HIS 121B: African American History, 1877 to present

Primary sources

OVERVIEW

In addition to visiting a Special Collections and Archives, primary sources can also be found online. Digitized primary sources are often made available for free online through libraries or other organizations; digitized primary sources are also exclusively available through library databases (unless you're able to travel to the institutions that hold the originals). These databases might be focus on a format type, subject, or theme. When using library databases, you will need to log in using the Campus VPN or your CRUZ ID and gold password

RESOURCES TO USE:

African American Communities This link opens in a new window Focusing predominantly on Atlanta, Chicago, St Louis, Brooklyn, 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 and in-depth oral histories, revealing the prevalent challenges of racism, discrimination and integration, and a unique African American culture and identity. Covers early 19th century - beginning of the 21st century.

African American Perspectives The Daniel A.P. Murray Pamphlet Collection presents a panoramic and eclectic review of African-American history and culture, spanning almost one hundred years from the early nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries, with the bulk of the material published between 1875 and 1900. Among the authors represented are Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Benjamin W. Arnett, Alexander Crummel, and Emanuel Love.
Library of Congress Digital Collections
Includes 19th- and 20th-century pamphlets, slave narratives, music

We Were Prepared for the Possibility of Death: Freedom Riders in the South, 1961 This link opens in a new window An Archives Unbound collection. This collection includes surveillance reports, chronologies, witness statements and more. These materials provide unique (and in some cases recently declassified) insight into the Freedom Rides, the Kennedy administration and the segregated South.
Archives Unbound This link opens in a new window This database is made up of small, discrete archival collections. Includes: The Black Liberation Army and the program of armed struggle; FBI surveillance of James Forman and SNCC; Fannie Lou Hamer : papers of a civil rights activitist, political activist, and woman; Liberation movement in Africa and African America; The papers of Amiri Baraka, poet laureate of the Black Power movement; The Republic of New Afrika.
History Vault from Proquest This link opens in a new window
Proquest’s History Vault modules include Civil Rights and the Black Freedom Struggle, Southern Life, Slavery, and the Civil War, Women's Studies, Workers, Labor Unions, Progressives, and Radicals, American Indians and the American West, American Politics and Society, International Relations and Military Conflicts, Latinx History and Revolutionary War and Early America (45 titles including NAACP papers, Plantation Records, American Indians and the American West).

North American Slave Narratives
1800's - early 1920
Autobiographical narratives of fugitive and former slaves published as broadsides, pamphlets, or books in English up to 1920.

Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 This link opens in a new window A resource for students and scholars of U.S. history and U.S. women's history. Organized around the history of women in social movements in the U.S. between 1600 and 2000.
Sixties: Primary Documents and Personal Narratives 1960 - 1974 This link opens in a new window Key events and movements in 1960s America as documented in diaries, letters, autobiographies and other memoirs, written and oral histories, manifestos, government documents, memorabilia, and scholarly commentary.

Other formats

U.S. Declassified Documents Online This link opens in a new window Includes a broad range of previously classified federal records spanning the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The collection brings together documents from all the presidential libraries and numerous executive agencies in a single database.
News & Newspapers from ProQuest This link opens in a new window
Includes historical issues of the Chicago Defender (1910-1975), the Chicago Tribune (1849-1989), the Los Angeles Times (1881-1989), The New York Times (1851-2009), and The Washington Post (1877-1996).
Black Studies Center This link opens in a new window
Black Studies Center is a fully cross-searchable gateway to Black Studies including scholarly essays, recent periodicals, historical newspaper articles from the Chicago Defender (1910-1975) and the Daily Defender (1956-1975), images, and video.
Readers' Guide Retrospective This link opens in a new window
Database with citations from 512 leading U.S. magazines. Covers 1890-1982.
American Periodicals This link opens in a new window
Digitized images of the pages of American magazines and journals published from 1740 to 1940. From ProQuest.