Key Sites on African-American History and Culture
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Biographical information on African-Americans is abundantly available in the University of Delaware's Morris Library. This guide can be used to identify full-text information online, books, newspaper and periodical articles, and encyclopedia entries on this topic.
This annotated listing of recommended African-American Web sites was prepared by Elna L. Saxton and Joe McClamroch, and published in the January, 1999 issue of College and Research Libraries News (vol. 60, no. 1). It is organized into five categories: Getting started, Educational sites/research centers, Organizations/associations, Afrocentric sites, and E-journals/news services.
In honor of the Library of Congress' Manuscript Division's centennial, its staff selected for online display representative historical documents on eight major themes, each theme covering the papers of prominent Americans whose lives reflect our country's evolution. This site reflects the theme, "African American History and Culture." Like the other theme pages, it consists of an essay containing links to digital reproductions of selected documents. A detailed description accompanies each document.
PBS is proud to recognize the unique experiences and accomplishments of African Americans. Browse by category or search for a specific person under arts, living, history, politics, people, video and kids. Special sections feature the legacy of Harry T. Moore, jazz, and UN mediator and diplomat Ralphe Bunche.
World Book editors have assembled a comprehensive look at the history of African Americans and their struggle for freedom in honor of Black History Month. The articles in this feature were taken from the World Book Multimedia Encyclopedia. There are also numerous links to World Wide Web sites concerning important figures and events in black history, as well as issues surrounding current events.
Provides a connection to over 200 listings of African American U.S. newspapers and publications sorted by State.
An online exhibit from the U.S. Library of Congress' American Memory project that showcases the Library's extensive African-American collections. It traces the African-American experience through nine chronological periods that document the long and difficult path from slavery to Reconstruction to the fight for civil and social equality in the twentieth century. With an emphasis on historical materials, it contains images of rare books, manuscripts, government documents, sheet music, movie posters and photographs.
Duke University's on-line archival collections featuring scanned pages and texts of the writings of African-American women. Includes the memoirs of Elizabeth Johnson Harris (1867-1942), an 1857 letter from Vilet Lester, a slave on a North Carolina plantation, and several letters from Hannah Valentine and Lethe Jackson, slaves on the estate of David Campbell, a governor of Virginia.
This site is produced by the co-editors of Microsoft��Encarta��Africana, including Professors Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Kwame Anthony Appiah. Its purpose is to promote understanding of black history and culture and to promote the educational use of Microsoft��Encarta��Africana in homes, schools, universities, and corporations. Coverage includes African American lifestyle, heritage, worldview and art.
The companion site to the Public Broadcasting Services (PBS) documentary explores the odyssey of African slaves in America, from the arrival of Europeans in Africa to the American Civil War. It is divided into four chronological sections, with each section featuring a teacher's guide keyed to a resource bank of more than 400 items including biographical information, full-text reproductions of related historical documents, and commentaries from contemporary experts. It boasts a major collection of images, documents, stories, biographies, and commentaries.
The first on-line book by a university press, this guide was prepared in collaboration with the University of Virginia Library's Electronic Text Center and the University's Information Technology and Communication Department. Michael Plunkett, the library's director of special collections, has updated the 1990 print version. It describes in detail the African-American
history holdings of the 26 institutional collections in Virginia, which range from early plantation records to diaries and letters to minutes of modern-day civil-rights movement meetings. The electronic edition includes some 18 historical photographs and images of key manuscripts and is searchable in full text.
Transcripts of interviews with a dozen former American slaves conducted in the 1930s by employees of the Works Progress Administration.
"A collection of primary documents related to the Amistad slave uprising. The site, provided by the U.S. National Archives, includes an account by the captain of the ship that captured the Amistad after it was taken over by slaves, a letter from former President John Quincy Adams requesting information about the incident, and the opinion of the Supreme Court in which the Amistad Africans were given their freedom."
"On-line index of the holdings of the Amistad research Center at Tulane University. The center's archives include more than 10 million documents from the American civil-rights movement and several collections of African and African-American Art."
"The Anacostia Museum and Center for African American History and Culture has grown from an experiment in community outreach to a national resource devoted to the identification, documentation, protection, and interpretation of the African American experience. The museum also examines contemporary urban issues, including housing, transportation, and health care, and their impact upon the African American community."
