African Studies

The Africa Yearbook covers major domestic political developments, the foreign policy and socio-economic trends in sub-Sahara Africa – all related to developments in one calendar year. The Africa Yearbook contains articles on all sub-Saharan states, each of the four sub-regions (West, Central, Eastern, Southern Africa) focusing on major cross-border developments and sub-regional organizations as well as one article on continental developments and one on European-African relations.

The "Quarterly Index of African Periodical Literature" (QUAPL) is a database with citations to some 51,000 articles published in approximately 750 mostly scholarly periodicals published in Subsaharan Africa. Some 18,000 have links to full text. Articles indexed in this database span a variety of subject areas in the Humanities and Social Sciences including:

• Agriculture, Natual Resources and the Environment
• Anthropology and Archaeology
• Colonialism
• Economics and Trade
• Ethnic and Race Relations
• History and Exploration
• Inter-African Relations
• Law, Human Rights and Violence
• Literature, Mass Media and the Press
• Politics and Government
• Urbanization and Migration
• Women's Issues

The African Studies Companion Online contains over 1800 entries covering guides and resources for African languages, Africa cartography and maps, African film, African studies journals, magazines and newsletters, media guides and news sources for Africa, the African press, African studies library collections worldwide, national archives in Africa, centers of African studies and African studies programs worldwide, awards and prizes in African studies, and a wealth of other subjects. Many entries describe and evaluate resources, others are factual and provide practical information. With a few exceptions, all entries directly link to the internet.

The Confidential Print series was issued by the British Government between c. 1820 and 1970. The series originated out of a need to preserve the most important papers generated by the Foreign and Colonial Offices. These range from single-page letters or telegrams to comprehensive dispatches, investigative reports and texts of treaties. All items marked ‘Confidential Print’ were printed and circulated immediately to leading officials in the Foreign Office, to the Cabinet, and to heads of British missions abroad.

From coastal trading in the early nineteenth century, through the Conference of Berlin of 1884 and the subsequent Scramble for Africa, to the abuses of the Congo Free State, fights against tropical disease, Italy’s defeat by the Abyssinians, World War II, apartheid in South Africa and colonial moves towards independence, the documents in Confidential Print: Africa cover the whole of the modern period of European colonization of the continent.

The resource includes the following file classes from the UK National Archives, Kew, in their entirety:

• CO 879/1-190 (Africa, 1848-1961)
• CO 886/1-11 (Dominions, 1907-1925)
• DO 116/1-8 (Dominions (South African), 1913-1944)
• FO 341/1-3 (Africa 1884-1900)
• FO 401/1-48 (Abyssinia, 1846-1956)
• FO 403/1-482 (Africa, 1834-1957)
• FO 413/1-99 (Morocco and North-West Africa, 1839-1957)
• FO 458/1-157 (West Africa, 1882-1950)
• FO 468/1-4 (British Commonwealth, 1945-1949)
• FO 485/1-3 (Liberia, 1947-1949)
• FO 540/1-6 (Libya, 1951-1956)

The resource includes selected files from:

CO 885/1-140 (War and Colonial Department and Colonial Office Confidential Print, 1839-1966)

DO 114/1-120 (Dominions Office Confidential Print, 1924-1951)

DO 201/1-53 (Commonwealth Relations Office Confidential Print, 1946-1966)

WO 287/1-287 (War Office Confidential Print, 1904-1949)

All these documents are full-text searchable.

In addition, this resource includes more than 300 full-colour maps.

1834-1966

British Online Archives contains a wide range of materials related to British history, including the colonization of America, India, Africa, the West Indies, New Zealand, Australia and Melanesia. The collection contains sources that relate to both politics and history, including: *Records of missionaries from the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel *Records made by the East India Company *Papers of the Parliamentary Labour Party *Anti-fascist newsletters of the International Transport Workers' Federation *Records of the Communist Party of Great Britain *The British Union of Fascists’ newspapers and secret files *British Broadcasting Corporation records *Trade directories Additional content can be found by selecting the ‘List Collections’ option on the toolbar.

NOTE: This product is the updated version of: http://www.lib.umich.edu/database/link/28611

Black Drama, now it its expanded second edition, contains the full text of more than 1,460 plays written
from the mid-1800s to the present by more than 250 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, is the project’s editorial advisor. Over 40% 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.

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 works from early twentieth-century America include key writings of the Harlem Renaissance, works
performed for the Federal Theatre Project, and plays by critically acclaimed dramatists through the
1940s. Included are the plays of Langston Hughes, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Zora Neale Hurston, Ira
Aldridge, Shirley Graham, W.E.B. Du Bois, Randolph Edmonds, Georgia Douglas Johnson, May Miller,
Willis Richardson, Eulalie Spence, and many others. The plays address 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.

