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Black Studies: Websites - History and Culture

Information resources on people of African descent worldwide with emphasis on: the Americas & Africa

Selected Sources from the Internet: History and Culture

CENTERS AND ARCHIVES

  • African Activists Archive Project. Michigan State University hosts this online archive that preserves and makes available the records of activism in the United States to support the struggles of African peoples against colonialism, apartheid, and social injustice from the 1950s through the 1990s.
  • American Black Journal. The ABJ programs, originally titled Colored People's Time, represent a wide variety of African-American viewpoints on issues important to the city of Detroit, the state of Michigan, and the nation as a whole, ranging from labor unrest in the automobile industry to the urban civil disturbances in Detroit and across the nation riots of 1967, the emergence of outspoken African American political leaders, and the explosion of Motown music.
  • African Online Digital Library. A portal to multimedia collections about Africa.
  • The Amistad Research Center. The nation's largest independent archives specializing in the history of African Americans and other ethnic groups.
  • Black History. Web portal to resources from the National Archives and other Federal websites related to black history research.
  • Black Panthers Archive. San Francisco Bay Area Television Archive: http://www.library.sfsu.edu/about/collections/sfbatv/index.php.
  • Digital Library of the Caribbean. A cooperative digital library for resources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean. dLOC provides access to digitized versions of Caribbean cultural, historical, and research materials currently held in archives, libraries, and private collections.
  • Endangered Archives. Contributes to the preservation of archival material that is in danger of destruction, neglect, or physical deterioration worldwide; digital collections from eastern, northern, and western Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America.
  • Freedom Archives. Archived speeches of movement leaders, activists, protests and demonstrations, and cultural currents of rebellion and resistance.
  • Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Digital collections from the archives and libraries of HBCUs.
  • National Archives - African American Records. Introduction to Research and Links to Resources related to the African American Heritage collections at the National Archives.
  • Pasadena Museum of History. The collection dating from years 1834 to the present contains over 1,000,000 historic photographs, rare books, manuscripts, maps, architectural records, plein air paintings, and more. Vital collections include: the J. Allen Hawkins Photo Collection, the Pasadena Black History Collection, the Sylvanus Marston Architectural Collection, and the Ernest A. Batchelder Tile Collection and Archives. Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. The Center supports research that expands the knowledge of the history, lifestyles, and sociocultural systems of people of African descent and investigates problems that have bearing on the psychological, social, and economic well-being of persons of African descent.
  • Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and Digital Collections. A research library of the New York Public Library and an archive repository for information on people of African descent worldwide.
  • Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies. Located at Northwestern University, it is the largest separate Africana collection in existence. Its scope is as wide as the continent of Africa itself; its subject matter ranges from art, history, literature, music, and religion to communications, management, and cooking.
  • Museum of the African Diaspora. Showcases the history, art, and cultural richness that resulted from the dispersal of Africans throughout the world. By realizing our mission MoAD connects all people through our shared African heritage.
  • Online Archive of California. The Black History Collection consists of taped interviews, indices, donor lists, photographs, family material, newspaper articles, and information about churches, community leaders, educators, and pioneers. It also includes the Samuel C. Sheats Papers.

