Provides a search of scholarly literature across many disciplines and sources, including theses, books, abstracts and articles.
WHY? Rationale for Evaluating What You Find on the Web
The World Wide Web can be a great place to accomplish research on many topics. But putting documents or pages on the web is easy, cheap or free, unregulated, and unmonitored.
• Documents can easily be copied and falsified or copied with omissions and errors -- intentional or accidental.
• In the general World Wide Web there are no editors (unlike most print publications) to proofread and "send it back" or "reject it" until it meets the standards of a publishing house's reputation.
• Most pages found in general search engines for the web are self-published or published by businesses small and large with motives to get you to buy something or believe a point of view.
• Even within university and library websites, there can be many pages that the institution does not try to oversee.
The web needs to be free like that! And you, if you want to use it for serious research, need to cultivate the habit of healthy skepticism, of questioning everything you find with critical thinking. Therein lies the rationale for evaluating carefully whatever you find on the Web.
The burden is on you - the reader - to establish the validity, authorship, timeliness, and integrity of what you find.
This Special Presentation of the Library of Congress exhibition, The African-American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship, showcases the Library's incomparable African-American collections. The presentation was not only a highlight of what is on view in this major black history exhibition, but also a glimpse into the Library's vast African-American collections. Both include a wide array of important and rare books, government documents, manuscripts, maps, musical scores, plays, films, and recordings.
"...it is this notion that movements can and will change the world we live in that makes the legacy of the African American freedom movement so important. How can these tales of resistance and of mobilization for change inform the way that we move toward a more equitable world? What are the struggles that still exist? These are the questions that we hope this resource will raise in the classroom."
Black Freedom Struggle in the United States: Challenges and Triumphs in the Pursuit of Equality
"...featuring select primary source documents related to critical people and events in African American history." "This website contains over 3,000 documents focused on six different phases of Black Freedom: Slavery and the Abolitionist Movement (1790-1860); The Civil War and the Reconstruction Era (1861-1877); Jim Crow Era from 1878 to the Great Depression (1878-1932); The New Deal and World War II (1933-1945); The Civil Rights and Black Power Movements (1946-1975); The Contemporary Era (1976-2000).
"This 10,000 page reference center is dedicated to providing information to the general public on African American history in the United States and on the history of the more than one billion people of African ancestry around the world. It includes an online encyclopedia of hundreds of famous and lesser known figures in African American history, Global African history and specifically the history of African Americans in the West."
Civil Rights History Project: Library of Congress
"On May 12, 2009, the U. S. Congress authorized a national initiative by passing The Civil Rights History Project Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-19). The law directed the Library of Congress (LOC) and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) to conduct a national survey of existing oral history collections with relevance to the Civil Rights movement to obtain justice, freedom and equality for African Americans and to record and make widely accessible new interviews with people who participated in the struggle. The project was initiated in 2010 with the survey and with interviews beginning in 2011."
Discover thousands of artworks, artifacts and stories from cultural organizations across the United States. Explore 6761 images, artifacts and more; online exhibits, and virtual tours of historic sites.
The HistoryMakers is a national, 501(c)(3) non-profit educational institution committed to preserving, developing and providing easy access to an internationally recognized archival collection of thousands of African American video oral histories.
"The Archives holds a wealth of material documenting the Black experience." This guide provides access to Archive Resources; Blogs, Articles & Links; Featured Records; Public Programs & Exhibits; and the Subject Portals. The Subject Portals include American Slavery & International Slave Trade, Migrations, World War I, Voting Rights, and Black Power.
The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a research unit of The New York Public Library, is generally recognized as one of the leading institutions of its kind in the world. For over 80 years the Center has collected, preserved, and provided access to materials documenting black life, and promoted the study and interpretation of the history and culture of peoples of African descent.
Slave Societies Digital Archive
"The Slave Societies Digital Archive (formerly Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies) preserves the most extensive serial records for the history of Africans in the Atlantic World and includes valuable information about the indigenous, European, and Asian populations who lived alongside them. SSDA holdings include more than 700,000 digital images dating from the sixteenth through twentieth centuries that document the lives of an estimated four to six million individuals."
Black Women's Suffrage/DPLA
The Black Women’s Suffrage Digital Collection is a collaborative project to provide digital access to materials documenting the roles and experiences of Black Women in the Women’s Suffrage Movement and, more broadly, women’s rights, voting rights, and civic activism between the 1850s and 1960.