American works from the later twentieth century cover the Black Arts movement of the sixties and
seventies, works performed by the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BARTS), The Negro Ensemble
Company, and other companies. The collection includes plays by Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), James
Baldwin, Ossie Davis, Charles Fuller, Ron Milner, Adrienne Kennedy, Anna Deavere Smith, Alice
Childress, Charles Smith, Dael Orlandersmith, Ntozake Shange, Melvin Van Peebles, Joseph Walker,
Richard Wesley, and August Wilson, to name a few. The plays explore themes including civil rights,
desegregation, and a wide range of ideologies—integrationist and separatist, revolutionary and
nationalist.

African and Caribbean drama is represented by 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, Bode Sewande, Ngugi wa Thiong'o , Femi
Osofisan, Zakes Mda, John Ruganda, Dennis Scott, Zulu Sofola, Paul Boakye, Errol John, Fatima Dike,
Clifford Sealy, Joe de Graft, Richard Rive, Bole Butake, Matsemela Manaka, Errol Hill, and Derrick
Walcott. The plays deal with the social and political ills stemming from colonialism, slavery, and
apartheid; the struggle for independence; African history; and neocolonialism. Of particular interest is
material written as “Township Theatre” in South Africa under apartheid and during the development of
black grassroots urban theatre.

This archive at the University of Frankfurt [Germany] contains ephemera of the members of the German Colonial Society (Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft), founded in 1877. Its members collected books, journals, and photographs of their activities and of the interests of Germans around the world, from its beginning until its dissolution in 1943. The 50,000 digitized slides, photographs, and book illustrations from the archive mostly document late 19th and early 20th-century Africa. The bulk of the images pertain to these countries (in ranked order of number of images present in the database): Togo, Cameroon, Namibia, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, China, Papua New Guinea, Palau, Federated States of Micronesia, USA and Canada, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Samoa. The images in the photo archive may be searched by Place, Subject, Person, Photographer, and/or Ethnic Group. The website also includes the three-volume [in German] German Colonial Dictionary (Heinrich Schnee, ed. Deutsches Kolonial-Lexikon. Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer 1920). The website is in German, but the search page for the image archive has an alternative English-language interface.

CultureGrams Online Database is a leading reference for concise, reliable, and up-to-date cultural information on countries across the globe. It includes four editions: the World Edition (for junior high school and up) and the Kids, States, and Canadian Provinces editions (for upper elementary school students). In addition to the country/state/province reports, the database includes the following features:  images, slideshows, streaming videos, sortable data tables and graphs, interviews with natives from countries around the world, recipes for each country, and more. The World Edition includes 208 country-specific reports. These provide complete coverage of every sovereign country recognized by the United Nations, plus several foreign dependencies.

Each World Edition report is written by a native or long-term resident of the country in coordination with a CultureGrams editor. Writers are selected for their education, knowledge of a national language, experience with different regions and socioeconomic groups, recent residency in the country, and access to current information.

Updated twice a year. Provides cultural information on more than 200 countries.

The African Writers Series offers access to key works from the highly acclaimed Heinemann's African Writers Series. This series provides seminal works from the canon of African literature of the twentieth century, covering such authors as Nelson Mandela, Chinua Achebe, Tayeb Salih, Steve Biko, Ama Ata Aidoo, Nadine Gordimer, and Buchi Emecheta. Influential stories, along with drama and poetry, are fully searchable and richly indexed. Author biographies are included. The African Writers Series is indexed and designed for readers and researchers at every level, offering full-text access to the most important African literary works from the past four decades. Researchers are able to perform textual analyses of distinguished African novels and short stories together with an extensive collection of poetry, drama, and non-fiction. Researchers will also enjoy detailed indexing, high levels of textual accuracy and powerful search capabilities, as well as, a full gallery of book covers from the landmark print series. The African Writers Series is also available integrated within Literature Online, offering users cross-searching with 355,000 other literary works and critical and reference material support.

This large-scale scholarly enterprise gathers together French-speaking literature from sub-Saharan Africa: oral and written literature from the origins (end of the 18th century) to Independence (1960, as date of authors’ death). This exhaustive corpus of more than 11,000 texts covers the whole of sub-Saharan francophone Africa, that is some twenty countries and more than a hundred ethnic groups and brings together the most diverse genres of this literature which has yet to be discovered and studied (novels, tales, short stories, narrative accounts, theatre, poetry, myths, legends, fables, proverbs, riddles, songs). Built from vast bibliographical research, followed by the collection and edition of the texts, the Corpus is both a scholarly database and a precious collection of Africa's cultural heritage.