African American History

This historical newspaper provides genealogists, researchers, and scholars with first-hand accounts and coverage of the politics, society, and events from 1909-1975, including all articles, illustrations, and advertisements. Each issue has been fully digitized and indexed. With the majority of its readership outside the Chicago region, the Chicago Defender served as the de facto national Black newspaper in the U.S., and it was the most influential African-American newspaper of the 20th century.

This fully-searchable collection of 280+ historical newspapers from across the United States published by and for African Americans is a one-of-a-kind record of African American history and culture. Each newspaper issue in this collection has been fully digitized and is fully searchable, including all articles, obituaries, advertisements, editorials, and illustrations. Some of the major titles in the collection include The Colored Citizen (KS), Arkansas State Press, Rights of All (NY), Wisconsin Afro-American, New York Age, L’Union (LA), Northern Star and Freeman’s Advocate (NY), Richmond Planet, Cleveland Gazette, and The Appeal (MN). The oldest newspaper dates to 1842. Try the new Text Explorer to visualize data using methods such as term clustering, frequencies, trends, and more.

Archives Unbound presents topically-focused digital collections of historical documents that support the research and study needs of scholars, researchers, and students at the college and university level. A multi-disciplinary resource, collections cover a broad range of topics from the Middle Ages forward-from Witchcraft to World War II to twentieth-century political history. Further explore African American, American, Asian, Latin American, Caribbean, and Middle Eastern Studies; British and European History; Business and Economic History; Cultural Studies; Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies; Health and Environmental Sciences; International Relations; and Law, Politics, and Radical Studies. Collections are chosen based on requests from scholars, archivists, and students.

This is a landmark electronic collection of approximately 100,000 pages of non-fiction writings by major American Black leaders—teachers, artists, politicians, religious leaders, athletes, war veterans, entertainers, and other figures—covering 250 years of history. In addition to the most familiar works, Black Thought and Culture presents a great deal of previously inaccessible material, including letters, speeches, prefatory essays, political leaflets, interviews, periodicals, and trial transcripts. The ideas of over 1,000 authors present an evolving and complex view of what it is to be Black in America. Browse primary sources from the Vietnam War, the US Civil Rights Movement, the US Civil War, the Watergate Scandal, Reconstruction, World Wars I & II, and many landmark and historical events. This collection contains the work of Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida Wells, A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King, Jr., Jesse Jackson, as well as the complete run of the Black Panther newspaper (1966-1980), and a wide selection of abolitionists' writings from the nineteenth century.

This collection of full-text poems includes elegies, odes, ditties, hymns, and sonnets of more than 50 African American poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This collection documents the unique voices of the 20th century's critically acclaimed African-American poets, providing access to the full-text of thousands of works. Coverage begins with the key writers of the early decades (James Weldon Johnson, Georgia Douglas Camp Johnson, Claude McKay), continues with major figures of the Harlem Renaissance (Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Arna Bontemps and Sterling Brown) and the Black Arts movement of the 1960s (Imamu Amiri Baraka, Etheridge Knight, Audre Lorde, Sonia Sanchez), and concludes with a considerable body of writing of the 1980s and 1990s, including major figures such as Ai, Rita Dove and Yusef Komunyakaa. Biographical profiles accompany each poet's work, and the complete database can be searched by a number of fields, including keyword, first line or title keyword, and poet name. 
 

This is a collection of 19th and 20th century newspapers from Africa. There are 67 titles available from Angola, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Soa Tome and Principe, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. English is the most common publication language but others such as Portuguese, Zulu, Tswana, Sotho, Southern Sotho, Gujarati, Hindi, Tamil, Afrikaans, German, Tonga, French, Malagasy, and Xhosa are also available. Coverage spans from 1800 to 1924.

This collection provides access to the 19th and 20th century poetry and fiction from the Caribbean region, including Barbados, Belize, Guyana, Suriname, and Guyane. This literary connection, combined with the tales of survival, exile, resistance, endurance, and emigration to other parts of the Americas, makes for a body of work that is essential for the study of the Caribbean and the Black Diaspora. It includes rare and hard-to-find works written in English, French, Spanish, Dutch, and various Creole languages.

This collection provides access to digitized and fully searchable American periodicals published between 1684 and 1912. A wide variety of publication types are included, such as general interest magazines, religious magazines, periodicals for women and children, and specialized publications in literature, science, agriculture, medicine, and related fields. Each periodical may include a variety of content types, such as articles, poetry, short stories, serialized novels, editorials, cartoons, and advertisements. Subjects covered in the collection reach into every facet of American life, including science, literature, medicine, agriculture, women’s fashion, family life, and religion.

