Question

anyone good with US history i want to know about Jonathan Edwards and why he was so important. besides the great awakening sermon he gave.

Answer 1

I already pointed out Google Scholar to you, but here are some other ideas.

One thing you can do is a proper use of Wikipedia. Now, most scholars say Wikipedia is bad, but really it is a mixed blessing and there are ways to get good things out of it. For example, your Jonathan Edwards:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Edwards_%28theologian%29

OK, skim that and use it as a source of search terms. It says he was part of the enlightenment. So search up Jonathan Edwards enlightenment. See if you get better results.

It lists books he wrote. See if anyone did summaries of the books. Look them up by the title of the book. Look for the books in scholar, which may get you some other papers that use them. Or search for things that include .edu. That will help bring results on school sites to the top.

Also, at the bottom of the Wikipedia page there are notes, references, and external links. These list sources. You can use this information to go back past Wikipedia to where they get their stuff from. These sources are generally far more citable than Wikipedia is.

As you can see, by working back to original sources, searching for related terms, and using .edu in searches, you can use one easy to find source as a way to find better ones.