AAAD 252: Blacks in the West: Primary Sources

An image database of hundreds of drawings, etchings, paintings, and photographs accompanied by textual descriptions. These artists, engravers and photographers managed to capture and preserve for posterity a variety of images of African Americans throughout the 19th century. The pictures they left range from the stereotypical to the naturalistic. In addition to recording the physical characteristics of their African-American subjects, they document the social, political and cultural life worlds of African-American people from slavery to various stages of quasi freedom. The tumultuous period of transition from slavery to freedom during the Civil War and Reconstruction eras is well documented. Some pictures capture the uniqueness and subtleties of African-American group celebrations, cultural rituals and individual and group aesthetic choices. They also record the process of social, political and institutional development during this pivotal century in African-American history.

Ante-bellum Southern plantation records such as journals, crop books, account books, diaries, and letters document the lives of both owners and slaves. Material is drawn from major repositories across the South, including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Provides data on over 35,000 slave ship voyages which forcibly carried over 10 million Africans to the Americas from the early 16th to the mid-19th centuries. You can search for particular voyages, use the African name database of 67,000 names, view and even create maps, retrieve numerical data, read explanatory essays, and find and use lesson plans.

Provides online access to approximately 270 U.S. newspapers chronicling a century and a half of the African American experience. This unique collection offers researchers valuable primary sources for such diverse disciplines as cultural, literary and social history; ethnic studies and more. Users can compare and contrast African American views on practically every major theme of the American past.

Contains a wealth of information about the cultural life and history during the 1800s with first-hand reports of the major events and issues of the day. See web site's "Database Description" for detailed information about individual newspapers. (Source: vendor website.)

Searches the full text back files of several major black newspapers, including The Chicago Defender, founded in May 1905 as a weekly newspaper and later expanded to daily publication, and the New York Amsterdam News, founded as a six-page weekly covering local news by James Henry Anderson in 1909.