This database provides access to two separate collections, American Periodicals Series Online (APS Online) and American Periodicals from the Center for Research Libraries (APCRL). It contains over 1,100 periodicals published between 1740 and 1940, including special interest and general magazines, literary and professional journals, children's and women's magazines and many other historically-significant periodicals. Each issue is digitized and searchable from cover to cover, including all articles, advertisements, illustrations, editorial cartoons, obituaries, letters to the editor, and other types of content. Subject coverage includes history, literature, history of science & medicine, law, news & magazines, politics, religion, education, women's studies, art, and American studies.

ProQuest History Vault consists of manuscript and archival collections digitized in partnership and from a wide variety of archival institutions. Major collection areas in History Vault focus on the Black Freedom Movement of the 20th Century, Southern Life and Slavery, Women's Rights, International Relations, American Politics and Society with a strong focus on the 20th Century, and labor unions, workers and radical politics in the 20th Century. On the topic of civil rights and Black Freedom, History Vault contains records of four of the most important civil rights organizations of the 1950s and 1960s: NAACP, SCLC, SNCC, and CORE. History Vault's collections on Slavery and Southern plantations candidly document the realities of slavery at the most immediate grassroots level in Southern society and provide some of the most revealing documentation in existence on the functioning of the slave system. Many of the collections in History Vault were originally available in microfilm from the University Publications of America (UPA) research collections and others come from the University Microfilms International (UMI) research collections with additional collections scanned from the original documents.

This collection is a resource for students and scholars of U.S. history and U.S. women's history, bringing together resources documenting aspects of American women's public lives and political activities. Organized around the history of women in social movements in the U.S. between 1600 and 2000, the collection currently includes more than 145 document projects and archives with more than 9,500 books and documents, 1,500 images, and 191,000 pages of additional full-text documents, written by 2,800 primary authors. This digital collection also includes book, film, and website reviews, notes from the archives, a dictionary of social movements and organizations, a chronology of U.S. Women's History, and teaching tools. This site also has an online edition of the five-volume biographical dictionary, Notable American Women (1971-2004) and an Online Biographical Dictionary of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the U.S. which includes biographical sketches of grassroots suffrage activists.

This online database offers a rich collection of streaming video content focused on world history, featuring critically acclaimed documentaries from renowned filmmakers worldwide. With over 1,750 documentaries, the collection spans human history from ancient civilizations to contemporary events, covering diverse regions including Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Oceania with chronological coverage back to films from 1918. Users can access a variety of materials that include documentaries on significant historical events, cultural movements, and influential figures. The platform also provides advanced search functionalities that allow users to filter content by subject, time period, and geographic region, facilitating targeted research. Each documentary is accompanied by supplementary materials such as transcripts and bibliographies to enhance understanding and academic study. This resource is invaluable for educators, students, and researchers seeking to engage with historical narratives through visual media.

This resource provides data on all aspects of American history from colonial times through the year 2000. It is divided into five sections: population, work and welfare, economic structure and performance, economic sectors, and governance and international relations. Data series relate to the social, behavioral, humanistic, and natural sciences, including history, economics, government, finance, sociology, demography, education, law, natural resources, climate, religion, international migration, and trade. This database is the electronic counterpart of the 5-volume print publication "Historical Statistics of the United States: Earliest Times to the Present, Millennial Edition."

Discover rare and previously unpublished American History newsreels, documentaries, commercials, public service announcements, and instructional material, released from 1934 to 1966. Deep dive into the Plymouth Rock landing, westward expansion, the Civil War, women’s suffrage, the Great Depression, World War II, the Civil Rights Movement, the Space Race, the Gay Rights Movement, the Iraq War, and more. You'll uncover the inspiring voices of Native Americans, African Americans, women, the LGBT community, and other traditionally underrepresented groups in American History. Videos range from two minutes to one hour long.

This historical newspaper collection provides first-hand accounts and unparalleled coverage of politics, society, and events covering 1851-2020. Search historical local, regional, national, and international news using subject terms and topics for focused and targeted results in combination with searchable full text, full page, and article-level images from the Historical New York Times.

A dynamic tool to scan and search the contents of billions of datasets from the United States. Compare and contrast variables of interest and create customized views in tables, maps, rankings, and charts. Views also include descriptive summaries of the datasets and data sources. Datasets cover a wide range of subjects – including business, finance, banking, economics, sociology, political science, demography, agriculture, education, international studies, criminal justice, housing and construction, labor and employment, energy resources and industries, and more. Note: access is available for content that predates 12/31/21; any content from 01/01/2022 - present is unavailable. 

This collection provides access to videos focusing on American history including commercial, governmental, and archival footage, newsreels, interviews, speeches and addresses, public service announcements, news stories, lectures, and documentaries. Popular topics include war and violence, political and social movements, international relations, the Depression, WWI, WWII, politics and current affairs, and United States presidents.