Africana Studies

A selection of Time magazine full-text articles from 1923-present.

Access and full-text searching for African-American newspaper published in Indianapolis, Indiana from 1899 to 2005.

Afro-American Newspapers publishes newspapers in Baltimore, Maryland and Washington, D.C.  Over one hundred years of newspapers have been digitized and made full-text searchable.  The newspapers contain national coverage of African-American-related news events. 

Chronicling America is a Website providing access to information about historic newspapers and select digitized newspaper pages, and is produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). NDNP, a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress (LC), is a long-term effort to develop an Internet-based, searchable database of U.S. newspapers with descriptive information and select digitization of historic pages."  (From website.)  Currently, researchers can search full-text in hundreds of U.S. newspapers between 1836 and 1922.  New content is added regularly.

A primary source website dedicated to Harriet Beecher Stowe's classic American novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin. Contained are images from the original manuscript, as well as commentaries, reviews, and articles written about the book. An excellent resource for examining slavery in the context of American culture.

"The major site and starting place for African-American materials online from the Library of Congress and a rich sampling of their larger collections. Included are a comprehensive text and images from the nearly 500 years of the black experience in the Western Hemisphere. Lesser-known topics, which are covered, include Liberia, abolitionists, western migration, and documents from the Works Progress Administration, the Federal Writers Program, and the Daniel Murray Pamphlet collection. Items within the African-American Mosaic can be searched online. The American Odyssey is not part of the American Mosaic."

A section of the WWW Virtual Library. A chronological listing of primary documents and maps related to American History.

Housing more than 7 million digitized items, this collection contains items relating to U.S. history, people, politics, and culture. Items include photographs, maps, illustrations, manuscripts, diaries, sheet music, motion pictures, and sound recordings.

"The Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery is a Web-based initiative designed to foster inter-site, comparative archaeological research on slavery throughout the Chesapeake, the Carolinas, and the Caribbean. Our goal is to help scholars from different discplines use archaeological evidence to advance our historical understanding of the slave-based society that evolved in the Atlantic World during the colonial and ante-bellum periods." (from website)

"Documenting the American South (DocSouth) is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes ten thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs." (from website)

In 2005, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute was created to provide an institutional home for a broad range of activities illuminating the Nobel Peace laureate’s life and the movements he inspired." (from website) These activities include the Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. Project, an online Martin Luther King, Jr. Encyclopedia, and the Online King Records Access (OKRA) database. 

"Race and Place is an archive about the racial segregation laws, or the 'Jim Crow' laws from the late 1880s until the mid-twentieth century. The focus of the collection is the town of Charlottesville in Virginia." (from website) Contains images, newspapers, personal papers, oral histories, maps, census data, city records, and political materials sections.

"The New York Public Library Schomburg Collection is 'the world's leading publicly-accessible research institution for the study of the history and culture of peoples of African descent.' Notes on its collection appear on its home page and most of its materials appear in the online exhibits are also being organized."

"The Digital Library on American Slavery offers data on race and slavery extracted from eighteenth and nineteenth-century documents and processed over a period of eighteen years. The Digital Library contains detailed information on about 150,000 individuals, including slaves, free people of color, and whites. These data have been painstakingly extracted from 2,975 legislative petitions and 14,512 county court petitions, and from a wide range of related documents, including wills, inventories, deeds, bills of sale, depositions, court proceedings, amended petitions, among others. Buried in these documents are the names and other data on roughly 80,000 individual slaves, 8,000 free people of color, and 62,000 whites, both slave owners and non-slave owners." (From website)

Ida B. Wells (1862-1931) was an African-American teacher and journalist whose writings focused on lynching in the American South.  Finding aid and links to digitized images of items in the collection.

Duke University Libraries website includes "a selection of 100 recorded oral history interviews chronicling African-American life during the age of legal segregation in the American South, from the 1890s to the 1900s.

The University of Massachusetts at Amherst has a significant collection of W.E.B. Du Bois manuscripts and other materials in their Special Collections and University Archives.  Many of these records have been digitized and posted to the Internet.  Also included are resources for the study of Du Bois's life and work.

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change at Atlanta, Georgia has developed a searchable website of its extensive holdings of primary sources regarding Dr. King, including letters he sent and received. The searchable website includes scans of the original documents. 

The Center at Columbia College in Chicago, Illinois  "exists to illuminate the significant role that black music plays in world culture by serving as a nexus for all who value black music, by promoting scholarly thought and knowledge about black music, and by providing a safe haven for the materials and information that document the black music experience across Africa and the diaspora."  (From website)

"Our aim is to locate, document, digitize, and provide access to all archival materials related to [South African political leader] Nelson Mandela.  This is a work in progress.  Here is a selection of materials arranged in exhibits for your enjoyment."  (From website)

In December 1861, Senator Wilson submitted a bill proposing the immediate and compulsory emancipation of the District of Columbia's 3,300 slaves through a program of federal compensation. The District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act, which President Lincoln signed on April 16, 1862, allotted an average of $300 per slave to all slaveowners who were loyal to the Union, for a total payment of $900,000. The act also allocated $100,000 to support the emigration of any African Americans who voluntarily chose to leave the country for Haiti, Liberia, or any other foreign destination, through a process known as "colonization." Almost no one chose to leave, so the colonization provision was largely symbolic, muting opposition to the emancipation act among even the most rigid defenders of slavery."  (From website)  Site includes scans and transcriptions of original petitions held in the National Archives, Washington, D.C.

