzes the phenomenon of faith-based business in US history, particularly through the corporate history of four organizations: Tyson Foods, Chick-fil-A, Walmart, and Hobby Lobby. This topic grants me the opportunity to wrestle with several historiographies, from consumer capitalism, to religion, to conservatism, and beyond. 

In all honesty, this started out as a sort of vain, self-interested project. Chick-fil-A is tasty--why not write about it? By the time I was working on a graduate thesis, 2012's same-sex marriage controversy was winding down, so even the restaurant's religious/political/capitalist implications were gradually becoming irrelevant. However, since our president-elect's appointment of Carl's Jr. CEO Andy Puzder as Secretary of Labor, it's become clear that fast food--not to mention corporate interests in general--and the ideological skirmishes it represents will remain relevant for at least the next four years.

With thesis chapters on Hobby Lobby and Walmart already underway, I turned to the Oxford Bibliographies to enlighten me on the historiography of fast food. There isn't much, and it's easy to understand why: the labor scandals, geographic patterns, and outright nutritional horrors of fast food are far more attractive to sociologists, cultural geographers, and food scientists than historians, who tend to place singular topics within broader lineages by nature.

There isn't much on faith-based business specifically--but there's plenty on the various climates that gave rise to it. Namely, Michael Kimmage's massive historiography of US conservatism in the twentieth century, which includes several works I've dipped into as I strive to form the environments in which faith-based business CEOs built their legacies. 

Zachary Hutchins' bibliography of various resources delineating what exactly constitutes the "Fourth Great Awakening" (my undergraduate adviser referred to it as the "Umpteenth" Great Awakening, which I admittedly prefer) is equally fascinating. Most notably, it doesn't downplay the importance of theologians and religion scholars in writing religious history, both fields that historians tend to tragically overlook.

Finally, if I'm feeling particularly daring, I can turn to anthropologist Jo Littler's impressive list of writings on consumer capitalism, which mostly encompasses very complex theoretical writing. I'll definitely check out Littler's own "Gendering anti-consumerism," which offers a similar ideological take to the one I'm trying to communicate in my own thesis.

As Nanosh said in a previous post, it's easy to get lost in the magnitude of these bibliographies, and I hope I've communicated this awe and confusion in a way that's easy to understand. As I strive to describe faith-based business and the numerous historical, cultural, and political borders it crosses, these bibliographies will provide an invaluable framework.