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African American Studies — Home Page

Primary and selected secondary sources for research in African American Studies at Princeton University.

Articles and databases

African American Communities

"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, revealing the prevalent challenges of racism, discrimination and integration, and a unique African American culture and identity."

African American Historical Serials Collection

"The African American Historical Serials Collection is a complete, centralized and accessible resource of formerly fragmentary, widely dispersed and endangered materials that document the history of African American life and religious organizations from primary source materials published between 1829 and 1922."

Afro-Americana Imprints, 1535-1922 Full text of more than 12,000 printed works, including lesser known imprints published from the early 16th century to the early 20th century.

America: History and Life  (1954+)

Predecessor Writings on American History covering 1904-1954 is found here.

American History & Culture Online  (1500-1926)

Digital library of works written or published in the United States, as well as items printed elsewhere, that document the history of the Americas from 1492 to the mid-1800s. Based on Sabin's Bibliotheca Americana. 

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.

Early American Imprints  (1801-1819)  

Note: (not yet complete) Digital library of works published in America in the early 19th century. Materials include fiction and non-fiction covering every aspect of American life in the period. 

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (1861+; full text 1997+)  

The database includes citations to dissertations from 1861 to those accepted last semester. Citations for dissertations and master's theses published from 1980 forward have abstracts.

Harpweek  

HeritageQuest Online  

Includes all of the images, & extensive indexing, from the 1790 - 1930 U.S. federal censuses. Offers more than 20,000 book titles, including nearly 8,000 family histories & over 12,000 local histories. Additionally, there are more than 250 primary-source documents such as tax lists, city directories, probate records, and more.  Search for individuals in Freedman’s Bank (1865-1874), which was founded to serve African Americans.

History Compass  (2003+)  

Peer reviewed survey articles across the historical disciplines. 

Making of the Modern World Digital Archive  (1450-1850)

Digital edition of the Goldsmiths'-Kress collections of books on that document economic and business activity in the West, from the last half of the 15th century to the mid-19th century. Materials include books, pamphlets and ephemera and cover a broad range of topics in political science, history, sociology, and banking, finance, transportation and manufacturing.

Nineteenth Century Masterfile  (Nineteenth Century+)

Combines various general, scientific, religious, psychological, and legal indexes covering the nineteenth century.

Urban Studies Abstracts  (1973+)  

Covers urban affairs, community development, urban history, etc.

Digital history projects

Civil Rights Movement Archive 

The Civil Rights Movement Vetrans website was created by and is maintained by veterans of organizations like SNCC and CORE. It is designed to be a site about the Movement "by those who actually lived it."

O Say Can You See

"This project explores multigenerational black, white, and mixed family networks in early Washington, D.C., by collecting, digitizing, making accessible, and analyzing thousands of case files from the Circuit Court for the District of Columbia, Maryland state courts, and the U.S. Supreme Court. We include petitions for freedom, civil, criminal, and chancery cases. And we incorporate where possible related documents about these families from special collections, archives, churches, and local historical societies. Scholars from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the University of Maryland will collaborate by uncovering the web of litigants, jurists, legal actors, and participants in this community, and by placing these family networks in the foreground of our interpretive framework of slavery and national formation."

Encyclopedias and guides

Africana: the Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, 2005. In African American Studies Reading Room at DT14.A37435 2005.

Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century

The Encyclopedia of African American Military History, by William Weir.  Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2004.  (F) UB418.A47 W45 2004

The Encyclopedia of Civil Rights in America

Encyclopedia of slave resistance and rebellion

The Harvard guide to African-American history, 2001.  In African American Studies Reading Room at E185 .H326 2001

Oxford African American Studies Center  

Genealogy

ProQuest African American Heritage - Provides key genealogical and historical records specific to tracing the lives of African  Americans.  It contains information vital to African American genealogical research, including U.S. federal census, freedman and slave records, birth, marriage, and death records, church records, court and legal records, genealogies and family histories.

 

 

Images

 

Images of African-American Slavery and Freedom from the Collections of the Library of Congress.  Selected sets of images on frequently requested topics, focusing on images for which there are no known restrictions.

Photographs of African Americans During the Civil War: A List of Images in the Civil War Photograph Collection of the Library of Congress. A selection of photographs in the Civil War Photograph Collection that include African Americans.

Oral history

Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South - “A selection of 100 recorded oral history interviews chronicling African American life during the age of legal segregation in the American South, from the 1890s to the 1950s.”

The History Makers

Videos and full transcripts for interviews with 100 contemporary African Americans.

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.

Sixties: Primary Documents and Personal Narratives 1960-1974  

Contains letters, diaries, oral histories, posters, pamphlets, and rare audio and video materials documenting the key events, trends, and movements in 1960s America.

Negro Motorist Green Book

Negro Motorist Green Book

“The Negro traveler's inconveniences,” writes Wendell P. Alston in The Negro Motorist Green Book for 1949, “are many and they are increasing because today so many more are traveling, individually and in groups….

The Green Book with its list of hotels, boarding houses, restaurnts, beauty shops, barber shops and various other services can most certainly help resolve your tracel problems.  It was the idea of Victor H. Green, the publisher, in introducing the Green Book, to save the travelers of his race from as many difficulties and embarrassments as possible.”gro