Introduction
This page contains databases and books related to African American and Diaspora Studies, including primary source databases, newspaper databases, secondary source databases, and author databases of African American history and culture.
- Link to all library subject databases for African American and Diaspora Studies.
Primary Source Databases
- African American Communities This link opens in a new window
Focusing predominantly on Atlanta, Chicago, St. Louis, 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.
- African Diaspora, 1860 - Present This link opens in a new windowDatabase contains primary and secondary documents concerning African communities in countries worldwide. With content from partners like The National Archives and Records Administration (US), National Archives at Kew (UK), Royal Anthropological Institute, and Senate House Library (University of London), this first release of African Diaspora, 1860-Present offers a view into the experiences and contributions of individuals in the Diaspora, as told through their own accounts. On the Alexander Street Press platform.
- American Pamphlets, Series 1, 1820-1922 This link opens in a new window
Key to the study of race, ethnicity, and gender in the 19th and early 20th centuries, these pamphlets span 100 years of American life, from the Jacksonian Era through the dawn of the Jazz Age. Researchers will find outstanding coverage of contentious topics related to politics and government, religion and religious movements, art and entertainment, business and economics, health and medicine, education, immigrants and ethnic groups, American Indians, slavery and the Civil War, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, women, and science and technology. Content includes speeches, orations, debates, sermons, treatises, tracts, narratives, poems, songs, memoirs, announcements, legal notices, and more.
- Archive of Americana This link opens in a new window
Archive of Americana enables students and scholars to explore virtually every aspect of United States history, culture, and daily life across three centuries. Providing online access to newspapers, books, broadsides, ephemera, government publications and more, the Archive of Americana puts tens of millions of pages of primary documents at researchers' fingertips.
- Black Abolitionist Papers, 1830-1865 This link opens in a new window
African American archival database that provides primary sources from those that worked on abolition of slavery from 1830 to 1865. On the ProQuest platform.
- Black Freedom Struggle in the United States: Challenges and Triumphs in the Pursuit of Equality This link opens in a new windowDatabase featuring select primary source documents related to critical people and events in African American history.
- Black Freedom Struggle in the United States: Challenges and Triumphs in the Pursuit of Equality This link opens in a new windowDatabase featuring select primary source documents related to critical people and events in African American history.
- Black History This link opens in a new window
Full-text collection of original military records, photos, stories and historical primary texts of interest to historians and genealogists.
- Black History This link opens in a new window
Full-text collection of original military records, photos, stories and historical primary texts of interest to historians and genealogists.
- BlackPast.org This link opens in a new window
African American reference database that includes encyclopedia articles, speech transcripts, primary documents and links to other sources for the general public. On its own platform.
- Civil War Era This link opens in a new window
History archival database that includes primary sources including newspaper articles and pamphlets from 1840 to 1865. On the ProQuest platform.
- Ethnic Diversity Source This link opens in a new window
This full-text database covers the culture, traditions, social treatment and lived experiences of different ethnic groups in America. It provides full text from a growing list of sources including peer-reviewed journals, magazines, e-books, biographies and primary source documents. It also includes a curated selection of relevant videos from the Associated Press.
- Oxford African American Studies Center This link opens in a new window
African American reference database that provides a number of full-text encyclopedias, primary documents, images, maps, etc. 5 user limit. On the Oxford platform.
- Sixties, The: Primary Documents and Personal Narratives This link opens in a new window
Interdisciplinary full-text archives that reproduces diaries, letters, autobiographies, oral histories, government documents, memorabilia and scholarly commentary on the American sixties. On the Alexander Street Press platform.
- Slavery, Abolition, and Social Justice This link opens in a new window
Historic full-text archive that reproduces manuscripts, pamphlets, books, paintings and maps between 1490 and 2007. On the Adam Matthew platform.
- Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive This link opens in a new window
Historic full-text archive that reproduces books; pamphlets; magazine and newspaper articles; court cases and manuscript collections from 1700 to early 20th century. On the Gale platform.
