Iowa Colored Conventions Project: Digital Collections
African American Resources
- Accessible Archives This link opens in a new windowA site devoted to primary source material in American history. Information archived is from leading historical periodicals and books, and includes eyewitness accounts of historical events, vivid descriptions of daily life, editorial observations, commerce as seen through advertisements, and genealogical records. Databases are encyclopedic in scope and allow full Boolean, group, name, string, and truncated searches. Transcribed individual entries are complete with full bibliographic citations and are organized chronologically. Titles will continue to be added covering important topics and time periods for scholars and students of all academic levels.
- African American Historical Serials Collection This link opens in a new windowRECOMMEND USING CHROME; This collection was developed in conjunction with the American Theological Library Association (ATLA) as part of an effort to preserve endangered serials related to African American religious life and culture. This unique resource documents the history of African American life and religious organizations from materials published between 1829 and 1922.
- African American Periodicals, 1825-1995 This link opens in a new windowFeatures more than 170 wide-ranging periodicals by and about African Americans. Published in 26 states, the publications include academic and political journals, commercial magazines, institutional newsletters, organizations' bulletins, annual reports and other genres.
- Afro-Americana Imprints, 1535-1922 This link opens in a new windowThis collection spans nearly 400 years, from the early 16th to the early 20th century. These essential books, pamphlets and broadsides, including many lesser-known imprints, hold an unparalleled record of African American history, literature and culture.
- Black Abolitionist Papers This link opens in a new windowThis collection searches a unique set of primary sources from African Americans actively involved in the movement to end slavery in the United States between 1830 and 1865.
- Black Drama - 1850 to present This link opens in a new windowCurrently contains approximately 1200 plays by 201 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. The database also includes selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays. Many works are rare, hard-to-find, or out of print. Nearly a quarter of the collection will consist of previously unpublished plays by such writers as Langston Hughes, Ed Bullins, Willis Richardson, Femi Euba, Amiri Baraka, Randolph Edmonds, Zora Neale Hurston.
- Black Studies in Video This link opens in a new windowSignature Alexander Street collection featuring award-winning documentaries, newsreels, interviews and archival footage surveying the evolution of black culture in the United States. In partnership with California Newsreel, the database provides unique access to their African American Classics collection, and includes films covering history, politics, art and culture, family structure, social and economic pressures, and gender relations
- Black Thought and Culture: African Americans from Colonial Times to the Present This link opens in a new windowBlack Thought and Culture is a single source for the published works of numerous historically important black leaders. Along with well-known works, the collection features approximately 5,000 pages of unique, fugitive, and never-before-published materials. When complete, Black Thought and Culture will provide approximately 100,000 pages of monographs, essays, articles, speeches, and interviews written by leaders within the black community from the earliest times to 1975. Black teachers, artists, politicians, religious leaders, athletes, war veterans, entertainers, and other leaders form the mainstay of this corpus. The collection is intended for research in black studies, political science, American history, music, literature, and art.
- HeinOnline Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture & Law This link opens in a new windowThis HeinOnline collection brings together a multitude of legal materials on slavery in the United States and the English-speaking world. This includes every statute passed by every colony and state on slavery, every federal statute dealing with slavery, and all reported state and federal cases on slavery.
Included in the collection are hundreds of pamphlets and books written about slavery, and legal commentaries held in obscure, hard-to-find journals in the U.S. and elsewhere. - Slavery & Anti-Slavery, A Transnational Archive This link opens in a new windowIn addition to the standard primary sources one would expect—newspaper collections and books published in the antebellum era, for example—SAS includes a broad selection of documents from several different archives.
Includes Parts I-IV. - Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice, 1490-2007 This link opens in a new windowThis digital collection documents key aspects of the history of slavery worldwide over six centuries. Topics covered include the African Coast, the Middle Passage, the varieties of slave experience, religion, revolts, abolition, and legislation. The collection also includes case studies from America, the Caribbean, Brazil, and Cuba.
