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Africana Studies

Find Primary Sources in Quicksearch

Primary sources are materials or sources of information that offer first hand accounts of the time period or event that you want to study. These include things like letters, photographs, historic newspaper articles, interviews and other sources.

 

 To locate primary sources in Quick search (libraries.rutgers.edu), try one of these strategies: 

Quicksearch Basic Search: 

  • Run a search then use filters to search "Resource Type"--> "Archival Material" and/or "Images," Videos, Sound Recordings, Collections, film, Newspaper articles etc. 
  • Search for subject plus the keyword "sources" or "documents" (See Example Search: "the great migration" sources)

Quicksearch Advanced Search: 

  • Use the Advance Search feature, type in the subject of your search on the first line(s) and then on the subsequent line enter any or multiple of the following subject headings: sources* OR archives* OR diaries* OR correspondence* OR personal narratives* OR speeches* OR pictorial* (see an example search)

Primary Sources: Images, Documents etc.

  • ProQuest One: Black Studies brings together primary and secondary sources, leading historical black newspapers, archival documents, government materials, video, writings by major American black intellectuals and leaders, and essays by top scholars in Black Studies. The primary focus of the collection is the experience of black people in the United States, but it also includes some materials with a more global focus. Major elements of the collection include:
    • NAACP Papers & records of civil rights organizations
    • Black Literature Index
    • Black Studies Periodicals
    • Historical Black Newspapers
    • Personal papers of key civil rights figures, including Robert F. Williams, Mary McLeod Bethune, Arthur Mitchell, A. Philip Randolph, and Bayard Rustin.
    • U.S. Federal Government Records, including files from the Department of Justice, FBI, and U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
    • Archival collections dating from the 18th - 19th centuries, including Black Abolitionist Papers, Records of Antebellum Southern Plantations, Slave Trade Records, Reconstruction Military
      Government Records, and Freedman’s Savings Bank Records.
    • Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience essays
  • Black Thought and Culture is a landmark electronic collection of approximately 100,000 pages of non-fiction writings by major American black leaders. Types of material include articles and essays, monographs, speeches, interviews, pamphlets, and correspondence. Approximately twenty percent is previously unpublished, including transcripts from the Columbia University Oral History Project. Dates: 18th-20th centuries.
  • Slavery, Abolition & Social Justice brings together digitized primary source material from archives around the world relating to the history of slavery, with a focus on the various forms slavery has taken around the globe, slaves' experiences and testimonies, abolitionist and social justice movements, and the global legacy of slavery. Document types include manuscripts, government publications, court records, pamphlets, books, maps, images, testimonials, and voyage logs. The collection includes materials produced in Africa, Europe, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, North America, and South America. It also includes thematic companion essays and historical timelines. Date: 1490-2008
  • Digital Library of the Caribbean: cooperative digital library for resources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean. Cultural, historical and research materials include images, books, maps, newspapers and more! 
  • Africa Commons is a platform for discovering African historical and cultural materials held by organizations around the world. It searches across over 250,000 documents from over 2,100 collections and over 600 organizations, including libraries, museums, and archives.
  • Empire Onlinedigitized primary sources on the history of empires and empire building in the modern era. The collection focuses on the British Empire, though it also includes materials on American imperialism, with materials written from a range of perspectives including indigenous peoples in Africa, India, North America and by French, Spanish, Portuguese and Germans. Material types include essays, atlases, monographs, autobiographies, reports of government agencies and voluntary organizations, magazine articles, fiction, sermons, letters, and diaries. Dates: 1492-2007

  • Archives Unbound: Federal Response to Radicalism in the 1960s is a collection of the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation)’s previously classified files on prominent radicals and radical organizations from 1956 to 1971. The files include material such as newspaper clippings, meeting transcripts, internal bureau memoranda, and reports of special agents, which frequently refer to information provided by confidential informants. Subjects of the investigations include Abbie Hoffman, Malcolm X, Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, Students for a Democratic Society and the Weatherman Underground Organization, the Fire Bombing and Shooting at Kent State University, the Black Panther Party, the Brown Berets, and a number of white supremacist groups. A significant portion of this collection documents COINTELPRO, the bureau's extensive "counterintelligence" program against dissent in the 1960s.This collection can be crossed search with another Archives Unbound collection, Federal Surveillance of African Americans, 1920-1984

BOOKS:

  • HathiTrust Digital Library - Search millions of books, government publications, dissertations, journals, and other published and unpublished materials. Includes hundreds of works in French and Latin, mostly from the 18th and 19th centuries. (NetID Required)

 

Collective Africana Materials Project

The Cooperative Africana Materials Project (collects newspapers, journals, government publications, personal and corporate archives, and the personal papers of scholars and government leaders.  CAMP's materials are in many African and European languages, including Swahili, Portuguese, French, Zulu, Xhosa, English, and German. Focus is on West, East and Central Africa. Dates covered depend on collection but generally 20th C

CAMP is a joint effort by research libraries throughout the world and the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) to preserve publications and archives concerning the nearly fifty nations of Sub-Saharan Africa.  CAMP acquires and preserves materials in microform and digital formats.  

Maps

  • Caribbean Map Collection (Digital Library of the Caribbean) Includes maps from 1564 through the present, although historical maps form the bulk of the collection.

Arts

  • Artstor: A digital image library in the areas of art, architecture, the humanities, and social sciences with a set of tools to view, present, and manage images.
  • Art & Architecture ePortal: Collection of books and images documenting the history of art, architecture, photography, and design.

Media, Film, Sound Recording

Film & Media:

 

  • Academic Video Online (AVON): includes American History in Video and Ethnographic Video Online. Videos in a broad range of subject areas from over 1,500 leading distributors, producers, and filmmakers. (1894-present)

  • Kanopy: Kanopy provides access to a broad selection of streaming video titles for educational purposes, including documentaries, independent and foreign films, classics, and feature films. Kanopyincludes films from a wide range of content providers, including New Day Films, PBS, the Criterion Channel, Kino Lorber, and Documentary Educational Resources

  •  Smithsonian Global Sound: Audio recordings of American folk, blues, bluegrass, jazz, spoken word, and world music.

ORAL HISTORY/Ethnography

  • Ethnographic Sound Archives Online is a digitized collection of previously unpublished historical audio field recordings of music from around the world, accompanied by supporting field notes and ethnographers’ metadata. These recordings allow for the study of music in its cultural context. Includes U.S.A South Negro Folklore collection. The majority of materials in the collection were recorded during the early days of ethnomousicology as a discipline, the 1960s - 1980s.

Find Primary Sources & Collections Beyond Rutgers

Use the following catalogs and databases to locate primary sources outside of Rutgers' collections. 

  • ArchiveGrid Index to archival collection descriptions and finding aids
  • WorldcatUnion catalog of over 179 million bibliographic records for titles owned by libraries that participate in/contribute to OCLC. As part of "Advanced Search" allows you to limit your search to "archival materials".
  • C19: The Nineteenth Century IndexThe most comprehensive source for English language material (archives, newspapers etc.)printed in the 19th Century. Includes bibliographic access to 71,000 archival collections. Dates covered: long 19th C.