African American Studies

Race Relations Abstracts includes bibliographic records covering essential areas related to race relations, including ethnic studies, discrimination, immigration studies, and other areas of key relevance to the discipline. Records are selected from many of the top titles within the discipline, including Race, Ethnicity & Education and Ethnic & Racial Studies.

Full-text searchable access to the complete backfiles of six major African American community newspapers--Atlanta Daily World (1931-2003), Baltimore Afro-American (1893-1988), Chicago Defender (1909-1975), Los Angeles Sentinel (1934-2005), New York Amsterdam News (1922-1993), and Pittsburgh Courier (1911-2002). Includes original page images digitized from microfilm.

1909 - 2005 (Varies by title) For all titles except The Chicago Defender, one year of additional content is added to the backfile annually.

Information on materials by and about African Americans, Africa and peoples of African ancestry. Includes the catalog of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and citations from the Index to Black Periodicals (1988-2002).

700 A.D. - (cataloged items); 1988 - 2002 (periodical index) 2003 Edition. ## ##Schomburg Center catalog includes 217,000 records describing over 2 million books, serials, microforms, audio and audio-visual resources, photographs, manuscript collections, art, artifacts and ephemera. (Manuscripts, photographs, art works and other special collection materials are cataloged at the collection level.) ## ##Index to Black Periodicals includes records describing all articles appearing in 36 popular magazines and scholarly journals from 1988 to 2002.

NOTE: a newer version of this product, Black Drama: Second Edition, is available here: http://www.lib.umich.edu/database/link/1078898.

Black Drama contains the full text of 1,200 plays written from the mid-1800s to the present by more than 100 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. James Vernon Hatch, the playwright, historian, and curator of the landmark Hatch-Billops Collection of black drama, is the project’s editorial advisor. More than a quarter of the collection will consists of previously unpublished plays by writers such as Langston Hughes, Ed Bullins, Willis Richardson, Femi Euba, Amiri Baraka, Randolph Edmonds, Zora Neale Hurston, and many others.

Each play is extensively and deeply indexed, allowing both keyword and multi-fielded searching. The plays are accompanied by reference materials, significant ancillary information, a rich performance database, and images. The result is an exceptionally deep and unified collection that illustrates the many purposes that black theater has served: to give testimony to the ancient foundations of black culture; to protest injustices; to project emerging images of the new Black; and to give voice to the many and varied expressions of black creativity.

The database covers key writings of the Harlem Renaissance, works performed for the Federal Theatre Project, and plays by critically acclaimed dramatists of the 1940s. The collection includes musical comedies, domestic dramas, folk dramas, history plays, anti-slavery plays, one-act plays, and other works. Many were published in a wide range of magazines and anthologies, others have never before been published or performed.

Students and scholars will have immediate access to plays addressing a wide range of struggles and triumphs, including migration to Northern cities, mothers’ keeping families together, exploitation by white land owners, interracial unity, racial violence, civil rights activism, and the black war hero.

Included are the plays of Langston Hughes, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Zora Neale Hurston, Ira Aldridge, Shirley Graham, W.E.B. DuBois, William Wells Brown, Owen Dodson, Joseph Seamon Cotter, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Randolph Edmonds, Angelina Weld Grimke, Georgia Douglas Johnson, May Miller, Willis Richardson, Eulalie Spence, and others.

In addition, the collection covers the Black Arts movement of the sixties and seventies and works performed by the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BARTS), The Negro Ensemble Company, and other companies.

The plays explore themes including civil rights, desegregation, and a wide range of ideologies – integrationist and separatist, revolutionary and nationalist. While the collection is strong in social and political drama, it also covers domestic drama and satires.

The collection includes works by Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Ed Bullins, Phillip Hayes Dean, Ted Shine, Aishah Rahman, Paul Carter Harrison, James Baldwin, Rita Dove, Charles Fuller, Ron Milner, Sonia Sanchez, Melvin Van Peebles, Joseph Walker, Richard Wesley, and many others. Dozens of never-before-published works are included.

This collection also brings together a wide collection of plays from Ghana, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, the West Indies, the United Kingdom, and other parts of the world. It includes works by writers such as David Edgecombe, Una Marson, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Jimmi Makotsi, Femi Osofisan, Yulisa Amadu Maddy, Duro Lapido, ‘Zulu Sofola, H.I.E Dhlomo, Gus Edwards, Fatima Dike, Alan Paton, Ama Ata Aidoo, Francis D. Imbuga, Joe Coleman de Graft, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Richard Moore Rive, and many others. Dozens of plays in the collection have never been published before. Other works are long out-of-print or hard-to-find.

The plays deal with the social and political ills stemming from colonialism, slavery, and apartheid; the struggle for independence; African history; and neo-colonialism. Of particular interest is material written as “township theatre” in South Africa under apartheid and the development of black grassroots urban theatre. White Africans are included when they are key writers whose works address important black issues.

 

 

mid-1800s to present

America's Historical Newspapers provides searchable digital facsimiles of thousands of titles from all 50 states. The collection currently includes:

African American Newspapers, 1827-1998

Early American Newspapers, Series I, 1690-1876

Early American Newspapers, Series II, 1758-1900

Early American Newspapers, Series III, 1829-1922

Early American Newspapers, Series VI, 1741-1922

Early American Newspapers, Series VII, 1773-1922

Hispanic American Newspapers, 1808-1980

1690-1922

The Encyclopedia is a 5-volume set and a supplement covering all aspects of the African-American experience from 1619 to the present day. Using biographies, historical essays, and thematic pieces-many by the foremost scholars in the field-it addresses a wide array of subjects in over 2,300 articles to fully define in one source the cultural roots and current condition of the African-American community. Included as part of the Gale Virtual Reference Library.

2nd edition, 2006 1619-present

Combines more than 7,500 articles by scholars drawn from reference works. Includes the complete text of Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, The Encyclopedia of African American History, Black Women in America, African American National Biography, and The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature, plus selected articles from many other reference works published by Oxford University Press. Also includes over 1,000 images, maps, charts, tables, and primary sources with specially written commentaries.

Current edition.

This chronology presents the history of African Americans from pre-colonial times to the present. Includes overview essays, sidebars, and primary sources, and over 200 images that chronicle the story of African Americans' struggles, triumphs, complexity, and exuberance. Features include a comprehensive index and a primary document index; sidebars spotlighting specific people and topics; and a bibliography for each topical chapter. Gabriel Burns Stepto, editor. 475 pages. Included as part of the Gale Virtual Reference Library.

Current edition

The African American Almanac provides historical and current information on African American history, society, and culture in 28 topical chapters (e.g., African American Firsts, Politics, Family & Health). It also includes a chronology, a chapter of important primary documents, directories of organizations and businesses, a bibliography of recently-published works, annotated lists of crucial court cases, a filmography, hundreds of brief biographies, and more than 650 photographs, illustrations, maps, and statistical charts located within the most appropriate text. Included as part of the Gale Virtual Reference Library.

9th edition

Searchable access to the backfile of The Chicago Defender, a leading African-American newspaper, available in full page images digitized from microfilm. (Issues of The Chicago Defender from 1976-1993 are available on microfilm in the Hatcher Graduate Library, call number FILM X474.)

1909-1975 Includes most issues from the weekly, daily and national editions that were variously published between July 31, 1909 (Volume 4, Number 31) and December 31, 1975 (Volume 71, Number 170).