Research Guides: African American History: Primary Sources

Archival Sources

American Memory This link opens in a new window
Provides information on, and access to, digitized versions of primary-source collections on American history and culture, including photographs, documents, sound recordings, and motion pictures.
Adam Matthew Explorer
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Includes the African American Communities Collection and the Slavery, Abolition, and Social Justice Collection
HistoryMakers
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Stories are assembled from live oral history interviews with historically significant African Americans.
Umbra Search African American History This link opens in a new window
Umbra Search African American History makes African American history more broadly accessible through a freely available widget and search tool, umbrasearch.org; digitization of African American materials across University of Minnesota collections; and support of students, educators, artists, and the public through residencies, workshops, and events locally and around the country.

umbrasearch.org brings together hundreds of thousands digitized materials from over 1,000 libraries and archives across the country.

Umbra Search celebrates the vital efforts of the individuals and institutions that have helped to preserve and make accessible online hundreds of thousands of pieces of African American history and culture, and we pay homage to the Umbra Society of the early 1960s, a renegade group of Black writers and poets who helped create the Black Arts Movement.

Television News of the Civil Rights Era
University of Virginia's website contains films from the nightly news from two local television stations in Virginia--WDBJ (CBS) Roanoke and WSLS (NBC) Roanoke. Contains over 230 films.

Documenting the American South This link opens in a new window
A collection of sources on Southern history, literature and culture from the colonial period through the first decades of the twentieth century.
American Periodicals Series Online
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Search through 1,800 magazines and journals published in the United States between 1740-1940. Includes early scientific publications, trade journals, popular magazines such as Ladies' Home Journal, and journals such as Puck, The Dial, and McClure's.
Making of America (Cornell University) This link opens in a new window
Provides access to approximately 10,000 books and over 50,000 journal articles in the University of Michigan and Cornell University Libraries from the antebellum through reconstruction periods. Covers American social history focusing especially on education, psychology, religion, science, and technology.
Making of America (University of Michigan) This link opens in a new window
Provides access to approximately 10,000 books and over 50,000 journal articles in the University of Michigan and Cornell University Libraries from the antebellum through reconstruction periods. Covers American social history focusing especially on education, psychology, religion, science, and technology.
ProQuest History Vault: Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century
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View the digitized records of Civil Rights organizations and personal papers on African American life in the 20th century, including:
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), records from 1913-1965
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Papers (SNCC), records from 1959-1972
Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), records from 1941-1967
Records of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, records from 1925-1969
The Claude A. Barnett Papers: The Associated Negro Press, covering 1918-1967
The Black Power Movement: Papers of the Revolutionary Action Movement, records from 1962-1996; The League of Revolutionary Black Workers, records from 1965-1976
Personal papers of Bayard Rustin, Mary McLeod Bethune, and A. Philip Randolph
Fannie Lou Hamer : papers of a civil rights activitist, political activist, and woman
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"We were prepared for the possibility of death": Freedom Riders in the South, 1961
Freedom Riders were civil rights activists who rode interstate buses into the segregated South to test the United States Supreme Court decision in Boynton v. Virginia. Boynton had outlawed racial segregation in the restaurants and waiting rooms in terminals serving buses that crossed state lines. Five years prior to the Boynton ruling, the Interstate Commerce Commission had issued a ruling in Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company that had explicitly denounced the Plessy v. Ferguson doctrine of separate but equal in interstate bus travel, but the ICC had failed to enforce its own ruling, and thus Jim Crow travel laws remained in force throughout the South. The Freedom Riders set out to challenge this status quo by riding various forms of public transportation in the South to challenge local laws or customs that enforced segregation. The Freedom Rides, and the violent reactions they provoked, bolstered the credibility of the Civil Rights Movement and called national attention to the violent disregard for the law that was used to enforce segregation in the southern United States.

Historical Newspapers & Periodicals

African American Newspapers: the 19th century
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Contains full-text articles about the cultural life and history during the 1800s, including presidential and congressional addresses, Congressional abstracts, business and commodity markets, the humanities, world travel and religion. Also contains large numbers of early biographies, vital statistics, essays and editorials, poetry and prose, and advertisements all of which embody the African-American experience. Covers 1827-1902 (with gaps).
Nineteenth Century Collections Online
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Full text versions of books, magazines, and other materials published in the 19th century. This is a collection in development. Materials now in the database cover Asia and the West, British politics and society, high and popular culture in Britain, and European literature.

Philadelphia tribune (Philadelphia, Pa. : 1884)
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Founded in 1884, the Tribune is the oldest continually published African-American newspaper in the U.S. Available in full page images and article images from ProQuest Historical Newspapers (1912 - 2001) and in full text from Ethnic Newswatch (1991 - present).

Eighteenth Century Collections Online
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Offers full-text access to English-language titles and editions published between 1701 and 1800 including books, pamphlets, almanacs, Bibles and treatises. Subjects covered include history, geography, fine arts, medicine, science, literature, language, religion, philosophy and law. Significant collections of women writers, collections on the French Revolution, and numerous eighteenth-century editions of the works of Shakespeare are also included.
Chronicling America This link opens in a new window
Provides full-text access to newspaper pages from 1900 to 1910 and abstracts about American newspapers published between 1690 to the present.