African, African American, & Diaspora Studies

Guide to internet resources on African cultures and peoples. Site organized by country and topic. Maintained at Stanford University. Includes primary, secondary, and other types of sources.

"Digital Black History was created out of a need for a centralized directory of all digital history projects relating to Black History. These projects have the potential to serve as valuable resources for family historians, genealogists, and historians alike."

A massive list of collections about the Civil Rights Movement. Some collections are freely available online. If a link has become inactive, try locating the collection using a search engine.

"An interactive and searchable map of digital and public humanities projects related to Black history & culture."

A resource guide for the study of Black history and culture by the Library of Congress. Topics include colonization, abolition, migration, and the WPA.

"This project aims to shed light on the gruesome culture of lynching. It also seeks to find nuance in its history and legacy. How did Americans explain the public killing of well over 4,500 neighbors? Who were the victims and who were the killers? With the support of the Library of Congress and the Chronicling America historic newspaper database, we can begin to know those stories."

Digital collections include materials on the Amistad case, the Civil Rights Movement, the American Missionary Association, and New Orleans hiphop and bounce.

"The online companion to the permanent exhibition that celebrates the life of pioneering African-American educator, Lucy F. Simms, and the school named in her honor."

"The Colored Conventions Project (CCP) is a scholarly and community research project dedicated to bringing the seven decades-long history of nineteenth-century Black organizing to digital life."

"The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) is a cooperative digital library for resources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean."

"Relying on the expertise of distinguished curators and scholars, Digital Schomburg provides access to trusted information, interpretation, and scholarship on the global black experience 24/7. Users worldwide can find, in this virtual Schomburg Center, exhibitions, books, articles, photographs, prints, audio and video streams, and selected external links for research in the history and cultures of the peoples of Africa and the African Diaspora."

"An open access collection of pre-twentieth-century Caribbean texts, maps, and images. Texts include travel narratives, novels, poetry, natural histories, and diaries that have not been brought together before as a single collection focused on the Caribbean."

"The Freedom Archives contains over 12,000 hours of audio and video recordings which date from the late-1960s to the mid-90s and chronicle the progressive history of the Bay Area, the United States, and international movements... Our collection includes weekly news, poetry, music programs; in-depth interviews and reports on social and cultural issues; numerous voices from behind prison walls; diverse activists; and pamphlets, journals and other materials from many radical organizations and movements."

"A repository of materials relating to the Maryland Jesuits, Georgetown University, and slavery."

"In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience presents more than 16,500 pages of texts, 8,300 illustrations, and more than 60 maps." From the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

"Unusually rich and extensive research materials on sub-Saharan Africa... The focal point of the Library's reference and bibliographic activities on sub-Saharan Africa, which excludes the North African countries of Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia."

"The Archives holds a wealth of material documenting the African American experience, and highlights these resources online, in programs, and through traditional and social media."

"The Green Book was a travel guide published between 1936 and 1966 that listed hotels, restaurants, bars, gas stations, etc. where black travelers would be welcome. NYPL Labs is in the process of extracting the data from the Green Books themselves and welcomes you to explore its contents in new ways."

"Project STAND is a radical grassroots archival consortia project between colleges and universities around the country; to create a centralized digital space highlighting analog and digital collections emphasizing student activism in marginalized communities." There are African American, Asian American, Latinx, LGBTQ, and women's rights collections.

"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... The archive contains photos, letters, two regional censuses and a flash map of the town of Charlottesville." Includes some transcribed articles from the Charlottesville Reflector and the Richmond Planet.

"This website focuses on telling the stories of all the known lynching victims who were killed in Virginia between 1866 and 1932, most of them African American men."

From JSTOR Primary Sources. "This collection focuses on the complex and varied liberation struggles in the region, with an emphasis on Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe."

A part of Virginia Memory from the Library of Virginia, the "African American Narrative project aims to provide greater accessibility to pre-1865 African American history and genealogy found in the rich primary sources in its holdings while creating conversation and encouraging engagement around these records."

From JSTOR Primary Sources. "Links visual, contextual, and spatial documentation of African heritage sites."

A project of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University, gathers together and introduces repositories that contain primary sources from across the world.

A rich open-source image collection focusing on cities, sites, and buildings in the Muslim world. Curated by MIT Libraries.

Immersive images of "murals and street art in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina, crafted by various artists, creators, and makers."

Provides online exhibits of traditional and modern African art.

"This collection offers digital versions of nearly 20,000 photographs by Ernie Paniccioli, one of Hip Hop’s most prolific and prominent photographers. Presented by Cornell University Library’s Hip Hop archives with the permission of Ernie Paniccioli, these photographs provide an unprecedented visual history of Hip Hop culture of the 1980s, 90s, and early 2000s."

