Background resources, such as encyclopedia entries, handbook chapters, and other reference works can give short, authoritative overviews of a topic. Many of these resources also include links for further reading for when you're ready to research in more depth.
There are many ways to search for entries about people in the library catalog. One way is to do an exact search for a name: "mary elizabeth garrett" OR "garrett, mary elizabeth". This will pick up named entities mentioned in subject headings, table of contents entries, titles, and descriptions. Take care to try out different ways to express a person's name - for example, with or without a middle initial.
In Advanced Search, you can also search just within subject headings related to biographies. For example, both of these tags are found within Mary Elizabeth Garrett's biography:
Garrett, Mary Elizabeth, 1854-1915.
Women philanthropists -- Maryland -- Baltimore -- Biography.
Using Advanced Search and entering terms on the Subject line would allow you to search for: mary elizabeth garrett biography, and any entry with all of those words would be retrieved.
Below are some sample searches to get you started.
There can be an overwhelming number of journal articles you might consider for perusal. Articles+, part of the catalog, attempts to give access to articles across many databases here at Penn.
However, you might be interested in searching more narrowly within discipline-specific databases. This may not be as overwhelming. For example, you may want to look at articles about Julius Rosenwald in ERIC, an education-related database, as well as in America: History and Life. Links to some suggested databases are below.
Many journal articles about your subjects may not be independently research articles at all, but rather, book reviews which are published in journal articles. These will be scholars giving overviews and critiques of books you may have already encountered above. Some databases, like Articles+, have filters to exclude book reviews, but those filters can be incomplete. Just be aware of what you're looking at: is it an independently research article, or a review of a book?
Primary sources come from the time period in which you are studying. They may include newspaper articles, correspondence, personal papers, and other archival documents. While a scholarly article about Madam C.J. Walker from the 2000s looks back at her life with some distance and context, a work written about her during her lifetime can reveal how she was received by her contemporaries. Primary sources such as letters or financial documents may contain small details which scholars have largely overlooked, but could be of interest to you. It will also likely contain the biases of the time period.
There are several archival collections relevant to 19th century philanthropists, including some digitized collections.
These reference works are the main authority on writing papers and formatting citations in APA style.
For those who do not have a style guide handy, these web tools summarize and distill the key points of APA style. They also provide examples as templates for your own writing.