The FBI, the domestic intelligence and national law enforcement agency of the U.S. government, investigated individuals and groups deemed to be involved in criminal activities; in some cases FBI and other federal officials investigated persons and groups deemed to be political threats to an existing administration.   The FBI has released many investigatory files on groups and individuals according to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests or in an effort to disassociate itself from its past.  Included are many files on noted African Americans such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Bayard Rustin, Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz, Thurgood Marshall, and Benjamin Hooks, and organizations such as the Nation of Islam, Freedom Riders, and the NAACP.

"The Black Abolitionist Digital Archive is a collection of over 800 speeches by antebellum blacks and approximately 1,000 editorials from the period. These important documents provide a portrait of black involvement in the anti-slavery movement; scans of these documents are provided as images and PDF files."  (from website)  Project by the University of Detroit Mercy Libraries.


Established in 1991, the Archives of African American Music and Culture (AAAMC) is a repository of materials covering a range of African American musical idioms and cultural expressions from the post-World War II era. Our collections highlight popular, religious, and classical music, with genres ranging from blues and gospel to R&B and contemporary hip hop. The AAAMC also houses extensive materials related to the documentation of black radio." (from website)

"The Black Film Center/Archive was established in 1981 as a repository of films and related materials by and about African Americans. Included are films which have substantial participation by African Americans as writers, actors, producers, directors, musicians, and consultants, as well as those which depict some aspect of black experience." (from website)

"The Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center (BCC) Library was founded in 1972. It is a hub of information networking, cultural research, and bibliographic instruction and learning for students, faculty, and staff at Indiana University. The BCC Library began as an informal reading room, grew into a distinguished reference and information center on the Bloomington campus, and was organizationally established as a branch library of Indiana University Libraries in 1991-92." (from website)

"Historic Landmarks Foundation of Indiana saves and restores irreplaceable architectural heritage, from outstanding national landmarks like West Baden Springs to modest historic houses, barns and bridges. If you're interested in the historic preservation and restoration of Indiana landmarks or heritage tours and visiting historic sites, you've come to the right place." (from website)

Since 1830, the Indiana Historical Society has been "collecting preserving, interpreting and disseminating Indiana history" and is "one of the largest archival repositories of material on the history of Indiana and the Old Northwest." Over 25,000 digital images are contained in the Collections section.. (from website)

"The Indiana State Archives is the official repository of Indiana government records of permanent historical and legal significance. It principally contains records generated by state government and state agencies, but also holds a major collection of county and local government records." (from website)

"Through its history, the Indiana State Library has developed strong collections in the fields of Indiana history and culture, Indiana state government and United States government publications, Indiana newspapers, genealogy and family history resources on Indiana and the eastern United States, Braille, large print, and books on tape for the visually impaired, library science, and American history, politics, and economics." (from website)  The Indiana State Library hosts Indiana Memory, a "gateway to Indiana's history and culture found in digitized books, manuscripts, photographs, newspapers, maps, and other media."

"IMCPL's collection of over 2.1 million items includes a variety of formats: books, books on tape, magazines, large print materials, audiocassettes, videocassettes, compact discs and DVD's. Foreign language materials are an integral part of the Library's collection." (from website)

The National Archives is responsible for permanently preserving important historical and legal documents that are created in the course of business conducted by the United States federal government

"The National Civil Rights Museum, located at the Lorraine Motel, the site of Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination, chronicles key episodes of the American civil rights movement and the legacy of this movement to inspire participation in civil and human rights efforts globally, through our collections, exhibitions, and educational programs." (from website)

Research and educational institution funded by the federal government and other endowments that is committed to promoting innovation, research and discovery in science.

Provided by the U.S. government, this website serves as a gateway to statistics from the 2000 U.S. Census that contains quick facts, figures, and multiple search options.

Provided by the U.S. government, this website serves as a gateway to statistics from the 1990 U.S. Census that contains quick facts, figures, and multiple search options.

"This site is the home page for a private mailing list run by the Mississippi State Historical Archives. The focus is discussion, promotion, and exchange of family history research, especially for people of African descent. The Web site provides a newsletter, information about surnames, and a unique 'Slave Data Project,' which is an online collection of wills and other documents of slave owners."

The IPUMS National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS) provides free online access to summary statistics and GIS files for U.S. censuses and other nationwide surveys from 1790 through the present.

Provided the U.S. Census Bureau, this page contains a variety of information on every census from 1790 through 2000. Contains numerous facts, figures, and statistical abstracts, along with questionnaires and instructions from each census. Includes historic census data from the Decennial Censuses from 1790-1860, 1990, 2000 (PDF). Contains comments and Table of Contents on 1870-1980 Censuses.

Project website sponsored by the Africana Studies department at the University of South Florida seeks "to rediscover records that document the names and lives of enslaved and freed persons and their descendants, and share those records."  (from website)