- Slavery and the Law (ProQuest History Vault) This link opens in a new windowIncludes race, slavery, and free blacks petitions to southern legislatures and southern county courts as well as State slavery statutes.
Selected Historical Resources
- Accessible Archives This link opens in a new windowA site devoted to primary source material in American history. Information archived is from leading historical periodicals and books, and includes eyewitness accounts of historical events, vivid descriptions of daily life, editorial observations, commerce as seen through advertisements, and genealogical records. Databases are encyclopedic in scope and allow full Boolean, group, name, string, and truncated searches. Transcribed individual entries are complete with full bibliographic citations and are organized chronologically. Titles will continue to be added covering important topics and time periods for scholars and students of all academic levels.
- American Broadsides and Ephemera, Series I This link opens in a new windowBased on the American Antiquarian Society's landmark collection, this offers fully searchable facsimile images of approximately 15,000 broadsides printed between 1820 and 1900 and 15,000 pieces of ephemera printed between 1760 and 1900. The subjects of these broadsides range from contemporary accounts of the Civil War, unusual occurrences and natural disasters to official government proclamations, tax bills and town meeting reports. Featuring many rare items, the pieces of ephemera include clipper ship sailing cards, early trade cards, bill heads, theater and music programs, stock certificates, menus and invitations documenting civic, political and private celebrations.
- American Periodical Series Online 1740-1940 This link opens in a new windowOver 1,100 periodicals that first began publishing between 1740 and 1900, including special interest and general magazines, literary and professional journals, children's and women's magazines, and many other historically significant periodicals. Coverage 1740-1940.
- Civil War Primary Source Documents This link opens in a new windowRECOMMEND USING CHROME; This unique archive captures various accounts of the Civil War as it was experienced on land and at sea. The collection provides firsthand perspectives from hospitals and prison camps and reactions to the War from the home front.
While focus is placed on the War years, this resource also includes important contextual documents in the crucial years leading up to the War and after the fall of the Confederacy. - Gerritsen Collection: Women's History Online, 1543-1945 This link opens in a new windowThe Gerritsen Collection was begun by Aletta Jacobs Gerritsen in the late 1800s. The online resource delivers two million page images exactly as they appeared in the original printed works. It includes monographs, periodicals and pamphlets in fifteen languages, and is searchable by keyword and Boolean operators.
- HarpWeek: the Civil War Era through the Gilded Age (1857-1912) This link opens in a new windowFull text of the popular 19th century magazine, Harper's Weekly, on literature, history, current events, culture and society. Includes images from Harper's Weekly, with index.
- Making of America, Cornell University This link opens in a new windowA digital library of primary sources in American social history, this site provides access to 267 monograph volumes and over 50,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints.
- Migration to New Worlds This link opens in a new windowFrom government-led population drives during the early nineteenth century through to mass steamship travel, Migration to New Worlds showcases unique primary source material recounting the many and varied personal experiences of 350 years of migration. Explore Colonial Office files on emigration, diaries and travel journals, ship logs and plans, printed literature, objects, watercolours, and oral histories supplemented by carefully selected secondary research aids.
- Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO) This link opens in a new windowMulti-year global digitization and publishing program focusing on primary source collections of the long nineteenth century, with archives releasing incrementally beginning in spring 2012. The content is sourced from the world’s preeminent libraries and archives. It consists of monographs, newspapers, pamphlets, manuscripts, ephemera, maps, photographs, statistics, and other kinds of documents in both Western and non-Western languages. Collections I - XII.
- Sabin Americana, 1500-1926 This link opens in a new windowBased on Joseph Sabin's famed bibliography, Bibliotheca Americana – A Dictionary of Books Relating to America From its Discovery to the Present Time, Sabin Americana, 1500–1926 is an online collection of books, pamphlets, serials and other works about the Americas, from the time of their discovery to the early 1900s.
- Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 This link opens in a new windowA set of learning modules in the form of mini-monographs, each of which is organized around a specific question about a single social movement. Each module contains fifteen to twenty documents that address the question.