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"This research site provides a reference guide on the historical and contemporary experiences of African Americans. It was composed by Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Services and contains numerous subject categories, including race/identity, press, literature, and history. It lists African American Studies Encyclopedias and Handbooks, biographical sources, book annotations, videos, and links to other related sites... "
"This site, from the New Deal Network, features a selection of seventeen interviews of former slaves conducted by members of the Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). As with the recollections featured at the University of Virginia's American Slave Narratives: An Online Anthology, these narratives are from the 2,000 interviews with ex-slaves collected during 1936-1938 by journalists and other writers employed by the Federal Writers Project. In addition to the narratives, it features an introductory essay, three lesson plans, and a modest annotated guide to related online resources.
Hosted by the United States Civil War Center at Louisiana State University, this exhibit explores "the relationship between art and politics in the Civil War era" with over 100 digital images of Confederate notes. The images are accompanied by an overview of the Civil War and brief essays on the Antebellum economy and paper money in the mid-nineteenth century. It includes a bibliography and collection of related links.
"The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute is more than an online museum; it is a place that promotes research and provides education and discussion regarding civil and human rights issues in America and around the world." Covering the nation's segregation era to the birth of the Civil Rights Movement, it will interest anyone curious about American history and historical art form during the 1950s and 1960s.
The Public Broadcasting System broadcast this award-winning film to celebrate Black History Month, 1999. The film celebrates the history of America's Black newspapers and includes interviews with key reporters, publishers and photo journalists. Some of the prominent Black journalists interviewed are Vernon Jarrett, former reporter with Chicago Defender, Chicago Tribune, and the Chicago Sun Times and Edward "Abie" Robinson, former reporter with the California Eagle. The site includes a full transcript of the film and ordering information.
One of America's largest African-American virtual communities on the Internet. The site features a variety of lifestyle, career and community activities, including news, information, entertainment, sports, a full-service career center, special interest clubs, chat rooms and its popular member photo page.
This collection from the American Memory Project at the Library of Congress contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration, a Depression-era program that put unemployed writers to work.
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The Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, a nonprofit organization named after an African-American journalist, has published the first part of a series about the experiences of African-American journalists during the 1960s civil rights movement. The site, essentially an interactive archive, is written by veteran journalist Earl Caldwell, who is seen by many as a pioneer for other African-American journalists. The purpose of the series is to tell the story of those journalists who were pioneers in this era.
Time.com celebrates Black History LMonth with this notable Web page that takes viewers on a journey into the lives of noteworthy African American news makers of the mid- to late-twentieth century. The site contains a moderate profile of the Rev. Martin Luther king, Jr., as well as a reading room equipped with articles from Time Magazine's cover stories on black culture and extraordinary achievers in education, business, sports and entertainment. Note that viewers must scroll to the bottom of the Web page to access the various links because the side icons lead to dead and unavailable pages.
Researched and compiled by Eddie Becker, this site arose from independent research into the Smithsonian Institution's oldest building in Washington, DC, the Holt House. It includes comprehensive footnoted entries from archival and secondary source documents, including links to full text Internet sites. It includes details on the integral role played by slavery in the formation of the U.S. Capital and political system, spanning the period from 1619 to the present -- with sections covering 1619-1789, 1790-1829, and 1830 to the present.
The project, from the McCain Library & Archives, University of Southern Mississippi, aims to provide an Internet-accessible, fully searchable database of digitized versions of rare and unique library and archival resources on race relations in Mississippi. The first phase will offer 125 oral history transcripts on the civil rights movement, such as those by civil rights leaders Charles Cobb, Charles Evers, Aaron Henry, and Hollis Watkins. This collection also includes oral histories of governor Ross Barnett, national White Citizens Council leader William J. Simmons, and State Sovereignty head Erle Johnston.
A bibliography of oral history interviews on the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi from the University of Southern Mississippi Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage and the Tougaloo College Archives.
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This University of Virginia library site features transcripts and images of documents concerning acts of resistance to slavery in Virginia between the American Revolution and the Civil War. Each section includes a short summary and a link to the primary documents.
From the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries, this site brings together a collection of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century slave narratives. The collection comprises 230 English-language narratives and many biographies of fugitive and former slaves.
