Background Sources
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Oxford African American Studies Center This link opens in a new windowAfrican American and African history and culture including biographies, topical entries, primary source documents with commentary, images, maps, charts, tables, and more.
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Oxford Reference This link opens in a new windowHundreds of dictionaries, general reference, language reference, and subject reference works from Oxford University Press.
Scholarly Articles
Both scholarly and peer-reviewed articles are written by experts in academic or professional fields. Scholarly articles are published in journals for specific academic disciplines. Many scholarly journals are also peer-reviewed.
Peer-reviewed articles are submitted to reviewers who are experts in the field. Because the reviewers specialize in the same scholarly area as the author, they are considered the author’s peers (hence “peer review”).
Both scholarly and peer-reviewed articles are excellent places to find what has been studied or researched on a topic, as well as find references to additional relevant sources of information.
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Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
Multidisciplinary - good for nearly all subjects. Scholarly and trade journals, popular magazines, newspapers, conference proceedings, book reviews, and more.
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African Journals Online This link opens in a new windowUse African Journals OnLine (AJOL) to find articles written by scholars on the continent of Africa. Although there are not many articles on the art of Africa it is still an important place to check.
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Africa Knowledge Project This link opens in a new windowDedicated exclusively to academic research on Africa and its Diaspora, AKP focuses on critical Africa-centered, evidence-based knowledge and research from a diverse range of disciplines.
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America: History and Life This link opens in a new window
Index to research on the history and culture of the United States and Canada, from prehistory to the present. Indexes articles and book reviews from more than 1,700 journals published in more than 40 languages. Dates of Coverage: 1964 to date
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American Race Relations: Global Perspectives, 1941-1996 This link opens in a new window
Thousands of commentaries on African American, Hispanic American, Asian American and Native American history covering foreign reactions to America's struggles with racial justice from the Jim Crow era to the Civil Rights movements and beyond.
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Apartheid: Global Perspectives, 1946-1996 This link opens in a new window
Translated news broadcasts and publications of the international reaction to apartheid throughout the African Continent and around the world.
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Black Studies Center This link opens in a new window
Covers the Black experience from ancient Africa to the modern day from perspectives in history, literature, political science, sociology, philosophy, music, visual arts, and religion. Includes index to Black Literature (1827-1940), Black Studies Periodical Database, and the full text backfile (1910-2010) of the influential black newspaper The Chicago Defender.
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Historical Abstracts This link opens in a new window
Index to thousands of academic journals covering world history (excluding the US and Canada) from 1450 to present, in over 40 languages, with full-text available. Dates of Coverage: 1955 to date
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JSTOR This link opens in a new windowScholarly journal archive for the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences; current issues (usually the last 2-5 years) are not digitized by JSTOR and may be obtained elsewhere.
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Literary Reference Source This link opens in a new window
Information on thousands of authors and works, including: plot summaries, synopses and work overviews; literary criticism; author biographies, interviews and images; and book reviews.
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Gale Literature This link opens in a new windowFull-text database that includes author biographies and work overviews, literary criticism, and indexed books, essays, and articles on world literature, and well as full-text of poems, short stories, novels, essays, speeches and plays.
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MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new window
Index to books, essays, and journal articles on modern languages, literatures, fiction, folklore and linguistics. Topics include literary theory, criticism, folk literature and belief systems, linguistics, semantics, translation, dramatic arts, and history of printing and publishing. Covers literature worldwide and includes materials in all genres and in foreign languages. Dates of Coverage: 1926 to date
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Journal of Black StudiesJournal of Black Studies is a bimonthly peer-reviewed academic journal that publishes papers in the fields of social sciences and ethnic studies concerning African-American culture. The journal's editors-in-chief are Molefi Kete Asante (Temple University) and Ama Mazama (Temple University). The journal was established in 1970 and is currently published by SAGE Publications.
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Journal of African American StudiesThe Journal of African American Studies examines topics concerning social transformations that impact the life chances of continental Africans and the African diaspora. It publishes original research on issues of professional and disciplinary concern for the social progress of people of African descent. The journal features empirical, methodological, and theoretical papers as well as literary criticism. It covers the full spectrum of this interdisciplinary field, containing diverse methods and perspectives that include anthropology, art, economics, law, literature, management science, political science, psychology, sociology, social policy research, and others.
Primary Sources
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African American Newspapers (1827-1998): Series 1 This link opens in a new window
Provides online access to hundreds of historical U.S. newspapers chronicling the African American experience. Series 1 includes titles from the Wisconsin Historical Society, Kansas State Historical Society and the Library of Congress. Dates of Coverage: 1827-1998
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African American Newspapers (1827-1998): Series 2 This link opens in a new window
Provides online access to hundreds of historical U.S. newspapers chronicling the African American experience. Series 2 includes titles from the Wisconsin Historical Society, Kansas State Historical Society and the Library of Congress. Dates of Coverage: 1827-1998
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African American Periodicals (1825-1995) This link opens in a new window
More than 170 periodicals by and about African Americans, published in 26 states. Includes academic and political journals, commercial magazines, institutional newsletters, bulletins, annual reports and more.
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America's Historical Newspapers (1690-1876) This link opens in a new window
Cover-to-cover reproductions of hundreds of historic newspapers, providing more than one million pages as full text searchable scanned page images.
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Ethnic NewsWatch This link opens in a new window
Full-text coverage of newspapers, magazines, and journals of the ethnic, minority, and native press in America. Dates of Coverage: 1959 to date
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Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow SouthA selection of 410 recorded oral history interviews chronicling African-American life during the age of legal segregation in the American South, from the 1890s to the 1950s.
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Black Lives MatterBlack Lives Matter Foundation, Inc. is a global organization in the US, UK, and Canada, whose mission is to eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes. By combating and countering acts of violence, creating space for Black imagination and innovation, and centering Black joy, we are winning immediate improvements in our lives.
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Digital SchomburgIdentifies trusted information, interpretation, and scholarship on the global black experience. Users can find citations to exhibitions, books, articles, photographs, prints, audio and video streams, and selected external links on the history and cultures of the peoples of Africa and the African Diaspora.
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Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade DatabaseTrack the journeys of over 67,000 Africans forced into slavery with this searchable database of passenger records from 35,000 trans-Atlantic slave ship voyages.
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Black Freedom Struggle in the United States: A Selection of Primary SourcesProvides a rich array of primary source material on African American efforts to secure civil and human rights – from slavery and abolition to the contemporary era.