African American Studies

Large general database of articles from scholarly journals and a few newspapers on many topics.

Searchable text and page images for 7 African-American newspapers published between 1827 and 1860. See also African-American papers in microfilm.at UVA. See also entry below for ProQuest Historical Newspapers - Black and Ethnic Newspapers, for 20th-21st century African-American newspaper coverage.

Focusing predominantly on Atlanta, Chicago, 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 Americans and Jim Crow: Repression and Protest offers more than 1,000 fully searchable printed works critical for insight into African-American culture and life from the beginning of Jim Crow to World War I and beyond.

African American Newspapers, Series 1 and 2, provides online access to more than 350 U.S. newspapers chronicling a century and a half of the African-American experience. This unique collection, which includes historically significant papers from more than 35 states, features many rare 19th-century titles.

African Americans and Reconstruction: Hope and Struggle provides nearly 1,400 fully searchable printed works essential for understanding the African-American struggle for identity from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of Jim Crow.

Covers the history of the United States and Canada from prehistory to present with records from 2,000 English-language journals published worldwide.

Thousands of historical journal articles from 1740-1900, including many articles on abolition and issues surrounding slavery and African-Americans.

This primary source collection details the extensive work of African Americans to abolish slavery in the United States prior to the Civil War. Covering the period 1830-1865, the collection presents the international impact of African American activism against slavery, in the writings of the activists themselves.

This module supplements the original module of Federal Government records by adding civil rights records from the Ford and Reagan presidencies.

This module supplements the original module of Federal Government records by adding civil rights records from the Ford and Reagan presidencies.

The Organizational Records and Personal Papers bring a new perspective to the Black Freedom Struggle via the records of major civil rights organizations and personal papers of leaders and observers of the 20th century Black freedom struggle. The three major civil rights organizations are the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs.

This Black Freedom module is highlighted by the records of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Africa-related papers of Claude Barnett, and the Robert F. Williams Papers. SNCC, formed by student activists in 1960 after the explosion of the sit-in movement, was one of the three most important civil rights organizations of the 1960s, alongside SCLC and the NAACP. CORE was formed in 1941 and organized the pioneering Journey of Reconciliation in the 1940s and the Freedom Rides in the early 1960s; both events are documented in the CORE records in this module.

This primary source collection offers an expansive window into centuries of African American history, culture and daily life—as well as the ways the dominant culture has portrayed and perceived people of African descent. The content in this database is sourced from more than 19,000 American and global news sources, including over 400 current and historical Black publications.

Part of Gale Primary Sources: Archives Unbound, materials in the collection document John LeFlore's prolific work in both public and private life.

James Dombrowski was a southern white Methodist minister and intellectual who was active in the African American civil rights movement from the 1940s through 1960s. This collection consists of his correspondence and papers as leader of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, 1941-1948, and executive director of the Southern Conference Educational Fund, 1948-1966.

The collections in this module deliver unique coverage of the Confederate Army and the Union Army. The Confederate Army records consist of Confederate Military Manuscripts sourced from the holdings of Virginia Historical Society; the Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, Louisiana State University; the Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin; and the University of Virginia. The collections in the Confederate Military Manuscripts cover the perspective of an army commander or an administrative department down to the level of the private soldier, covering all aspects of their military service and experience, while also offering glimpses of life on the home front. Several previously unpublished collections of records of the Union Army are also integral to this module. Highlights include papers of spies, scouts, guides and detectives, including a series on Allan Pinkerton; records on military discipline from courts-martial, courts of inquiry and investigations by military commissions; and records of the U.S. Colored Troops.

In depth background reports on contemporary issues with lists of recommended books and articles.

Primary documents, secondary reference sources and journal articles covering all areas of U.S. history from pre-colonial times to the present day.

Includes MLA, Dictionary of Literary Biography and other biographical and critical compilations about authors, along with journal articles and book chapters about literary works and topics.

Ebony Magazine Archive covers civil rights, education, entrepreneurship and other social topics with an African-American focus. It includes more than 800 issues providing a broad view of African-American culture from its first issue in 1945 through 2014.

Full-text of newspaper, magazine, and journal articles from 200 ethnic, minority, and native publications in the U.S., in English and in Spanish.

Benjamin J. Davis (1903-1964), one of the best known African American members of the Communist Party USA and a figure central to any history of activism in Harlem in the years of the Great Depression, World War II, and the McCarthy period, was the object of intense scrutiny by the FBI and other government intelligence operations for the whole of his political life. Davis served as a leader in local, district, and national leadership bodies of the Communist Party USA and thus concerned himself with a broad range of organizational, political, and theoretical questions. There is news of grassroots organizing successes and failures, minutes from meetings held on all the levels on which Davis engaged, and reports from member-informers on all the major political and theoretical debates.

