National and Texas newspaper: Corpus Christi Caller-Times from 1993-present, as well as 60 other Texas newspapers including Austin American-Statesman, Dallas Morning News, Fort Worth Star Telegram, Houston Chronicle, San Antonio Express-News, Victoria Advocate and Brownsville Herald.
These databases have both national and Texas newspapers. Try these tips while searching for resources:
Enter relevant keywords like "redistricting" or the last name of your characters
If your character is fictional, their name will not provide useful resources
With words like "redistricting" try typing them into the database with an asterisk at the end like this: redistrict* This tells the database to give you results that include the words redistrict, redistricting, and redistricted
Spelling matters! If you type in "redistrictin" instead of "redistricting" you won't get the results you should
Use filters on the left side of the results page:
Date Search filter lets you limit results to just those surrounding the dates of the event (2000-2004)
Source Name filter lets you select which source (newspaper) you'd like to see results from, like the Corpus Christi Caller Times or the Houston Chronicle
Source Locations filter will limit results to just those from Texas or Corpus Christi
When you find an article you want to use, click on the title, grab a permalink (icon that looks like two chain links hooked together), grab the citation (icon that looks like quotation marks), and download the article if you'd like a copy saved on your personal device
Internet Resources
There are lots of great resources available to you on the internet. If you're doing a Google search, try these tips:
if you want to find government resources try adding "site:.gov" to your search to limit the results to just government website
example: redistricting site:.gov
if you want to make sure that the results showing up has a particular phrase, rather than just one word, try adding quotations mark
example: "texas redistricting"
you can also add the word AND in between key words to tell Google that you want results that both words in them
"Corpus Christi" AND redistricting site:.gov
Some places to check:
Politicians have personal webpages, but they often aren't government websites (they don't end in .gov). To find webpages, just google the senator's name and look for a website that has a .org or .com ending. Most politicians' official websites will have the politicians' name in the URL
example: betoorourke.com or tedcruz.org
If the politician is currently in the Texas or national government, they may also have an official government website. This would end in .gov
Reporters often have short biographies on their newspapers' websites. Some of these might be blocked behind a pay wall, but you can google a jounalist's name and their newspaper to see if a bio is available and accessible.
This Way Back Machine, also called the Internet Archive, has copies of webpages dating back to the early 2000s. Enter a URL (like tedcruz.org) and browse through the different iterations of that webpage to see politicians' opinions, government stances, and more. You can also search keywords in the Wayback machine, like "ted cruz" or "texas redistricting."
Credo Reference is a database that has entries from dictionaries, encyclopedias, and indexes on all sorts of topics and is a great place to start any research. You can search for "redistricting" or for politicians' names or even for legal cases.
This site includes an overview of the various redistricting processes in Texas history including maps and explanations of legal requirements for the process.
This website gives a brief explanation of all of the court cases that came out of the redistricting processes in the early 2000s in Texas. You can copy and paste the case titles into Google to learn more about them.