Books
African American Arts by
Signaling such recent activist and aesthetic concepts in the work of Kara Walker, Childish Gambino, BLM, Janelle Monáe, and Kendrick Lamar, and marking the exit of the Obama Administration and the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, this anthology explores the role of African American arts in shaping the future, and further informing new directions we might take in honoring and protecting the success of African Americans in the U.S. The essays in African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity engage readers in critical conversations by activists, scholars, and artists reflecting on national and transnational legacies of African American activism as an element of artistic practice, particularly as they concern artistic expression and race relations, and the intersections of creative processes with economic, sociological, and psychological inequalities. Scholars from the fields of communication, theater, queer studies, media studies, performance studies, dance, visual arts, and fashion design, to name a few, collectively ask: What are the connections between African American arts, the work of social justice, and creative processes? If we conceive the arts as critical to the legacy of Black activism in the United States, how can we use that construct to inform our understanding of the complicated intersections of African American activism and aesthetics? How might we as scholars and creative thinkers further employ the arts to envision and shape a verdant society? Contributors: Carrie Mae Weems, Carmen Gillespie, Rikki Byrd, Amber Lauren Johnson, Doria E. Charlson, Florencia V. Cornet, Daniel McNeil, Lucy Caplan, Genevieve Hyacinthe, Sammantha McCalla, Nettrice R. Gaskins, Abby Dobson, J. Michael Kinsey, Shondrika Moss-Bouldin, Julie B. Johnson, Sharrell D. Luckett, Jasmine Eileen Coles, Tawnya Pettiford-Wates, Rickerby Hinds. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Call Number: NX512.3.A35 A35 2020ISBN: 9781684481521Publication Date: 2019-12-06
African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song (LOA #333) by
Taking the measure of the tradition in a single indispensable volume, African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song sets a new standard for a genuinely deep engagement with Black poetry and its essential expression of American genius.
Call Number: PS591.N4 A37 2020ISBN: 9781598536669Publication Date: 2020-10-20
Daily Life of African American Slaves in the Antebellum South by
This book covers the full spectrum of daily life among slaves in the Antebellum South, giving readers a more complete picture of slaves' experiences in the decades before emancipation. In their daily struggles to forge lives of dignity and meaning within an inhuman system, slaves in the Antebellum South demonstrated creativity, resilience, and an insatiable desire to be free. The Daily Life of African American Slaves in the Antebellum South focuses on their struggles to create lives of meaning and dignity within a brutal and repressive system. This volume provides a comprehensive examination of the institution of slavery from the perspective of the slaves themselves. Readers can explore the family life, religious beliefs, political activities, intellectual aspirations, material possessions, and recreational pursuits of enslaved people. The book shows that enslaved people were tightly constrained by the harsh realities of the oppressive system under which they lived but that they found ways to forge lives of their own. The book synthesizes the latest and best literature on slavery and gives readers the opportunity to examine history through the lens of daily life using primary source documents created by slaves or former slaves. Provides readers with an understanding of the daily lives of enslaved African Americans Depicts how slaves struggled to create lives of dignity and meaning within a system designed to dehumanize them Points out important ways in which slaves resisted slavery Links the history of slavery to the larger history of Antebellum America Uses primary source documents and slave narratives to provide a supporting voice to the text
Call Number: E443 .T44 2020ISBN: 9781440863240Publication Date: 2020-01-16
Inequality, Crime, and Health among African American Males by
Imprisonment, homicide, non-lethal assault and other crime, chronic and infectious disease, substance abuse, suicide, and accidents all contribute to the much wider gap in the community-level sex ratios found among African Americans compared to those observed found among other ethnic and racial groups in the United States. This wide array of causes and correlates of African American male mortality, disability, and confinement suggests an area in need of interdisciplinary inquiry that examines the intersection between public health and public safety. Health analysts and social scientists across many disciplines have studied the disproportionately high levels of disease, disability, premature death, and exposure to the criminal justice system in African Americans communities extensively. To date, there has been little overlap between the diverse literatures even though the very same factors leading to crime and punishment among African American males often contribute to their poor physical and mental health profiles. This book addresses this omission by including chapters exploring the multifaceted dimensions of the varied disadvantages faced by African American males. Authors draw from an array of theoretical and methodological frameworks to illustrate how poor outcomes and sharp disparities among individuals and communities can be linked to the interplay of multiple factors operating at multiple levels. This volume is a useful resource for serious scholars and makers of public policy who seek to understand the causal interplay among economic and racial inequality, gender, crime, punishment, and health outcomes among all African Americans.
ISBN: 9781786350527Publication Date: 2018-11-30
Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers by
Contemporary African American and Black British Women Writers: Narrative, Race, Ethics brings together British and American scholars to explore how, in texts by contemporary black women writers in the U. S. and Britain, formal narrative techniques express new understandings of race or stimulate ethical thinking about race in a reader. Taken together, the essays also demonstrate that black women writers from both sides of the Atlantic borrow formal structures and literary techniques from one another to describe the workings of structural racism in the daily lives of black subjects and to provoke readers to think anew about race. Narratology has only recently begun to use race as a category of narrative theory. This collection seeks both to show the ethical effects of narrative form on individual readers and to foster reconceptualizations of narrative theory that account for the workings of race within literature and culture.
Call Number: PR120.B55 R84 2020ISBN: 9780367189280Publication Date: 2020-02-03
Video Databases
- American History in Video This link opens in a new windowHistory streaming media database that includes primary sources (newsreels and archival footage and educational videos from PBS, History Channel and other sources. On the Alexander Street Press platform.