HISTORY

  • 1964 Freedom Summer. From the Wisconsin Historical Society. Brief descriptions and links to original documents created by CORE, SNCC, COFO, local residents, volunteers, and opponents.
  • African-American History.  Links to people and key events in African American history.
  • African American History. A set of online exhibits at the American Memory Project at the Library of Congress.
  • Afrolatinos: The Untaught Story. A documentary television series independently produced by Creador Pictures, LLC. The program will illustrate the history and celebrate the rich culture of people in Latin America of African descent.
  • Civil Rights Movement Veterans. A website devoted to the "Southern Freedom Movement" (1951-1968).
  • National Museum of African American History and Culture. Reminiscences of ordinary Americans are collected as text, images, and audio uploads in the virtual Memory Book where website visitors are encouraged to submit their own histories, traditions, thoughts, and ideas.
  • The History of Jim Crow. An educator's site for historical resources and teaching ideas on an era of segregation, violence, and disfranchisement of African Americans.
  • In Motion - The African-American Migration Experience. Access to articles, photographs, maps, and historical documents focusing on Black migration.
  • National Museum of African American History and Culture. Website of exhibitions, programs, collections, etc. for the NMAAHC. Consult the resources section for links to art, history, research collections, museums, organizations, and associations.
  • Pasadena  Museum of History Collection. Pasadena Museum of History’s Black History Collection consists of photographs, letters, family records, property deeds, and other materials revealing the history of the African-American community in Pasadena. A lot of the materials date from the early 20th century and shed light on a less-visible period in African-American life prior to the Second Great Migration.
  • Pasadena Museum of History - Black History interview tapes. This collection consists of audiovisual material (moving images and audio) from the 1980s. Most of the materials are filmed footage and recorded oral history interviews with African American residents of Pasadena, California. Subjects include the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) chapter in Pasadena, California.
  • The Negro Traveler's Green Book (Spring 1956). It was a travel guide series published from 1936 to 1964 by Victor H. Green. It was intended to provide African American motorists and tourists with the information necessary to board, dine, and sightsee comfortably and safely during the era of segregation.
  • The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. Information on almost 35,000 slaving voyages that forcibly embarked over 10 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.
  • The African-American Mosaic. A Library of Congress Resource Guide for the Study of Black History and Culture
  • The Encyclopedia Brittanica Guide to Black History. Created to examine the entirety of the African American experience, and to celebrate the achievements of many individual African Americans.
  • Virginia Center for Digital History. Digital Collections focus on slavery, emigrants to Liberia, the Reconstruction period, and the Civil Rights Movement, among other collections of interest.
  • eBlack Studies. Includes online lectures and information relating to various Black Studies topics.
  • The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record. The 1,280 images in this collection have been selected from a wide range of sources, most of them dating from the period of slavery. This collection is envisioned as a tool and a resource that can be used by teachers, researchers, students, and the general public - in brief, anyone interested in the experiences of Africans who were enslaved and transported to the Americas and the lives of their descendants in the slave societies of the New World.

NEWS AND NEWSPAPERS

  • BBC News - Africa. Get the latest African news from BBC News in Africa: breaking news, features, analysis and special reports plus audio and video from across the continent.
  • Caribbean News. The source for news throughout the Caribbean.
  • CP-Africa. Africa’s number one progressive news website. Every year, CP-Africa attracts millions of unique visitors that want to learn about Africa’s technology and economic progress.
  • Chicago Defender.  The voice of the African American community in Chicago.
  • New Amsterdam News. One of New York's largest and most influential Black-owned and operated business institutions.
  • Omaha Star. Provides description of the newspaper and links to organizations. Does not have online articles from the newspaper. Current issues in Newspaper Collection, older issues on microfilm.
  • The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. Dedicated to the conscientious investigation of the status and prospects for African Americans in higher education.

ORAL HISTORY AND NARRATIVES

  • African Oral Narratives. An open-access digital library containing 6 collections of oral and life histories, folklore, and song from Ethiopia, Ghana, and South Africa.
  • American Slave Narratives. Each narrative taken alone offers a fragmentary, microcosmic representation of slave life. Read together, they offer a sweeping composite view of slavery.
  • Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South. This collection captures the vivid personalities, poignant personal stories, and behind-the-scenes decision-making that bring to life the African American experience in the South during the late 19th to the mid-20th century. One hundred of the interviews have been digitized and made available on this site, with transcripts, totaling about 175 hours of recordings and 10,000 pages of text.
  • Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project. Born in Slavery (1935-1938) contains more than 2300 first-person accounts of slavery.
  • African American Oral History Collection. Includes interviews conducted as part of projects designed to document particular aspects of Louisville's history and/or important local institutions, such as the Red Cross (Community) Hospital and the Louisville Municipal College, as well as projects that sought to document African American life more generally.
  • North American Slave Narratives. From Documenting the American South.

POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT

RELIGION

  • Afro-America Religion and Theology. Research guide for African American religious thought from the University of Nebraska at Omaha. 
  • The Church in the Southern Black Community. Collects autobiographies, biographies, church documents, sermons, histories, encyclopedias, and other published materials. These texts present a collected history of the way Southern African Americans experienced and transformed Protestant Christianity into the central institution of community life.