African American Studies Research Guide

Focusing predominantly on Atlanta, Chicago, New York, and towns and cities in North Carolina this resource presents multiple aspects of the African American community through pamphlets, newspapers and periodicals, correspondence, official records, reports and in-depth oral histories, revealing the prevalent challenges of racism, discrimination and integration, and a unique African American culture and identity.

The African American Experience developed with the guidance of African American librarians and subject specialists and is designed to be a user friendly online database collection on African American history and culture.

Includes print and online-only newspapers, blogs, newswires, journals, broadcast transcripts and videos. Use it to explore a specific event or to compare a wide variety of viewpoints on topics such as politics, business, health, sports, cultural activities and people.

Documents the African American press in the South from Reconstruction through the Jim Crow period. Includes newspapers written by African Americans for African Americans, covering current domestic and international events, racial discrimination and violence, civic and religious events, politics, foreign affairs, and local gossip.

Covers more than 170 periodicals by and about African Americans. The publications, which come from 26 states, include academic and political journals, commercial magazines, institutional newsletters, organizations bulletins, annual reports and other genres.

This third edition contains approximately 1,700 plays by over 200 playwrights. It also has selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays. Nearly 600 of the plays are published here for the first time, including a number by major authors. The library also has the catalog records and the plays can be searched by title in the online catalog.

ProQuest's Black Freedom Struggle website is intended to support a wide range of students, from middle and high school to college, as well anyone interested in learning more about the on-going Black Freedom Struggle.

Published from 1987 to 1995, Black Sacred Music sought to establish theomusicology—a theologically informed musicology—as a distinct discipline, incorporating methods from anthropology, sociology, psychology, and philosophy to examine the full range of black sacred music. Topics included black secular music, the early days of rap, soul, jazz, civil rights songs, the religious music of Africa and the African diaspora, spirituals, gospel music, and the music of the black church.

The journal consisted of scholarly articles, essays, hymns and folk songs, sermons, historical reprints, and reviews of books, hymn books, and recordings. It also published volumes of archival writings by R. Nathaniel Dett, William Grant Still, and Willis Laurence James.

Provides primary source materials published by the leading African American thinkers and intellectuals of their day.

The complete digital archives of Ebony Magazine.

Designed for undergraduate students, Exploring Race in Society contains scholarly journals and proprietary essays that provide researchers with a deeper understanding of how current issues stem from actions and policies of the past.
Each proprietary topic includes an overview article and three essays suggesting potential solutions. Solutions essays are written by a diverse group of writers representing the fields of academia, journalism, medicine and other disciplines working to address issues related to race.

Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive is devoted to the study and understanding of the history of slavery in America and the rest of the world from the 17th century to the late 19th century. Archival collections were sourced from more than 60 libraries at institutions such as the Amistad Research Center, Bibliothèque nationale de France, the National Archives, Oberlin College, Oxford University, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and Yale University; these collections allow for unparalleled depth and breadth of content.

The main mission of H-Afro-Am is to provide an exchange of information for professionals, faculty, students and others interested in teaching and discussing the African American expereince as well as issues of race in America and the Diaspora.

The HistoryMakers Digital Archive is an easy-to-use online database of thousands of African Americans from a broad range of backgrounds and experiences. Unlike other primary source resources, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive provides high-quality video content, fully searchable transcripts, and unique content from individuals whose life stories would have been lost were it not for The HistoryMakers.

Jet Magazine Archive covers art, news, politics and other social topics with an African-American focus. It includes over 3,100 issues providing a broad view of culture, fashion and entertainment from its first issue in 1951 through 2014.

ProQuest and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) have teamed up to digitize the association’s archives, bringing one of the most famous records of the civil rights movement to the online world via ProQuest History Vault. The collection is nearly two million pages of internal memos, legal briefings, and direct action summaries from national, legal, and branch offices throughout the country. It charts the NAACP’s work and delivers a first-hand view into crucial issues: lynching, school desegregation, and discrimination in the military, the criminal justice system, employment, and housing, among others.

The Oxford African American Studies Center combines the authority of carefully edited reference works. It contains: Africana, Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895, Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present,Black Women in America, 2nd Edition, African American National Biography, Dictionary of African Biography, The Oxford Encyclopedia of African Thought, and the Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography.

This historical newspaper provides genealogists, researchers and scholars with online, easily-searchable first-hand accounts and unparalleled coverage of the politics, society and events of the time.

This database will combine primary and secondary sources, leading historical Black newspapers, archival documents, key government materials, video, writings by major American Black intellectuals and essays by top scholars in Black Studies.
 

Brings together documentary material from underrepresented 20th-century voices of dissent as curated Open Access collections on the JSTOR platform, contributed and funded by libraries, museums, historical societies, and individual collectors worldwide.

This an open access archive on the history of world slavery, but concentrates mostly on African American slavery.

A handy source for modern and contemporary African American poetry, with nearly 9,000 poems by sixty two prominent African American poets of the last century, including Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Imamu Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde and Rita Dove.

This is the full run of print Vibe magazine which chronicles the hip-hop culture from 1993-2014. Founded by Quincy Jones, it provides information about rap, hip-hop, and R&B music that is associated urban youth culture. "It is renowned for its pioneering role in establishing mainstream coverage of this culture and for raising the profile of many major hip-hop and R&B artists."