LibGuides: African American Studies: Topics in African American Studies

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Topics in African American Studies

The boxes below bring together numerous websites that provide information about specific topics in African American Studies.

Topics include:

History
Civil War & Slavery
Civil Rights
African American Leaders
African American Organizations

History & Culture

Library Collections (outside Fisher)

African-American Odyssey
Freely accessible and searchable collections of documents and ephemera related to African Americans in the United States from the 17th century to present. Created and maintained by the Library of Congress.
Black American Feminisms
A multi-disciplinary bibliography of Black American Feminist thought across many academic fields.
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
From the website: The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, one of The New York Public Library’s renowned research libraries, is a world-leading cultural institution devoted to the research, preservation, and exhibition of materials focused on African American, African Diaspora, and African experiences.

News and Media Organizations

The 1619 Project
From the website: The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.
For full access to the New York Times, follow these instructions.
Africans In America
PBS overview of African American history includes excerpts from primary sources.

Collections Curated by Organizations

African American Mosaic
A Library of Congress Resource Guide for the Study of Black History & Culture.
African Diaspora Music Project
From the About page: To create a repository for the concert works (those intended for the concert stage; aka classical works) of composers of the African Diaspora. (The African Diaspora in this context is defined as those composers throughout the world descended from people of West and Central Africa).
Black Past
This site includes an online encyclopedia of hundreds of famous and lesser-known figures in African America, full-text primary documents and major speeches of black activists and leaders from the 18th Century to the present.
Facing History and Ourselves
By studying the historical development of race in US history, the Holocaust and other examples of genocide, students make the essential connection between history and the moral choices they confront in their own lives. Excellent resources for teachers and student teachers.
Tangled Roots
This project produced by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition is a collection of primary documents from the 17th century to the present "about the shared history of African Americans and Irish Americans." Also see the Center's archive of more than 200 digitized items dealing with African American history.

Civil War and Slavery

Colleges and Universities

Documenting Slave Voyages
From the website: Led by Emory, a massive digital memorial shines new light on one of the most harrowing chapters of human history.
The Geography of Slavery in Virginia
"The Geography of Slavery in Virginia is a digital collection of advertisements for runaway and captured slaves and servants in 18th- and 19th-century Virginia newspapers."
Making of America: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies
From the website: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies, part of Cornell Universities Making of America collection
North American Slave Narratives
A collection of "approximately two hundred texts, including all known narratives of fugitive and former slaves published in broadsides, pamphlets, or book form in English up to 1920 and many of the biographies of fugitive and former slaves published in English before 1920."
The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies
From the website: Official records of the Union and Confederate armies, part of Cornell Universities Making of America collection

Library of Congress

Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in America: A Visual Record
Hundreds of images depicting slavery and the slave trade, includes maps, illustrations and photographs.
Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project 1936-1938
A Library of Congress collection of more than 2,300 first person accounts of slavery plus 500 photographs. Some audio narratives are included as well.

State and Local Histories

African Americans and the End of Slavery in Massachusetts
This Massachusetts Historical Society exhibit features 117 documents including letters, warrants, bills of sale and antislavery material.
Images of the Antislavery Movement in Massachusetts
A Massachusetts Historical Society collection of 840 visual materials from the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society that illustrate the role of Massachusetts in the national debate over slavery. Included are photographs, paintings, sculptures, engravings, artifacts, banners, and broadsides that were central to the debate and the formation of the antislavery movement.

Curated Collections

Slavery Images
From the website: A visual record of the African Slave Trade and slave life in the early African Diaspora.
SlaveVoyages
From the website: This digital memorial raises questions about the largest slave trades in history and offers access to the documentation available to answer them.
Valley of the Shadow
A digital archive of primary sources that document the lives of people in Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania, during the era of the American Civil War. Here you may explore thousands of original documents that allow you to see what life was like during the Civil War for the men and women of Augusta and Franklin.

Civil Rights

Museums and Digital Collections

Civil Rights Digital Library
From the website: The Civil Rights Digital Library Initiative represents one of the most ambitious and comprehensive efforts to date to deliver educational content on the Civil Rights Movement via the Web.
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Documents the struggle for racial equality in the 1950s and 1960s through a digital video archive of historical news film, extensive links to related digital collections, and secondary Web-based learning resources such as contextual stories, encyclopedia articles, lesson plans, and activities.
The Civil Rights Movement
History Channel website includes chronologies, film clips, photos.
Freedom Now
Collection of documents and photographs illustrating the history of the Mississippi Freedom Movement. The site is a collaborative project of Brown University and Tougaloo College.
Historical Publications of the United States Civil Rights Commission
U.S. Commission on Civil Rights - Historical Publications.
Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia
Museum at Ferris State University provides images of racist objects, images and cartoons along with essays.
Who Speaks for the Negro?
From the website: materials related to the book of the same name published by Robert Penn Warren in 1965. The original materials are held at the University of Kentucky and Yale University Libraries.

Oral Histories

Oral Histories of the American South - Civil Rights
Collection of oral histories from a number of Southern oral history programs.
Oral History of the March on Washington
Available from the Smithsonian Magazine, from the website: Americans who marched on Washington 50 years ago under a blazing sun recall the day they were part of a turning point in history.

Biography

"Born in the Wake of Freedom:" John Mitchell, Jr., and the Richmond Planet
The history of the oldest African American newspaper and it's most famous editor. An exhibit created by the Virginia Newspaper Project.
The Frederick Douglass Papers
The first release of this Library of Congress collection contains over 2000 items and "contains the writings of Douglass and such contemporaries in the abolitionist and early women's rights movements as Henry Ward Beecher, Ida B. Wells, Gerrit Smith, Horace Greeley, and others."
Malcolm X: A Research Site
This web page is designed to be a resource for scholarship in Black Studies and the political development of activists in the Black Liberation Movement.
Martin Luther King Jr. Project
Project sponsored by Stanford University and the MLK Center for Nonviolent Social Change. Includes a brief, selected documents, and a searchable database of transcriptions of MLK papers and secondary works.
UCLA African Studies Center (Marcus Garvey UNIA Papers Project)
Web site accompanying the publication of Garvey's papers, includes sample documents, narrative and some photographs.
W.E.B. Dubois Papers at University of Massachusetts Amherst
University of Massachusetts Amherst provides a biography, exhibits, photographs and selected books and articles by W.E.B. Du Bois.

Organizations

The Association for the Study of African American Life and History
The mission of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) is to promote, research, preserve, interpret and disseminate information about Black life, history and culture to the global community.
Association of Black Women Historians
From the website: The ABWH constitution outlines four organizational goals: to establish a network among the membership; to promote Black women in the profession; to disseminate information about opportunities in the field; and to make suggestions concerning research topics and repositories.
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
The mission of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate race-based discrimination.
National Association of African American Studies
Information and support for research related to the African and African American, Hispanic, Latino(a) and Chicano(a), Native American and Asian experiences.
National Council for Black Studies
From the website: The National Council for Black Studies (NCBS) was established in 1975, when African American scholars came together to formalize the study of the African World experience, as well as expand and strengthen academic units and community programs devoted to this endeavor.