This guide serves as a starting point for students and patrons interested in African American Studies. It contains information on locating materials in the library's physical collections, as well as provides links to a variety of databases and online resources.
Below are some suggested subject terms. While in the online catalog, select "subject" in the dropdown menu after the search bar and search some of the subject headings below. The search results may include both physical books and e-books.
African Americans and Mass Media
African Americans Social Life and Customs
African Americans -- Biography
African Americans -- Race Identity
Race Discrimination Law and Legislation United States
United States--Race Relations--History
If you prefer to browse the stacks, below are some relevant LC call number ranges.
E184.5-E185.98 African Americans and U.S.history
E441-E453 U.S. and Slavery
PS1-PS3576 American Literature
African American History (Library of Congress): This site links to selected collections related to African American history available online at the Library of Congress.
African American History Month: The Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum join in paying tribute to the generations of African Americans who struggled with adversity to achieve full citizenship in American society.
BlackPast.org is dedicated to providing the inquisitive public with comprehensive, reliable, and accurate information concerning the history of African Americans in the United States and people of African ancestry in other regions of the world. It is the aim of the founders and sponsors to foster understanding through knowledge in order to generate constructive change in our society.
Georgia College - Black Student Alliance: With an emphasis on African American students, the objective of BSA is to provide activities that will enhance the student's personal and social development, cultural enrichment and understanding of the African American experience in correlation with other cultures, and enhance the overall educational experience at Georgia College
Georgia College - Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity provides institutional leadership on all matters of diversity and inclusion, working under the Division of Academic Affairs.
The Faces of Science- African-Americans in The Sciences: Profiled here are African American men and women who have contributed to the advancement of science and engineering. The accomplishments of the past and present can serve as pathfinders to present and future engineers and scientists. African American chemists, biologists, inventors, engineers, and mathematicians have contributed in both large and small ways that can be overlooked when chronicling the history of science.
The King Center Digital Archive: The King Center Imaging Project brings the works and papers of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to a digital generation. JPMorgan Chase & Co. began the project in April of 2011 with the intent to preserve, digitize and make publicly available some of the extensive holdings of The King Center Archive collection.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute: The Institute’s publications, public programs, workshops, and website inform a diverse global audience about King’s dream of global peace with social justice.
NAACP: The mission of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate race-based discrimination.
New Georgia Encyclopedia: The first state encyclopedia to be conceived and designed exclusively for publication online. This authoritative resource contains original content and helps users understand the rich history and diverse culture of Georgia's still-unfolding story.
North American Slave Narratives collects books and articles that document the individual and collective story of African Americans struggling for freedom and human rights in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. This collection includes all the existing autobiographical narratives of fugitive and former slaves published as broadsides, pamphlets, or books in English up to 1920. Also included are many of the biographies of fugitive and former slaves and some significant fictionalized slave narratives published in English before 1920.
Slave Narratives: Chronological List of Autobiographies: Provides access to digitized primary materials that offer Southern perspectives on American history and culture. It supplies teachers, students, and researchers at every educational level with a wide array of titles they can use for reference, studying, teaching, and research.
If you are off campus and need the Galileo password, please follow these instructions.
Academic Search Complete is a multi-disciplinary database, with more than 6,100 full-text periodicals, including more than 5,100 peer-reviewed journals. In addition to full-text, this database offers indexing and abstracts for more than 10,100 journals and a total of 10,600 publications including monographs, reports, conference proceedings, etc.
African American Biographical Database: brings together the biographies of thousands of African Americans, many not to be found in any other reference source. These biographical sketches have been assembled from biographical dictionaries and other sources. The collection contains extended narratives of African American activists, business people, former slaves, performing artists, educators, lawyers, physicians, writers, church leaders, homemakers, religious workers, government workers, athletes, farmers, scientists, factory workers, and more--both the famous and the everyday person.
African American Funeral Programs from the East Central Georgia Regional Library consists of over one thousand funeral programs ranging from 1933-2008 from the Eula M. Ramsey Johnson Memorial Funeral Program Collection. A majority of the programs are from churches in Augusta, Georgia, and the surrounding area, with a few outliers in other states. The collection provides extensive genealogical information about the deceased, including birth and death dates, maiden names, names of relatives, past residences, and place of burial. Alongside this genealogical information, the obituaries provide a rich source of local history about African Americans. Many of the people included in this collection were prominent in their communities, and many were involved locally in the struggle for civil rights.
African American Poetry, 1760-1900: This database provides access to the full text of the works of nearly 3,000 poems by 54 African-American poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
American Memory from the Library of Congress is a gateway to the Library of Congress's vast resources of digitized American historical materials. Comprising more than 9 million items that document U.S. history and culture, American Memory is organized into more than 100 thematic collections based on their original format, their subject matter, or who first created, assembled, or donated them to the Library.
Annals of American History includes the full text of primary documents in American history, including historical accounts, speeches, memoirs, poems, editorials, landmark court decisions, and cultural criticism. This resource also has multimedia files, including hundreds of images and video and audio clips of famous speeches.
Art Full Text offers full text plus abstracts and indexing of an international array of peer-selected publications—now with expanded coverage of Latin American, Canadian, Asian and other non-Western art, new artists, contemporary art, exhibition reviews, and feminist criticism. Full-text coverage for selected periodicals is also included.
The Auburn Avenue Research Library Finding Aids database consists of guides to archival and manuscript collections held by the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African-American Culture and History.The database's primary source materials document the experiences of African-Americans in Atlanta, the Southeastern region, and throughout the nation.
Blues, Black Vaudeville, and the Silver Screen, 1912-1930s consists of selected correspondence, financial records, contracts, and advertising materials from the theater's records found in the Charles Henry Douglass, Jr. business records at the Middle Georgia Archives, which document the amusements available to Macon's African American population, and the business dealings of this African American entrepreneur from 1912 to the 1930s.
The Census Bureau offers the most comprehensive demographic data for the United States. The site includes information and statistics on the nation's population, housing, business and manufacturing activity, international trade, farming, and state and local governments.
Civil Rights Digital Library: The CRDL links to primary sources and other educational materials from libraries, archives, museums, public broadcasters, and others on a national scale. The CRDL features a collection of more than 30 hours of unedited news film from the WSB (Atlanta) and WALB (Albany, Ga.) television archives held by the Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia Libraries.
Digital Library of Georgia: A gateway to Georgia's history and culture found in digitized books, manuscripts, photographs, government documents, newspapers, maps, audio, video, and other resources.
Films on Demand consists of 15,500 video titles in Humanities & Social Sciences, Business & Economics, Health, and Science.
JSTOR is a collection of electronic journals in the fields of: African American Studies, Anthropology, Asian Studies, Ecology, Economics, Education, Finance, History, Literature, Mathematics, Philosophy, Political Science, Population Studies, Sociology, and Statistics.
Project Muse is a full-text database of scholarly journals covering: literature, history, art, political science, economics, math, and other fields in the arts and sciences. Project Muse allows users to either search full-text articles or browse the journals.
ProQuest Central brings together 30 highly used ProQuest databases to create the largest single academic research resource.
Race Relations Abstracts focuses on content relating specifically to the relationship between races. Race relations is an area of study that pertains to the social, political, and economic relations between races and ethnicities.
Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database is the result of the African Origins Project a scholar-public collaborative endeavor to trace the geographic origins of Africans transported in the transatlantic slave trade.