African American Studies  Tags: primary_sources newspapers  

African American Biographical Database  (1790-1950)  

Biographical profiles & extended narratives of African-Americans from all walks of life. Many profiles include photographs & illustrations, and there is a rich collection of full-text African-American reference works.

African American Experience  

Digital access to a range of reference books, monographs, & primary sources, including manuscripts, speeches, court cases, quotations, advertisements, statistics, and other papers. A major feature is the electronic version of The American Slave: a Composite Autobiography, a fully searchable database of over 4,000 interviews with former slaves.

African American Song  

Documents the history of African American music in an online music listening service. Contains a diverse range of genres such as jazz, blues, gospel, ragtime, folk songs, and narratives, among others.

African American Music Reference    

Brings together text reference, biographies, chronologies, sheet music, images, lyrics, liner notes, and discographies which chronicle the history and culture of the African American experience through music. The database will expand to include coverage of blues, jazz, spirituals, civil rights songs, slave songs, minstrelsy, rhythm and blues, gospel, and other forms of black American musical expression.

African American Poetry Database  (1750-1900)  

Contains nearly 3,000 poems by African-American poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

American Song    

History database that contains 50,000 tracks that allows people to hear and feel the music from America's past. Will include songs by and about American Indians, miners, immigrants, slaves, children, pioneers, and cowboys. Included are the songs of Civil Rights, political campaigns, Prohibition, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, anti-war protests and more.

Black Drama  (1850+)  

Full text of plays written by dramatists from Africa, the Caribbean, and North America, and detailed information about productions, theaters, production companies, and other ephemera related to the plays.

Black Short Fiction    

Full text of 760 stories and folktales by African, African American, and Caribbean authors.

Black Studies Center    

Scholarly essays and access to articles in Black Studies journals. Combines the Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience, the International Index to Black Periodicals (IIBP), and the full-text of The Chicago Defender, an important Black newspaper, from 1935-1975. 

Black Thought and Culture    

Full-text collection of published non-fiction works is included, as well as interviews, journal articles, letters, and other materials of leading African-Americans. Biographical essays by leading scholars and an annotated bibliography of the sources in the database are also featured.

Black Women Writers    

Works of fiction, nonfiction and poetry by women from North America, Africa and the Caribbean.

Caribbean Literature    

Full text of fiction, poetry, essays, plays, and other materials by authors from the Caribbean archipelago.

Ethnic NewsWatch  (1960+)

Interdisciplinary, bilingual (English and Spanish), full-text database of the newspapers, magazines and journals of the ethnic, minority, and native press.

Freedman’s Bank Records. (Accessible from Library Web Computers)

"Freedman’s Bank was created to assist newly freed slaves during and after the American Civil War. Records cover approximately 1864-71 and document names and relationships of those who used the bank. Although the records contain limited genealogical information, they are a valuable source of family history information for those with African-American ancestry.”

Oral History Online    

Provides indexing, plus some full text, for English-language oral histories that are publicly available on the Web and that are held by repositories and archives around the world. Primarily covers 20th-century America, but there is some content for other times and places.

Oxford African American Studies Center  

Provides online access to the finest reference resources in African American studies. At its core, AASC includes the new Encyclopedia of African American History 1619-1895; the forthcoming companion set, the Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present; the second edition of Black Women in America; and the much-anticipated African American National Biography. Also includes the highly acclaimed Africana, a 5 volume history of the African and African American experience. In addition to these major reference works, AASC offers other key resources from Oxford's reference series, including the Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature.

Smithsonian Global Sound  

Smithsonian Global Sound is a virtual encyclopedia of the world's musical and aural traditions. It includes the published recordings owned by the non-profit Smithsonian Folkways Recordings label and the archival audio collections of the Folkways Records, Cook, Dyer-Bennet, Fast Folk, Monitor, Paredon and other labels. It also includes music recorded around the African continent by for the International Library of African Music (ILAM) at Rhodes University as well as material collected by recordists on the South Asian subcontinent from the Archive Research Centre for Ethnomusicology (ARCE), sponsored by the American Institute for Indian Studies.