In 1846, Dred Scott and his wife Harriet filed suit for their freedom in the St. Louis Circuit Court, initiating an eleven-year legal fight that ended in a landmark Supreme Court decision that contributed to rising tensions between the free and slave states just before the American Civil War. This major digital project of the Washington University Libraries in St. Louis, presents a remarkable collection of documents relating to the case.
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Its "Eras in Black History" examines five centuries of black heritage through five distinct time periods, from the slave revolts of early America through the successes of the Civil Rights Movement. Each era is further divided by topic/profession, with biographies and photographs of notable people and descriptions and documents of historic events. The "Timeline of Achievements" traces the yearly contributions of African-Americans in politics, industry, the arts, religion, sports, and education. In addition, the site can be browsed alphabetically through the expanded Articles A to Z page, which contains links to every article through two lists--Biographies and Events &Institutions. The Guide features informative articles and is illustrated with historical film clips and audio recordings, as well as hundreds of photographs and other images. The Related Internet Links and Bibliography sections provide source material and areas for further study, as does the Study Guide for Students.
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Part of the Louisiana State University Library site, Faces profiles African American men and women who have contributed to the advancement of science and engineering. African American chemists, biologists, inventors, engineers, and mathematicians have contributed in both large and small ways that can be overlooked when chronicling the history of science. By describing the scientific history of selected African American men and women we can see how the efforts of individuals have advanced human understanding in the world around us.
The Foundation is committed to the belief that direct, face-to-face, dialogue between leaders of ethnic communities is the most effective path toward the reduction of bigotry and the promotion of reconciliation and understanding. In 2001, the Foundation launched a national education program in Black/Jewish relations, with the goal of transforming the powerful story of Black/Jewish cooperation in the civil rights movement into an educational vehicle to strengthen relations between Jewish and African American Students.
Library of Congress' first online release of the Frederick Douglass Papers contains over 2,000 items including a partial handwritten draft of his third autobiography, and a biography of his wife, Anna Murray Douglass, written by their daughter, Rosetta Douglass Sprague. In addition to writings by Douglass, material is included from authors such as Henry Ward Beecher, Ida B. Wells, Lydia Maria Child and Horace Greeley.
The State Historical Society of Wisconsin presents the first 20 issues of "Freedom's Journal," the first African-American owned and operated newspaper published in the United States. The Journal was published weekly in New York City from 1827 to 1829, and covered local, national, and international events, as well as offering editorials on slavery, lynchings and other injustices against African-Americans. The remaining issues (there are a total of 103) will be added in the near future. Note that the files are in PDF format and might have to be viewed in an enlarged format to read easily.
Part of the Library of Congress's American Memory project, the pamphlets in this collection constitute online primary resources in African-American History. Written by African-American authors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the materials deal with slavery, emancipation, African colonization, and related topics. The site includes "complete page images of 397 titles ... as well as searchable electronic texts and bibliographic records."
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A project of Bridgewater State College, this gallery focuses on the significant achievements and contributions of African Americans, Cape Verdeans, and Hispanics of African descent. It features the historical figures inducted into the HOBA and chronicles their lives, contributions, and the period of history in which they lived. Audio narratives are available with RealPlayer.
The Harry T. Moore Homesite commemorates the lives of two pioneering American black civil rights workers. Harry and his wife, Harriette, were leading human rights activists in Brevard County, in Florida, and in the nation. They were murdered when their house was bombed in 1951. It was the first killing of a prominent civil rights leader, and was a spark that ignited the American civil rights movement.
The Project is the comprehensive research on the history of Hartford's black community between the 17th and 20th centuries and is currently composed of two exhibits. "A Struggle from the Start" is a virtual exhibit of the history of Hartford's African-American community from 1638 to present. The "Hartford Studies Project" is a digitalized collection of images of the black experience in Hartford.
The Historical Text Archive provides historians with an electronic retrieval site covering much of human history, including extensive coverage of African-American history. It includes original material, links to other sites and reprints of books.
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Offers hundreds of links to various subject categories, spanning from Arts and Entertainment, to Books and Literature, to Education and Research, and much more. Viewers have the option of accessing the predefined subject headings or searching topics by keyword.
A national, nonprofit institution that conducts research on public policy issues of special concern to black Americans and other minorities. Founded in 1970, the Joint Center provides independent analyses through research, publications, and outreach programs.
