InfoGuides: African and African American Studies: Primary Sources

Primary Sources

African American Communities
Primary source database provides a variety of digitized items documenting African American community, race relations and history from several regions of the U.S., including Atlanta, Chicago, St Louis, New York and North Carolina. Sources included are pamphlets, newspapers, correspondence, official records, oral histories, photographs, maps and ephemera. Coverage: 1863 – 1986.
African American Periodicals, 1825-1995
Resource features more than 170 wide-ranging periodicals by and about African Americans published in 26 states. Include academic and political journals, commercial magazines, institutional newsletters, organizations' bulletins, annual reports and other genres.
African Americans and Jim Crow, 1883-1922
Contains more than 1,000 fully searchable printed works from the beginning of Jim Crow to post-World War I. These works provide insights into African American culture and life during this period of segregation and disenfranchisement and include such topics as African American identity, relationships with peoples of other nations, and literature.
African Americans and Reconstruction, 1865-1883
Contains nearly 1,400 fully searchable printed works from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of Jim Crow. It includes documents related to African Americans and citizenship, voting rights, literacy, land rights, employment, and more, including the gaps between written law and practice.
African Blue Books, 1821-1953
Collects annual reports on British colonies that provide detailed accounts of the day-to-day concerns and policies of colonial administrators. Include texts, statistics, maps, and illustrations and cover such topics as taxes and duties, military expenditure, civil establishment, legislation and proclamations, population data, import and export statistics, prisons, and meteorological observations.
African Diaspora, 1860-Present
Provides digitized primary source documents from African diasporic communities around the world, with a focus on communities in the Caribbean, Brazil, India, United Kingdom, and France. The collection personal papers, organizational papers, journals, newsletters, court documents, letters, and ephemera.
Black Thought & Culture
Provides primary source materials published by the leading African American thinkers and intellectuals in North America from the 19th & 20th centuries to 1975. Currently includes approximately 100,000 pages of primary source materials.
ProQuest History Vault: Confidential U.S. State Department Central Files, 1960-1969, Africa and the Middle East
U.S. State Department Central Files that have not been microfilmed by the National Archives or distributed by other publishers.
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This resource contains a wide range of sensitive materials from U.S. diplomats in foreign countries: reports on political, military, and socioeconomic matters; interviews and minutes of meetings with foreign government officials; important letters, instructions, and cables sent and received by U.S. diplomatic personnel; and reports and translations from foreign journals and newspapers. Among issues in the Africa and Middle East module is the pivotal 1964 Rivonia trial of Nelson Mandela and leaders of the African National Congress.
Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive
Primary source collection devoted to the study and understanding of the history of slavery in America and the rest of the world from the 17th century to the late 19th century. It consists of more than five million cross-searchable pages sourced from books, pamphlets, newspapers, periodicals, legal documents, court records, monographs, manuscripts, and maps from many different countries covering the history of the slave trade.
Southern Negro Youth Congress and the Communist Party: Papers of James and Esther Cooper Jackson
ames E. and Esther Cooper Jackson are African American communists and civil rights activists, best known for their role in founding and leading the Southern Negro Youth Congress (1937-48). Contains clippings (articles by and about Jackson), correspondence of both Esther and James Jackson, James Jackson’s lectures (typescripts and audiocassettes), research notebooks, speeches, writings (published and unpublished), correspondence, and internal documents.