- AM Explorer: Americana This link opens in a new window
Covers American history, literature and culture. Resources include manuscript and typescript letters, diaries, notebooks, journals, newspapers, plus incredible art works, illustrations, photographs, video and 360-degree objects.
- Black Studies in Video This link opens in a new window
Black Studies in Video features award-winning documentaries, newsreels, interviews, and archival footage surveying the evolution of Black culture in the United States. In partnership with California Newsreel, the database provides unique access to their African American Classics collection, and includes films covering history, politics, art and culture, family structure, social and economic pressures, and gender relations.
- Caribbean Studies in Video: The Banyan Archive This link opens in a new window
Caribbean Studies in Video presents more than 1,000 hours of edited and unedited footage from the Banyan Production company, the first Caribbean enterprise to produce original TV content in the 1970s. Available for the first time in streaming format, their programs are filled with interviews of key personalities across disciplines; theater, music and dance performances; documentaries on rituals and cultural practices; political events and much more.
Writers Databases
- African American Poetry (part of ProQuest One Literature) This link opens in a new window
English full-text database includes thousands of poems from African American poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Part of the Chadwyck-Healey Literature Collections.
- African Writers Series (part of ProQuest One Literature) This link opens in a new window
English full-text database includes the books of Heinemann series that focuses on the twentieth century. Part of Literature Online and Part of the Chadwyck-Healey Literature Collections.
- Black Authors, 1556-1922 This link opens in a new windowDatabase containing works by authors of African or African-American descent. Compiled from imprints from the Library Company of Philadelphia. On the Readex platform.
- Black Thought and Culture This link opens in a new windowBlack Thought and Culture contains 1,303 sources with 1,210 authors, covering the non-fiction published works of leading African Americans. Where possible the complete published non-fiction works are included, as well as interviews, journal articles, speeches, essays, pamplets, letters, and other fugitive material.
- Twentieth-Century African American Poetry (part of ProQuest One Literature) This link opens in a new window
Full-text database that includes African-American poems. Part of the Chadwyck-Healey Literature Collections.
Newspapers
- Baltimore Afro-American, 1893-1988 This link opens in a new window
Historic full-text newspaper that covers 1893 to 1988. Part of the ProQuest Historical Newspapers - Black Newspapers series.
- Norfolk Journal and Guide, 1921-2003 This link opens in a new window
Historic full-text newspaper that covers 1921 to 2003. Part of the ProQuest Historical Newspaper - Black Newspapers series.
- Atlanta Daily World, 1931-2003 This link opens in a new window
Historic full-text newspaper that covers from 1931 to 2003. Part of the ProQuest Historical Newspapers - Black Newspapers series.
- Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive This link opens in a new window
Historic full-text archive that reproduces books; pamphlets; magazine and newspaper articles; court cases and manuscript collections from 1700 to early 20th century. On the Gale platform.
- Pittsburgh Courier, 1911-2002 This link opens in a new window
Historic full-text newspaper that covers 1911 to 2002. Part of the ProQuest Historical Newspaper - Black Newspapers series.
- Philadelphia Tribune, 1912-2001 This link opens in a new window
Historic full-text newspaper that covers 1912 to 2001. Part of the ProQuest Historical Newspaper - Black Newspapers series.
- Chicago Defender, 1910-1975 This link opens in a new window
Historic full-text newspaper that covers 1910 to 1975. Part of the ProQuest Historical Newspapers - Black Newspapers series.
- Los Angeles Sentinel, 1934-2005 This link opens in a new window
Historic full-text newspaper that covers 1934 to 2005. Part of the ProQuest Historical Newspapers - Black Newspapers series.
- Civil War: Antebellum Period to Reconstruction This link opens in a new window
History archival database that includes newspapers, Congressional documents and ephemera from the Civil War era. On the Readex platform.
- Cleveland Call and Post, 1934-2010 This link opens in a new window
Historic full-text newspaper that covers 1934 to 1991. Part of the ProQuest Historical Newspapers - Black Newspapers series.
- Ethnic NewsWatch This link opens in a new window
Minorities indexing/full-text database that covers journal, magazine and newspaper articles from ethnic and minority publishers back to 1990. On the ProQuest platform.
- African American Newspapers, 1827-1998 This link opens in a new window
African-American full-text archive that reproduces full runs of newspapers from 35 states. A subset of America's Historic Newspapers on the Readex platform.
Secondary Sources
- EBSCOhost This link opens in a new window
Major database platform that include databases from EBSCO and other database suppliers.
- ProQuest Central This link opens in a new window
Database platform that includes 100-some other indexing, full-text and reference databases (listed separately). On the ProQuest platform.
- Ebook Central This link opens in a new window
Multidisciplinary collection of ebooks that can be read online or downloaded. Includes the Academic Complete and Public Library Complete collections.