Africana Studies
- Sheridan Libraries
- Guides
- Africana Studies
- Primary Sources
Explore resources for the study of Africa and the African diaspora.
Microfilms: General Africa and African-American
Microfilms: Slavery + Abolition: US
Microfilms: Civil War to 20th Century
- FBI Files: Communist Infiltration of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference [3236]; Marcus Garvey [3323]; MIBURN = Mississippi Burning [3363]
- FBI Files: Malcolm X [3006, 3289]; Elijah Muhammed [3290]; Black Panther Party, NC [3029]; Paul Robeson [3228]; Roy Wilkins [3229]; National Negro Congress [3232]; Philip Randolf [3233]; NAACP [3235]; Hoover's File on M.L. King Jr. [3236]- [pt 1] [pt 2];
Primary Sources
The following is a list of selected online, newspaper, print, and microform collections available at MSE library or on the Web. They are all primary sources in Africana Studies.
Online
- History Makers: the Nation's Largest African American Video Oral History CollectionHistory Makers picks up where the WPA interviews left off, as the largest oral history collection focusing on Black Americans in the 20th century.
HistoryMakers' is the nation’s largest African American video oral history archive. As a non-profit educational institution, the organization is committed to preserving, developing and providing easy access to an internationally recognized archival collection of thousands of African American video oral histories which seeks to preserve and elevate the cultural equity of the African American community to the level of its historical record, as well as to increase the cultural understanding of present and future generations. - History VaultSlavery and the Law
Papers of the NAACP, 1913-1965
Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century
African American Police League Records (1961-1988)
Slavery, the Slave Trade, and the Law and Order in the 19th Century (1636-1880)
Southern Life and African American History, 1775-1915 - Black Drama, 1850 to PresentBlack Drama contains approximately 1200 plays by 201 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. The database also includes selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays. Some 440 of the plays are published here for the first time, including a number by major authors.
- Music Online: American SongAmerican Song is a history database that allows people to hear and feel the music from America's past.The database includes songs by and about American Indians, miners, immigrants, slaves, children, pioneers, and cowboys. Included in the database are the songs of Civil Rights, political campaigns, Prohibition, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, anti-war protests, and more.
- African-American Poetry, 1760-1900A database of modern and contemporary African American poetry, featuring thousands of poems by some of the most important African American poets of the last century.
- American MemoryProvides open access to selected materials from the collections of the Library of Congress and other institutions that chronicle the history of the United States.
- From Slavery to Freedom: The African American Pamphlet Collection, 1822-1909Presents 396 pamphlets from the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, published from 1822 through 1909, by African-American authors and others who wrote about slavery, African colonization, Emancipation, Reconstruction, and related topics.
- Guide to African American SourcesHighlights African American sources in the H. Furlong Baldwin Library at the Maryland Historical Society.
- Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery CollectionAn extensive collection of slavery and abolitionist materials gathered by Reverend Samuel Joseph May. The collection includes over 10,000 pamphlets and leaflets documenting the anti-slavery struggle at the local, regional, and national levels.
- Say It Plain: A Century of Great African American SpeechesThis is the first anthology of African American political oratory designed for the ear and the eye. It is a sampling from the great stream of words spoken by black Americans, exhorting the nation to make good on its democratic principles.
- Slavery and Anti-Slavery: Debates over Slavery and AbolitionOver 1.5 million cross-searchable pages of primary sources on transatlantic slavery and other scholarly publications.
- Twentieth-Century African American PoetryA database of modern and contemporary African American poetry, featuring almost 9,000 poems by 62 of the most important African American poets of the last century.
- Voyages: Tras-Atlantic Slave Trade Database"The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database has information on more than 35,000 slave voyages that forcibly embarked over 12 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. It offers researchers, students and the general public a chance to rediscover the reality of one of the largest forced movements of peoples in world history."
- Description from Emory University's website.
Newspapers
- 17th & 18th Century Burney Collection NewspapersThe newspapers and news pamphlets gathered by the Reverend Charles Burney (1757 - 1817) represent the largest single collection of 17th and 18th century English news media. The 700 or so bound volumes of newspapers and news pamphlets were published mostly in London, however there are also some English provincial, Irish and Scottish papers, and a few examples from the American colonies, Europe and India.
- Accessible ArchivesAccessible Archives' databases contain the rich, comprehensive material found in leading historic periodicals and books. Eyewitness accounts of historical events, vivid descriptions of daily life, editorial observations, commerce as seen through advertisements, and genealogical records.
- African American Newspapers, 1827-1998 (Readex)Explore African American history, culture and daily life in the 19th and 20th centuries through newspaper articles. This is a sub-set collection within the America's Historical Newspapers database.
- African American Newspapers (1836-1922) from Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers (Library of Congress)This resource provides access to historic African American newspapers from 1836 to 1922.
- African Newspapers, 1800-1922 (Readex)More than 40 nineteenth- and twentieth-century African newspapers. Featuring titles from Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda and Zimbabwe.
- African American Newspapers: The 19th CenturySearch the full-text of the following titles: The Christian Recorder; Colored American; Frederick Douglass Papers and more.
- Atlanta Daily World (1931-2003)The Atlanta Daily World had the first black White House correspondent and was the first black daily in the nation in the 20th century.
- Baltimore Afro-American (1893-1988)This newspaper was the most widely circulated black newspaper on the Atlantic coast. It was the first black newspaper to have correspondents reporting on World War II, foreign correspondents, and female sports correspondents.
