Accessible Digital Collections
- Umbra Search: African American History Umbra Search African American History makes African American history more broadly accessible through a freely available widget and search tool, umbrasearch.org; digitization of African American materials across University of Minnesota collections; and support of students, educators, artists, and the public through residencies, workshops, and events locally and around the country. umbrasearch.org brings together hundreds of thousands digitized materials from over 1,000 libraries and archives across the country. Umbra Search celebrates the vital efforts of the individuals and institutions that have helped to preserve and make accessible online hundreds of thousands of pieces of African American history and culture, and we pay homage to the Umbra Society of the early 1960s, a renegade group of Black writers and poets who helped create the Black Arts Movement.
- Louisiana Digital Library The Louisiana Digital Library (LDL) is an online library containing photographs, maps, manuscript materials, books, oral histories, and other items that document the history and culture of Louisiana. Items comes to the LDL from institutions across the state, including libraries, museums, archives, and historical organizations.
- Digital Schomburg Relying on the expertise of distinguished curators and scholars, Digital Schomburg provides access to trusted information, interpretation, and scholarship on the global black experience 24/7. Users worldwide can find, in this virtual Schomburg Center, exhibitions, books, articles, photographs, prints, audio and video streams, and selected external links for research in the history and cultures of the peoples of Africa and the African Diaspora.
Databases with Historical Content
- Slavery And Anti-SlaveryAn international archive of over 5 million pages from books, magazines, manuscripts, court records, and reference materials on slavery, the anti-slavery movement, and emancipation. Each of the four parts can be searches separately. Covers the United States, Latin America, the Caribbean, and other regions.
- Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture & LawPrimary documents and writing on pre-20th Century slavery, primarily in the United States. Includes periodicals, statutes, court cases, articles, University of North Carolina Press books, and a bibliography. Made public for the general good by Hein Online.
Library of Congress and National Archives
The Library of Congress and the National Archives have a vast wealth of freely available resources on Black history, African Americans, Africa, enslaved people, and the lives, cultures, and struggles of African Americans. The following collections contain images, documents, and sound files important to national U.S. American identities.
- LoC Digital Collections -- African American HistoryThe Library of Congress is the world's largest library and makes publicly available large amounts of digitized materials pertaining to African American history, culture, and heritage.
- The African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full CitizenshipThe exhibition The African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship, showcases the incomparable African American collections of the Library of Congress. Displaying more than 240 items, including books, government documents, manuscripts, maps, musical scores, plays, films, and recordings, this is the largest black history exhibit ever held at the Library, and the first exhibition of any kind to feature presentations in all three of the Library's buildings.
- African American Perspectives“African American Perspectives” gives a panoramic and eclectic review of African American history and culture and is primarily comprised of two collections in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress: the African American Pamphlet Collection and the Daniel A.P. Murray Collection with a date range of 1822 through 1909.
- Black History at the National ArchivesLarge public collection of letters, books, images, serials, and papers pertaining to African American history and life.
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