Africana Studies

IMAGES, DOCUMENTS +

• 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 Approximately twenty percent is previously unpublished, including transcripts from the Columbia University Oral History Project.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 Online: digitized 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)

FILM & SOUND:

• 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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ADDITIONAL MATERIALS & DATABASES: 

African American History Section of Library of Congress American Memory Project

African American Perspectives: Pamphlets,1818-1907 (Library of Congress)

Resources for Black History Month (Library of Congress)

In Motion: The African American Migration Experience

Digital Manuscripts, NYPL Schomburg

The Green Book

African Activist Archive (MSU)

Blackpast.org Digital Archives

North American Women's Letters and Diaries: Colonial Times to 1950

Social and Cultural History: Letters and Diaries Online

Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 (Scholar's Edition)

Selected Sources for 20th and 21st c Black History and Cultures

Smithsonian Global Sound

Historic Maps of New Jersey in Rutgers Special Collections: use this library research guide to navigate to Rutgers' collections of NJ maps

Maps of the Americas

From the Perry-Castaneda Library Map Collection at the University of Texas at Austin.

Caribbean Map Collection (Digital Library of the Caribbean)

Includes maps from 1564 through the present, although historical maps form the bulk of the collection.

To locate primary sources in quick search, try one of these two ways: 

• Use the filters to search for specific types of material (film, audio, newspaper articles or other media etc)
• 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: correspondence OR diaries OR speeches OR interviews OR documents

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.