Retrospective, full-text .pdf coverage of hundreds of legal periodicals, U.S. Supreme Court cases, the U.S. Statutes at Large, Congressional Record, hearings and other legislative history materials, Federal Register, U.S. Attorney General opinions, U.S. treaties and agreements, Foreign and International Law, Israel Law Reports, English Reports, Hague Academy Recueil des Cours, Parker School of Foreign and Comparative Law collection, and the Virginia Law Weekly archive. Searchable by citation, author/title, and keyword.

Around 150,000 stories are assembled here from life oral history interviews with 2,700 historically significant African Americans including politicians, religious leaders, athletes, musicians, civil rights activists, soldiers, and many more.

Slavery in Antebellum Southern Industries presents some of the richest, most valuable, and most complete collections in the entire documentary record of American slavery, focusing on the industrial uses of slave labor. The materials selected include company records; business and personal correspondence; documents pertaining to the purchase, hire, medical care, and provisioning of slave laborers; descriptions of production processes; and journals recounting costs and income. The work ledgers in these collections record slave earnings and expenditures and provide extraordinary insight into slave life. The collections document slavery in such enterprises as gold, silver, copper, and lead mining; iron manufacturing, machine shop work, lumbering, quarrying, brickmaking, tobacco manufacturing, shipbuilding, and heavy construction; and building of railroads and canals.

Slavery and the Law features petitions on race, slavery, and free blacks that were submitted to state legislatures and county courthouses between 1775 and 1867. These petitions were collected by Loren Schweninger over a four year period from hundreds of courthouses and historical societies in 10 states and the District of Columbia. The petitions document the realities of slavery at the most immediate local level and with amazing candor. Slavery and the Law also includes the important State Slavery Statutes collection, a comprehensive record of the laws governing American slavery from 1789-1865.

Full-text backfiles of many scholarly journals, usually from the first issue to 3-5 years before the present.

The Northeast Slavery Records Index (NESRI) is an online searchable compilation of records that identify individual enslaved persons and enslavers in the states of New York, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Jersey.

NESRI indexes census records, slave trade transactions, cemetery records, birth certifications, manumissions, ship inventories, newspaper accounts, private narratives, legal documents, and many other sources. The goal is to deepen the understanding of slavery in the northeast United States by bringing together information that until now has been largely disconnected and difficult to access. This allows for searches that combine records from all indexed sources based on parameters such as the name of an owner, a place name, and date ranges.

Information by and about the U.S. Congress: documents and reports, Legislative Histories, hearings, and members and committees. Search the Congressional Record, Federal Register, Federal Regulations, The Hill, and Roll Call. Formerly LexisNexis Congressional.

The Slave Societies Digital Archive preserves endangered ecclesiastical and secular documents related to Africans and African-descended peoples in slave societies. SSDA holdings include more than 700,000 digital images, drawn close to 2,000 unique volumes, dating from the sixteenth through twentieth centuries that document the lives of an estimated four to six million individuals. This collection contains the most extensive serial records for the history of Africans in the Atlantic World, and also includes valuable information about the indigenous, European, and Asian populations who lived alongside them.

This resource is designed as an important portal for slavery and abolition studies, bringing together documents and collections covering an extensive time period, between 1490 and 2007, from libraries and archives across the Atlantic world. Close attention is given to the varieties of slavery, the legacy of slavery, the social-justice perspective, and the continued existence of slavery today.

Slavery and Anti-Slavery includes collections on the transatlantic slave trade, the global movement for the abolition of slavery, the legal, personal, and economic aspects of the slavery system, and the dynamics of emancipation in the U.S. as well as in Latin America, the Caribbean, and other regions.

Part of History Vault, the three modules include records of ante-bellum southern plantations from the Revolution through the Civil War, and plantation records from Emancipation to the Great Migration. The primary source documents cover business and day-to-day labor operations, as well as the roles of women, racial attitudes, slave-master relations, and social and cultural life on the plantations.

The papers contain clippings (articles by and about Jackson), correspondence of both Esther and James Jackson, including the Jacksons' voluminous World War II correspondence with each other, James Jackson's lectures (typescripts and audiocassettes), research notebooks, speeches, and writings (published and unpublished), subject files, correspondence, internal documents and printed ephemera pertaining to the Southern Negro Youth Congress, and to Freedomways, legal and other materials pertaining to the Smith Act indictments of Jackson and other communists, Communist Party internal documents, many of a programmatic nature, and memorabilia and other biographical materials.

Part of the African American Studies Collection, this database includes records of the New York State Supreme Court, which include a full testimony of all witnesses, including the two who spoke in secrecy to hide their identities; preliminary motions, summations, the court's charge, the verdicts, and the sentences; and a confession made years after the trial by one of the men convicted.

Searchable full text of over 100 scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, and mathematics, mostly from North American university presses. Older volumes are often available from JSTOR.

Many articles relevant to African-American history and life.