Cultures of the African Diaspora

Accessible Archives provides access to several primary source collections. African American Newspapers contains a wealth of information about cultural life and history during the 1800s and is rich with first-hand reports of the major events and issues of the day, including the Mexican War, Presidential and Congressional addresses, Congressional abstracts, business and commodity markets, the humanities, world travel and religion. The collection also provides a great number of early biographies, vital statistics, essays and editorials, poetry and prose, and advertisements all of which embody the African-American experience. The Civil War Collection contains in depth articles from a variety of perspectives and sources. Bluford Library also has access to The Liberator (the newspaper published by abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison) and The Pennsylvania Express.

African American Biographical Database is the largest electronic collection of biographical information on African Americans from 1790-1950. Biographies of thousands of African Americans, many not found in other reference sources, are assembled from biographical dictionaries and other sources. Includes extended narratives of African American activists, former slaves, performing artists, educators, writers, and more.

African American Music Reference chronicles the history of African American music: blues, jazz, spirituals, civil rights and slave songs, rhythm and blues, gospel, and other musical expressions. The resource also includes discographies and bibliographies along with songsheets, images, and other print resources.

The early history of African American poetry, from the first recorded poem by an African American (Lucy Terry Prince's 'Bars Fight', c.1746) to the major poets of the nineteenth century, including Paul Laurence Dunbar and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.

African Diaspora, 1860-Present Essential for understanding Black history and culture, African Diaspora, 1860-Present allows scholars to discover the migrations, communities, and ideologies of the African Diaspora through the voices of people of African descent. With a focus on communities in the Caribbean, Brazil, India, United Kingdom, and France, the collection includes never-before digitized primary source documents, including personal papers, organizational papers, journals, newsletters, court documents, letters, and ephemera.

This resources is now part of Literature Onlline. Over 250 volumes of fiction, poetry, drama and non-fictional prose, including works by Chinua Achebe, Ama Ata Aidoo, Steve Biko, Buchi Emecheta, Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head, Doris Lessing, Nelson Mandela, Dambudzo Marechera, Christopher Okigbo, Okot p'Bitek and Tayeb Salih.

A collection of the life histories of former slaves in the United States compiled through nearly 4,000 interviews.

Biography Reference Center offers a comprehensive collection of more than 461,000 full-text biographies, including the complete full-text run of Biography Today and Biography, as well as thousands of narrative biographies that are not available in other databases. In addition to keyword searching, users can also locate biographies of interest by browsing more than 30 genre categories, including actors, authors, composers, explorers, figures relevant to U.S. & world history, inventors, musicians, Presidents of the United States, current world leaders and many others.

Black Drama, now in its expanded third edition, contains the full text of more than 1,700 plays written from the mid-1800s to the present by more than 200 playwrights from North America, English-speaking Africa, the Caribbean, and other African diaspora countries. Many of the works are rare, hard to find, or out of print. More than 40 percent of the collection consists of previously unpublished plays by writers such as Langston Hughes, Ed Bullins, Willis Richardson, Amiri Baraka, Randolph Edmonds, Zora Neale Hurston, and many others.

Black Short Fiction and Folklore brings together 82,000 pages and more than 11,000 works of short fiction produced by writers from Africa and the African Diaspora from the earliest times to the present. The materials have been compiled from early literary magazines, archives, and the personal collections of the authors. Some 30 percent of the collection is fugitive or ephemeral, or has never been published before.

Black Studies Center consists of scholarly journals, commissioned overview essays by top scholars in Black Studies, historic indexes, and The Chicago Defender newspaper from 1910-1975. At the heart of Black Studies Center is Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience, consisting of essays that provide an introduction to major topics in Black Studies. Black Studies Center provides the historical full-text of one of the most influential black newspapers in the United States, The Chicago Defender.

Consists 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. Also presents previously inaccessible material, including letters, speeches, prefatory essays, political leaflets, interviews, periodicals, and trail transcripts.

Black Women Writers celebrates the many voices of women from Africa and the African Diaspora. Offering fiction, poetry, and essays from three continents and 20 countries, the database gives an unparalleled view of black womens struggles through time. New content is uploaded on a biweekly basis, giving users immediate access to a steadily growing treasury of extraordinary writings. The database currently features over 105,490 pages of poetry and prose.

Included are journals, magazines, and newspapers from ethnic and minority presses, providing researchers access to essential, often overlooked perspectives. The complete Ethnic NewsWatch resource, incorporating both current Ethnic NewsWatch and Ethnic NewsWatch: A History, provides a full-text collection of more than 2.5 million articles from over 330 titles, from 1959 to current. Ethnicities include: African American/Caribbean/African; Arab/Middle Eastern; Asian/Pacific Islander; European/Eastern European; Hispanic; Jewish; Native People.

IIBP Full Text draws its current content from international scholarly and popular periodicals in Black Studies and contains full-text coverage of core Black Studies periodicals. The database covers a wide array of humanities-related disciplines including art, cultural criticism, economics, education, health, history, language and literature, law, philosophy, politics, religion, and sociology among others.

The JSTOR project seeks to develop online access to the full back files of selected journals. The database contains a digitized image of every page and is searchable by every word.

The Oxford African American Studies Center combines the authority of carefully edited reference works with sophisticated technology to create the most comprehensive collection of scholarship available online to focus on the lives and events which have shaped African American and African history and culture.

A database of modern and contemporary African American poetry, featuring almost 9,000 poems by 62 of the most important African American poets of the last century, including Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Imamu Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde and Rita Dove.