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Langston Hughes' boyhood hometown, Lawrence, Kansas, will celebrate the life, art, and legacy of America's premier public poet in 2002. This centennial celebration of his birth will include a three-day symposium of scholars, poets, and performance artists who will explore themes relating to Hughes' life, work, and broad influence. This site, which features the full agenda, information on speakers, etc., will be updated through the centennial year.
This award-winning site features links to sites that focus on the lives of individuals or groups of people; to sites that contain worthwhile collections of links to other biographical resources and to primary biographical source material such as images, diaries, memoirs, correspondence, interviews, and oral histories; and to some of the best biographical dictionaries.
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One of the best sources of information about this African-American entrepreneur, hair care industry pioneer, philanthropist and social activist. The site comes from A'Lelia P. Bundles the great-great-granddaughter and biographer of Madam Walker.
Ghost stories haunt the moonlit backroads of the American South. Their roots in Southern culture and folklore are deep. Each month, The Moonlit Road brings you these ghost stories and other strange Southern folktales, told by the region's best storytellers. The stories can be read or heard using Real Player. The site offers background information on the Sea Islands and Gullah cultures to compliment a popular story from Veronica Byrd entitled "All God's Chillun Had Wings."
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The National Civil Rights Museum's mission is to educate and preserve the history of the Civil Rights Movement. Located at the site where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, the Museum houses interactive exhibits that trace the beginnings of the civil rights struggle.
A collaboration of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and Philip Morris Companies Inc.
Underground Railroad was a system of cooperation among Black slaves, abolitionists, sympathetic Whites, and Native Americans to help slaves escape the bondage of American slavery. The site currently contains a timeline, a list of major participants in the movement (along with brief descriptions and related resources), family stories and links to other related history sites. The Freedom Center is scheduled to open in Cincinnati, Ohio in 2004. Exhibits will include history galleries on pre-slavery African Kingdoms and post-slavery freedom movements in North America, Poland, South Africa, India, and more.
Produced by the History department at Furman University in South Carolina, this site features full texts of primary documents in nineteenth-century American history "with special emphasis on those sources that shed light on sectional conflict and transformations in regional identity." Materials will aid researchers examining issues of Slavery and Sectionalism, the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854, the Dred Scott Case, the election of 1860, the succession of the Southern states, and the immediate aftermath of the Civil War in the South.
This Web site, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, follows the great migration of African-Americans from mostly rural Southern areas into the large urban centers of the Northern United States during the century after the Civil War (1861-1865). There are sections on art, education, music, health practices, the cultural influences of the South that migrants brought with them, community rituals, Black urban journalism, and more.
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The site of Farai Chideya, an ABC News correspondent, who says that Pop and Politics has all sorts of deep and quirky information. She does everything from detailed statistical analysis of how the U.S. budget treats urban America, education, crime, and welfare to a piece called "I'm Glad I'm Not Black." that arose from something that a little girl said to her mother while sitting on a plane and staring at her. She ended up having a discussion with the mother about why we should talk to children about race, and it ended up with a happy ending.
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This new report, issued by Gary Orfield and John T. Yun of the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, analyzes recent US educational data and focuses on four significant demographic statistical trends in American Schools: the resegregation of the American South, the rising segregation of Latino students, the heightened segregation within suburban schools surrounding major metropolitan areas, and the rapid emergence of schools with three or more racial groups.
This site was developed by Africana.com and Warner Home Video in commemoration of the 25th anniversary of Alex Haley's epic TV miniseries, Roots. It features video clips and other multimedia features, along with Encarta Africana entries on the Middle Passage, the Transatlantic Slave Trade and other aspects of the African American experience. Interviews with producer David Wolper and Roots star Le Var Burton go behind the scenes of the making of TVs most-watched miniseries.
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The Schomburg Center, one of the research libraries of the New York Public Library, is an institution devoted to collecting, preserving and providing access to resources documenting the experiences of peoples of African descent throughout the world. The Schomburg Center promotes the study of these histories and cultures of the peoples and interprets its collections through exhibitions, publications, and educational, scholarly and cultural programs. This site includes information on the Center's various divisions: art and
artifacts; general research and reference; manuscripts, archives and rare books; moving image and recorded sound; and photographs and prints. It also contains links to other Internet sources of information on Africa and the African diaspora.