- Chicago Defender (1910-1975)Full text backfile, from 1910 to 1975, of the influential black newspaper The Chicago Defender. Robert Sengstacke Abbott founded the Defender in May 1905 and by the outbreak of the First World War it had become the most widely-read black newspaper in the country, with more than two thirds of its readership based outside Chicago. When Abbott died in 1940, his nephew John Sengstacke became editor and publisher of the Defender, which began publishing on a daily basis in 1956.
- Florida Sentinel Bulletin Collection"The Florida Sentinel Bulletin is Florida's largest and most widely read African American newspaper. Founded in 1945, the paper is published twice weekly and distributed door-to-door and on news racks in Hillsborough, Polk, and Pinellas counties and via subscription throughout the United States."
- Description from the University of South Florida Tampa Library's website. - Indianapolis Recorder"What began as a two-page church bulletin by co-founders George Pheldon Stewart and William H. Porter, the Indianapolis Recorder is now one of the top African-American publications in the nation. Established in 1897, the Indianapolis Recorder focused on local people and events in Indianapolis but also reported national events."
- Description from the IUPUI University Library's website. - Los Angeles Sentinel (1934-2005)This is the oldest and largest black newspaper in the western United States and the largest African-American owned newspaper in the U.S.
- New York Amsterdam News (1922-1993)A leading African-American newspaper, with more than two-thirds of its readership outside Chicago.
- Philadelphia Tribune (1912-2001)This oldest continuously published black newspaper is dedicated to the needs and concerns of the fourth largest black community in the U.S. During the 1930s the paper supported the growth of the United Way, rallied against the riots in Chester, PA, and continuously fought against segregation.
- Pittsburgh Courier (1911-2002)One of the most nationally circulated Black newspapers, the Courier reached its peak in the 1930s. A conservative voice in the African-American community, the Courier challenged the misrepresentation of African-Americans in the national media and advocated social reforms to advance the cause of civil rights.
- Proquest Historical NewspapersDeep backfile for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, The Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times.
- The James Birney Anti-Slavery Collection of Johns Hopkins UniversityA collection of over 1,000 books and pamphlets, most of which were collected by abolitionist writer and publisher James G. Birney (1792-1857).
- The Black Abolitionist PapersA selection of primary sources from a larger collection available on microfilm (see below). Contents: The British Isles; Canada; and The United States.
E-Resources/ Digtial Collections: African American
Africa: Primary Source databases
- Colonial Africa in Official StatisticsThese statistics cover the history of thirteen colonies across Africa. The date range of statistics for each colony depends on who ran it at the time. Most colonial statistics cover that colony's funds, its population and the names of its officers. Trade and public services data is also included. The statistics for Africa told the Colonial Office how the British Empire was performing as a business. A British Online Archives database.
- African Studies CollectionA project of the University of Wisconsin-Madison to digitize materials about Africa that were published in limited, sometimes very limited, quantities, but which have produced a demand beyond the capacity of their initial print run to satisfy. Selected by librarians, scholars, and other subject specialists along a wide range of criteria, this collection includes published materials as well as archival documents. The items were digitized from a variety of formats including books, manuscripts, sound recordings, photographs, maps, and other resources.
- Confidential Print: Africa, 1834-1966Spanning the full era of the modern European colonisation of Africa, from the occupation of Algeria by France, through increasing British presence on the west African coast and around the Cape of Good Hope in the south, the Berlin Conference which set off the ‘Scramble for Africa’, the high-water mark of economic exploitation of Africans in the Congo Free State, rivalries amongst European powers and the era of withdrawal that followed the Second World War, Confidential Print: Africa is a fundamental resource for academics, students and researchers studying modern Africa and its recent history.
- South African in records from colonial missionaries, 1819-1900This collection from the Archives of the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, dates from their earliest connection with South Africa. As the USPG is a church society, their records are arranged by dioceses, as this is the administrative and geographical unit with which they dealt. A British Online Archives database.
- Apartheid South Africa 1948-1980Apartheid South Africa makes available British government files from the Foreign, Colonial, Dominion and Foreign and Commonwealth Offices spanning the period 1948 to 1980. These previously restricted letters, diplomatic dispatches, reports, trial papers, activists’ biographies and first-hand accounts of events give unprecedented access to the history of South Africa’s apartheid regime. The files explore the relationship of the international community with South Africa and chart increasing civil unrest against a backdrop of waning colonialism in Africa and mounting world condemnation.
- Empire OnlineThis resource brings together manuscript, printed and visual primary source materials for the study of 'Empire' and its theories, practices and consequences. The materials span across the last five centuries.
- Making of the Modern World, 1450-1945Invaluable for an understanding of the competition for empire and the projection of European power from 1500 to the early twentieth century. Explore the historical underpinnings integral to the study of economics and European imperialism.
- Europe and Africa, Colonialism and CultureSo many research topics emerged from the colonial conquest and the legacy of slavery in modern South African society—the Anglo-Boer War, imperial policy, and race classification among them—that this volatile corner of nineteenth-century history draws enduring interest from scholars and students. To support their research, Europe and Africa, Colonialism and Culture delivers monographs, manuscripts, and newspaper accounts covering key issues of economics, world politics, and international strategy
- Archives Unbound: African StudiesEvangelism in Africa: Correspondence of the Board of Foreign Missions, 1835-1910
Egypt: Records of the U.S. Department of State, 1853-1962
King and People in Morocco, 1950-1959: U.S. State Department Records on the Internal Affairs of Morocco
Liberation Movement in Africa and African America
Libya: Records of the U.S. Department of State, 1796-1885
Morocco: Records of the U.S. Department of State, 1797-1929