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Biography

Biography Can:

  1. Personalize a subject while putting him or her into context.
  2. Provide a better understanding of a person’s achievements and significance.
  3. Show us how personal acts can shape history.
  4. Be more easy to relate to than other written accounts.
  5. Answer questions like:
    • Why did he write that?
    • How did she come to discover that?
  6. Provide insight into a particular time and place.

Questions to Ask Yourself

  1. What do you already know about the person?
  2. What kind of information do you want to find?
  3. What is the person’s occupation?
  4. How famous is the person?
  5. Is the person known in a particular field, but not outside that field?
  6. Is the person known in relation to a particular country? Or is the person only locally known?
  7. Is the person living or dead?

Oxford Reference Online

Search selected dictionaries and encyclopedias from Oxford University Press:

Examples:

  • biography
  • Trudeau, Pierre
  • Cabot, John

Oxford English Dictionary

"The Oxford English Dictionary is the accepted authority on the evolution of the English language over the last millennium. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over half a million words, both present and past. "

Gale Resources Online

Examples:

  • Francis Ford Coppola
  • Sigmund Freud
  • Nelson Mandela

Sage Knowledge

Search Sage Knowledge for indepth, authoritative background information on social sciences topics.
 


SAGE publishes peer-reviewed journals in Business, Humanities, Social Sciences, and Science, Technology and Medicine.
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