A Library of Congress Resource Guide for the Study of Black History and Culture. A noteworthy and singular publication, the Mosaic is 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.
Black Self-Publishing is an ongoing collaborative research project. It is based on a working list of books that are known to have been or may have been self-published by people of African descent who resided in North America and either were born before 1851 or first published before 1877. The list, at the core of this site consists of over 575 books, broadsides, pamphlets, and more by more than 250 black authors that were likely self-published. The American Antiquarian Society holds an excellent collection of works published in early North America by black authors, so the list presented here started with the Society's holdings and the scope has been defined by the chronological limits of AAS's pre-twentieth century collecting policy.
The Black Metropolis Research Consortium (BMRC) is a Chicago-based membership association of libraries, universities, museums, community/arts organizations, and other archival institutions. The BMRC’s mission is to connect all who seek to document, share, understand and preserve Black experiences. It is the vision of BMRC to be essential to promoting discovery, preservation, and use of Black historical collections.
BlackPast.org, an online reference center makes available a wealth of materials on African American history in one central location on the Internet. These materials include an online encyclopedia of over 4,000 entries, the complete transcript of more than 300 speeches by African Americans, other people of African ancestry, and those concerned about race, given between 1789 and 2016, over 140 full text primary documents, bibliographies, timelines and six gateway pages with links to digital archive collections, African and African American museums and research centers, genealogical research websites, and more than 200 other website resources on African American and global African history.
The College Language Association, founded in 1937 by a group of Black scholars and educators, is an organization of college teachers of English and foreign languages which serves the academic, scholarly and professional interests of its members and the collegiate communities they represent.
Bringing 19th-Century Black Organizing to Digital Life
From 1830 until well after the Civil War, African Americans gathered across the United States and Canada to participate in political meetings held at the state and national levels. A cornerstone of Black organizing in the nineteenth century, these “Colored Conventions” brought Black men and women together in a decades-long campaign for civil and human rights.
Founded in 1989 by Bryan Stevenson, EJI provides legal representation to people who have been illegally convicted, unfairly sentenced, or abused in state jails and prisons. EJI publish reports, discussion guides, and other educational materials that focus on the issues of mass incarceration, excessive punishment, and racial and economic injustice that effect marginalized communities and the most vulnerable people in our society.
The Digital Archival Project dedicated to the writings and study of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, the 12th Bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church.
In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience presents a new interpretation of African-American history, one that focuses on the self-motivated activities of peoples of African descent to remake themselves and their worlds. Of the thirteen defining migrations that formed and transformed African America, only the transatlantic slave trade and the domestic slave trades were coerced, the eleven others were voluntary movements of resourceful and creative men and women, risk-takers in an exploitative and hostile environment.
The funnel project is concentrating on the creation of new subject headings and the changing or updating of old subject headings relating to the African American experience. Through this project participants of the funnel will focus on providing and improving access to African American resources. To date, a variety of headings have been proposed such as: African American---Reparations and African American social reformers. Subject changes have also been proposed and accepted which include changing the heading Afro-American to African American.
The project draws on jazz history materials in digital format to expose relationships between musicians and reveal their community network. New modes of connecting cultural data have the potential to open up new and unprecedented avenues of research and community engagement. At the heart of their work are oral histories of jazz musicians.
A subsection of Famous Trials, a website with collections of original essays, trial transcripts and exhibits, maps, images, and other materials relating to high-profile trials that had a significant impact and shaped history or provided good insight into society, norms, and practice during that particular time period.
ArchiveGrid includes over 5 million records describing archival materials, bringing together information about historical documents, personal papers, family histories, and more. With over 1,000 different archival institutions represented, ArchiveGrid helps researchers looking for primary source materials held in archives, libraries, museums and historical societies.
The Trans-Atlantic and Intra-American slave trade databases are the culmination of several decades of independent and collaborative research by scholars drawing upon data in libraries and archives around the Atlantic world. The new SlaveVoyages website itself is the product of three years of development by a multi-disciplinary team of historians, librarians, curriculum specialists, cartographers, computer programmers, and web designers, in consultation with scholars of the slave trade from universities in Europe, Africa, South America, and North America.
Civil rights lawyers Morris Dees and Joseph Levin Jr. founded the SPLC in 1971 to ensure that the promise of the civil rights movement became a reality for all. Outside of its involvement in civil rights litigation, SPLC maintains databases on extremists activity.
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.
Universities Studying Slavery (USS) is dedicated to organizing multi-institutional collaboration as part of an effort to facilitate mutual support in the pursuit of common goals around the core theme of “Universities Studying Slavery.” USS additionally allows participating institutions to work together as they address both historical and contemporary issues dealing with race and inequality in higher education and in university communities as well as the complicated legacies of slavery in modern American society.
Black Past
Short descriptions of the women and men who have contributed to the shaping of African American history. These encyclopedia entries serve as a starting point for much more inclusive descriptions and discussions that appear in other sources.