This multifaceted tool places art works from the Metropolitan Museum's collection within geographical and chronological context. It has excellent thematic essays (background information) that cover the historical eras and cultures that produced the works of art (the primary sources), along with maps and key events from each place and time period.

"The Art and Artifacts Division collects, documents, preserves, and interprets art and artifacts by and about peoples of African heritage throughout the world. Fine and applied art and material culture objects from the seventeenth century to the present are collected, with emphasis on the visual arts of the twentieth century in the United States and Africa."

"The Photographs and Prints Division contains both documentary and fine art photographs, which document the history and culture of people of African descent worldwide as well as the work of photographers of African descent. The collection of over 300,000 images ranges from mid-eighteenth century graphics to contemporary documentary and art photography; all of the major photographic processes are represented."

"Black Film Archive is a living register of Black films. In its current iteration, it showcases Black films made from 1915 to 1979 currently streaming."

"A database of slave cases and the modern cases that continue to cite them as precedent."

Database of declassified CIA documents.

Official documentary historical record of major U.S. foreign policy decisions and significant diplomatic activity. Back volumes are in process of digitization.

A guide to Black comic book collections and resources in Special Collections at JMU Libraries.

From the American Antiquarian Society, "Black Self-Publishing is an ongoing collaborative research project. It is based on a working list of books that are known to have been or may have been self-published by people of African descent who resided in North America and either were born before 1851 or first published before 1877."

"Now in its third decade, the Furious Flower Poetry Center (FFPC) has been a driving force in showcasing, promoting, and analyzing African American poetry nationally and internationally."

Selected titles from a book display at JMU Libraries by Kristen Shuyler and Liana Bayne.

"A site of opinion, analysis, and new writing on and from the African left."

"Aims to support an Africa Rising and to empower African people by giving access to independent, trustworthy and relevant national, regional and international news, business, culture, sport, sci-tech stories."

"A voice of, by and about Africa - aggregating, producing and distributing 900 news and information items daily from over 150 African news organizations and our own reporters to an African and global public."

A series by the New York Times.

A free selection by Exact Editions of magazine articles on the Black Lives Matter movement. Subjects include activism, art, film & stage, history, literature, music, and politics.

Over 120 historic African American newspapers online through Chronicling America by the Library of Congress.

"Founded by W.E.B. Du Bois as the official publication of the NAACP, is a journal of civil rights, history, politics, and culture and seeks to educate and challenge its readers about issues that continue to plague African Americans and other communities of color."

A monthly magazine focused on African American culture and news. Cover-to-cover scans through Google Magazines. Browse by date, or check "Search all issues."

"An open access digital collection of alternative press newspapers, magazines and journals, drawn from the special collections of participating libraries. These periodicals were produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century."

A weekly magazine of African American news and entertainment. Cover-to-cover scans through Google Magazines. Browse by date, or check "Search all issues."

"Aims to identify, digitize, transcribe, and publish ads placed in newspapers across the United States (and beyond) by formerly enslaved people searching for family members and loved ones after emancipation."

"Lost Friends notices, which ran well into the first decade of the 20th century, featured messages from individuals searching for loved ones lost in slavery. This searchable database provides access to more than 2,500 advertisements that appeared in the Advocate between November 1879 and December 1900." From the Historic New Orleans Collection.

Access available through the Library of Virginia. You must be a Virginia resident and have a valid Library of Virginia account to access this database outside of the Library of Virginia.

"This website focuses on telling the stories of all the known lynching victims who were killed in Virginia between 1866 and 1932, most of them African American men."

An important African-American newspaper in Virginia ~1890-1938.

"The oral histories comprising this collection were compiled as part of James Madison University’s 1978 summer workshop, "Oral Tradition and Storytelling in the Black Community of Harrisonburg.'" From the Special Collections at JMU Libraries.

Hosted by ODU Librares. "Created to find, catalog, and encourage the preservation of records that tell the story of Virginia's school desegregation process."

An open access data repository of information on the identities of enslaved people in the Atlantic World. Includes the names, ethnicities, skills, occupations, and illnesses of individuals. Data sets include enslaved people in Maranhão, Brazil, slaves in colonial Louisiana, and freed slaves in Antebellum Louisiana.

"A movement of activists, organizers, and scientists committed to the mission of using data to create concrete and measurable change in the lives of Black people."

"A digital project that aims to catalog and map all the historical markers commemorating victims of lynching in the United States."

"The National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS) provides, free of charge, aggregate census data and GIS-compatible boundary files for the United States between 1790 and 2015."

"The National Survey of Black Americans (NSBA) series was developed by the Program for Research on Black Americans at the Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan... The series was developed to address the limitations in the existing research literature on the study of Black Americans. It seeks to provide an appropriate theoretical and empirical approach to concepts, measures, and methods in the study of Black Americans. The size and representativeness of the sample permit systematic investigation of the heterogeneity of the adult Black population. The series furnishes data on major social, economic, and psychological aspects of Black American life."