Subject Guides: Family History/Genealogy: African American

Featured African American Resources for Family History

Black Roots by Tony Burroughs

Written by the leading African American professional genealogist in the United States who teaches and lectures widely, Black Roots highlights some of the special problems, solutions, and sources unique to African Americans. Based on solid genealogical principles and designed for those who have little or no experience researching their family's past, but valuable to any genealogist, this book explains everything you need to get started.

ProQuest Historical Black Newspapers

Primary source content and editorial perspectives of the most distinguished African American newspapers in the U.S. Each of the eleven Historical Black Newspapers provides researchers with unprecedented access to perspectives and information that was excluded or marginalized in mainstream sources. The content, including articles, obituaries, photos, editorials, and more, is easily accessible for scholars in the study of the history of race relations, journalism, local and national politics, education, African American studies, and many multidisciplinary subjects.

Oxford African American Studies Center

The Oxford African American Studies Center combines the authority of carefully edited reference works with sophisticated technology to create the most comprehensive collection of scholarship available online to focus on the lives and events which have shaped African American and African history and culture. The Oxford African American Studies Center provides students, scholars and librarians with more than 10,000 articles by top scholars in the field.

Oral Histories Collection on the Civil Rights Movement (Gale)

The Ralph J. Bunche Oral History Collection from the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center is a unique resource for the study of the era of the American civil rights movement. Included here are transcriptions of more than 500 interviews with those who made history in the struggles for voting rights, against discrimination in housing, for the desegregation of the schools, to expose racism in hiring, in defiance of police brutality, and to address poverty in the African American communities.

Slavery and Anti-Slavery (Gale)

In its entirety, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive consists of more than five million cross-searchable pages sourced from books, pamphlets, newspapers, periodicals, legal documents, court records, monographs, manuscripts, and maps from many different countries covering the history of the slave trade. The archive is not just valuable to researchers in African history, but the wider scope of African studies and African-American studies. The archive covers a wide spectrum of interests related to the history of slavery. Examples include: Legal Issues, The Caribbean, the American South, race and the Civil War, Children and women under slavery, Modes of resistance, Emancipation and life thereafter.

African American Newspapers

African American newspapers contains a wealth of information about cultural life and history during the 1800s and is rich with first-hand reports of the major events and issues of the day, including the Mexican War, Presidential and Congressional addresses, Congressional abstracts, business and commodity markets, the humanities, world travel and religion. The collection also provides a great number of early biographies, vital statistics, essays and editorials, poetry and prose, and advertisements all of which embody the African-American experience. From Accessible Archives.