American Studies Guide

Covering the nearly 500 years of the black experience in the Western hemisphere, the Mosaic surveys the full range size, and variety of the Library's collections, including books, periodicals, prints, photographs, music, film, and recorded sound.

ABHM’s mission is to increase the public’s awareness and understanding of the magnitude of the Black Holocaust, its ongoing impact on American society, and what we can do about it.

The Gilder Lehrman Institute announces the launch of “History by Era,” an innovative and exciting new approach to our national history and one of the richest resources for the study and the teaching of American history we believe you will ever encounter.

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of The New York Public Library is pleased to offer this selection of images of 19th-century African Americans. They are presented in the hope that they will at one and the same time address some of your viewing, research, education and study needs and introduce you to the various types of visual images on the African-American experience that are contained in the Photographs and Prints Division of the Schomburg Center as well as other selected units of the Research Libraries of The New York Public Library.

In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience presents a new interpretation of African-American history, one that focuses on the self-motivated activities of peoples of African descent to remake themselves and their worlds.

Making of America (MoA) is a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. The collection currently contains approximately 10,000 books and 50,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints.

This guide to the web was launched in April 2005 and is based at the library of the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History, which is part of the University Library and the Sonja Haynes Stone Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The guide is a valuable resource for scholars and other researchers interested in African, African American, and African Diaspora history and culture. Over 1,000 sites are available in the searchable guide which is also browseable by subjects. The topics covered range from the underground railroad to hip hop music.

The Great Migration generally refers to the massive internal migration of Blacks from the South to urban centers in other parts of the country. Between 1910 and 1970, an estimated 6 million Blacks left the South. This graphic compares the early migration (1910-1940), sometimes referred to as the First Great Migration, and the later (1940-1970) also known as the Second Great Migration.

Documenting the American South (DocSouth) is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes sixteen thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs.

"First-Person Narratives of the American South" is a collection of diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, travel accounts, and ex-slave narratives written by Southerners. The majority of materials in this collection are written by those Southerners whose voices were less prominent in their time, including African Americans, women, enlisted men, laborers, and Native Americans.

The Freedmen and Southern Society Project was established in 1976 to capture the essence of that revolution by depicting the drama of emancipation in the words of the participants: liberated slaves and defeated slaveholders, soldiers and civilians, common folk and the elite, Northerners and Southerners.

Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938 contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and assembled and microfilmed in 1941 as the seventeen-volume Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves.

This program seeks to preserve and promote the vast universe of experiences that have shaped the lives of Maryland's African American population. From the day that Mathias de Sousa and Francisco landed in St. Mary's county aboard the Ark and the Dove in 1634, Black Marylanders have made significant contributions to both the state and nation in the political, economic, agricultural, legal, and domestic arenas. Despite what often seemed like insurmountable odds, Marylanders of Color have adapted, evolved, and prevailed. The Maryland State Archives' Study of the Legacy of Slavery Staff invites researchers to explore all of these elements and more within its numerous source documents, exhibits and interactive online presentations.

This database is the latest step by the Virginia Historical Society to increase access to its varied collections relating to Virginians of African descent. Since its founding in 1831, the VHS has collected unpublished manuscripts, a collection that now numbers more than 8 million processed items.

Slavery and the Making of America is a companion site to the PBS four-part series documenting the history of American slavery from its beginnings in the British colonies to its end in the Southern states and the years of post-Civil War Reconstruction. Drawing on a wealth of recent scholarship, it looks at slavery as an integral part of a developing nation, challenging the long held notion that slavery was exclusively a Southern enterprise. At the same time, by focusing on the remarkable stories of individual slaves, it offers new perspectives on the slave experience and testifies to the active role that Africans and African Americans took in surviving their bondage and shaping their own lives.

The Civil Rights Digital Library Initiative represents one of the most ambitious and comprehensive efforts to date to deliver educational content on the Civil Rights Movement via the Web. The struggle for racial equality in the 1950s and 1960s is among the most far-reaching social movements in the nation's history, and it represents a crucial step in the evolution of American democracy.

Building upon the achievements of Stanford University's Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project, the King Institute supports a broad range of educational activities illuminating Dr. King's life and the movements he inspired.

African American Women Writers of the 19th Century is a digital collection of some 52 published works by 19th-century black women writers. A part of the Digital Schomburg, this collection provides access to the thought, perspectives and creative abilities of black women as captured in books and pamphlets published prior to 1920. A full text database of these 19th and early 20th- century titles, this digital library is key-word-searchable. Each individual title as well as the entire database can be searched to determine what these women had to say about "family", "religion", "slavery" or any other subject of interest to the researcher or casual reader.

ALVIN AILEY (1931–1989) founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater as a company dedicated to enriching American modern dance heritage and preserving the uniqueness of the African American cultural experience. This exhibition draws from the Music Division’s rich collections to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of this acknowledged treasure of American modern dance.

A celebrated painter, storyteller, and interpreter for the African American experience, Jacob Lawrence is one of the most important American artists of the 20th century. The Phillips Collection allows users to experience Lawrence's world through this interactive exhibit.

The complex and colorful art of Romare Bearden (1911-1988) is autobiographical and metaphorical. Rooted in the history of western, African, and Asian art, as well as in literature and music, Bearden found his primary motifs in personal experiences and the life of his community. This online exhibit is hosted by the National Gallery of Art.

The Collecting of African American Art series focuses on distinguished private collections of African American art in the United States. An audio series by the National Gallery of Art.

"The Church in the Southern Black Community" collects autobiographies, biographies, church documents, sermons, histories, encyclopedias, and other published materials. These texts present a collected history of the way Southern African Americans experienced and transformed Protestant Christianity into the central institution of community life. Coverage begins with white churches' conversion efforts, especially in the post-Revolutionary period, and depicts the tensions and contradictions between the egalitarian potential of evangelical Christianity and the realities of slavery. It focuses, through slave narratives and observations by other African American authors, on how the black community adapted evangelical Christianity, making it a metaphor for freedom, community, and personal survival.

The Journal of Southern Religion is the first scholarly journal devoted to the study of religion in the American South. The journal is fully peer-reviewed, reflecting the best traditions of critical scholarship. It is an open-access publication, published free of cost in its entirety on the Internet. The JSR publishes articles and book reviews, as well as new media.