The information in this site is based on an exhibit marking the publication of the African-American Mosaic: A Library of Congress Resource Guide for the Study of Black History and Culture, the first Library-wide resource guide to the institution's African-American collections. Covering the nearly 500 years of the black experience in the Western hemisphere, the Mosaic surveys the full range, size and variety of the Library's collections, including books, periodicals, prints, photographs, music, film and recorded sound. This sampler from a much larger exhibition now in development covers the beginnings of colonization, abolition, migration and the Works Projects Administration (WPA).
Conceptualized and developed by Johnie H. Scott, California State University, Northridge, as a research resource for people interested in Pan African Diaspora Culture and History.
"This site provides access to the raw data and documentation which contains information on the following slave trade topics from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: records of slave ship movement between Africa and the Americas, slave ships of eighteenth century France, slave trade to Rio de Janeiro, Virginia slave trade in the eighteenth century, English slave trade (House of Lords Survey), Angola slave trade in the eighteenth century, internal slave trade to Rio de Janeiro, slave trade to Havana, Cuba, Nantes slave trade in the eighteenth century, and slave trade to Jamaica. For information about the data sets, read the study descriptions for each data set."
Selected links to sites on African-American history and culture hosted by Smithsonian Institution museums and organizations. The site is divided into two sections: African American Resources, and Exhibitions. African American Resources includes links to sites such as "African and African American Resources at the Smithsonian," "The African American Studies Center," and "Anacostia Museum Reading Lists." Exhibitions such as "African Immigrant Naming Ceremony," the "Amistad Case," "Million Man March Documentary Photographs," and "Martin Luther King Jr. 'I Have a Dream'" are featured.
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"Hosted by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University, this project has brought together over 200 documents and other items related to the history of American slaves and immigrants from Ireland and the links between them. The history of Afro- and Irish-American relations and the "whiteness" of Irish immigrants to America have long fascinated scholars, but this is the first time, to my knowledge, that such a large collection of primary sources on the subject have been offered together online." (from the Scout Report)
This Harpweek resource features historical text and illustrations from Harper's Weekly. Visitors are warned that some of the content, which is presented to give a true historical picture of the leading 19th century newspaper's view of black Americans, is considered racially offensive by today's standards. It features unique drawings and engravings, a timeline that lists the major events of slavery from 1619 to 1859, plus two more timelines on the Civil War and Reconstruction.
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This site from the Institute for Advanced Technologies in the Humanities at the University of Virginia contains a plethora of materials concerning Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and the nation's response to it. It features a complete electronic edition of the first published version of the novel.
"This National Geographic feature site explores the pre-Civil War, covert system that helped escaped slaves to reach freedom safely. It includes The Journey, an interactive first-person account of a runaway slave; Routes to Freedom, a Shockwave map of escape routes; Time Line, which chronicles slavery in the New World from 1501 until the U.S. abolition of slavery in 1865; and Faces of Freedom, a section containing twelve very brief biographies of famous abolitionists and civil rights leaders. In addition, the site includes For Kids, a section for younger students, and Classroom Ideas, which suggests educational activities for K-12 students. A discussion forum and a list of resources and links provide visitors with more opportunities to learn."
Links to government information on affirmative action and civil rights from the University of Colorado Libraries, Boulder, Colorado.
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President Lyndon Johnson's renowned voting rights speech delivered on March 15, 1965. From History and Politics Out Loud, a searchable archive of politically significant audio materials for scholars, teachers and students.
Founded in 1975, the Institute is the nation's oldest research center dedicated to the study of the history, culture and social institutions of African Americans. It sponsors research projects, fellowships for emerging and established scholars, publications, conferences and working groups. Named after the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard University (1896), the Institute also sponsors two major lecture series each year and serves as the co-sponsor for numerous public conferences, lectures, readings and forums. The site provides information about upcoming conferences as well as the various activities of the Institute.
An electronic guide to historic sites of the civil-rights movement, launched at the Martin Luther King Jr. Library in Washington, DC. The guide is a joint project of the U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, and National Conference of State Historic Preservation Officers. The online travel itinerary includes 41 historic places in 21 states associated with various aspects of the movement.
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