Looking to learn more about contemporary Africa and choose a paper topic? Try the Africa Portal, the Africa Research Institute or immerse yourself in the Story of Africa from the BBC.
If you need a topic on African Americans, check out the Black History: Chronological Topics from the National Archives or be inspired by the collections at the National Museum of African American History & Culture or the African American Mosaic from the Library of Congress.
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For over 40 years, Heinemann's African Writers Series has published key texts in modern African literature. This online edition includes over 250 volumes of fiction, poetry, drama, and prose by notable authors such as Ama Ata Aidoo, Steve Biko, Buchi Emecheta, Nadine Gordimer, and Nelson Mandela.
America: History and Life is the definitive index of literature covering the history and culture of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present.
The Baltimore African-American was the most widely circulated black newspaper on the Atlantic coast. It was the first black newspaper to have correspondents reporting on World War II, foreign correspondents, and female sports correspondents. The paper's contributors have included writer Langston Hughes, intellectual J. Saunders Redding, artist Romare Bearden, and sports editor Sam Lacy, whose column influenced the desegregation of professional sports.
Spanning from the earliest times to 1975, this resource provides over 100,000 pages of primary sources illuminating the evolution of Black identity, including The Black Panther newspaper, oral histories by David Hilliard, and works by influential Black leaders across various fields.
The Digital Library on American Slavery (DLAS) is an expanding online resource providing free access to tens of thousands of digitized records and personal accounts related to slavery and race in the American South, with a focus on documenting the names and stories of the enslaved.
This link opens in a new windowEthnic NewsWatch offers full-text newspapers, magazines, and journals from African American, Native American, Hispanic, Arab/Middle Eastern, Asian/Pacific Islander, European/Eastern European, and Jewish cultures. Featuring over 2.5 million articles, including historical coverage from 1959-1989, it is an essential resource for diverse perspectives in ethnic and minority studies.
Historical Abstracts indexes periodical literature in history and related social sciences, covering world history (excluding the U.S. and Canada) from 1450 to the present. It includes topics like world history, military history, women's history, and the history of education.
This link opens in a new windowUnlock a treasure trove of knowledge with JSTOR! Dive into over 12 million journal articles, books, images, and primary sources across 75 disciplines.
This historical newspaper provides genealogists, researchers and scholars with online, easily-searchable first-hand accounts and unparalleled coverage of the politics, society and events of the time.
"Slavery and Abolition in the US: Select Publications of the 1800s" is a digital collection of books and pamphlets from the nineteenth century, presenting varying American perspectives on slavery through first-person narratives, legal documents, anti-slavery tracts, religious sermons, and early secondary works. Materials are sourced from the Millersville University Library and Dickinson College Library, including their Special Collections Departments.
This link opens in a new windowSlavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive is a comprehensive collection spanning over five million cross-searchable pages from the 17th to 19th centuries, covering the history of slavery, the slave trade, abolitionism, and emancipation across America, Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean. Sourced from over 60 libraries worldwide, it provides unparalleled depth through books, periodicals, legal documents, manuscripts, and more.
The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database comprises more than 35,000 individual slaving expeditions between 1514 and 1866. The website provides full interactive capability to analyze the data and report results in the form of statistical tables, graphs, maps, a timeline, and an animation.
African American Data Links (US Census)
Digital Harlem - Mapped data from 1920's and 30's
Social Sciences Data Resources - Africa
Social Sciences Data Resources - Caribbean
Library databases (require login off-campus)
This link opens in a new windowBiography Index Retrospective: 1946-1983 is a key resource for information on notable individuals from antiquity to 1983. It includes over 627,000 citations, indexing interviews, profiles, obituaries, letters, diaries, memoirs, book reviews, bibliographies, and exhibition reviews, offering contemporary perspectives on historical figures.
This link opens in a new windowBiography Reference Bank offers biographical information on over half a million people, plus thousands of images. It includes full-text biographies, feature articles, interviews, essays, reviews, speeches, obituaries, and more. Search by name, profession, origin, gender, race/ethnicity, work titles, birth/death dates, keywords, and images.
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