American Mosaic: The African American Experience (NYPL)

To access this database you must login with your NYPL library card.  If you don't already have a NYPL library card you can apply for one here.

This database is organized by eras covering African American "history, biographies, literature, arts, music, popular culture, folklore, business, slavery, the struggle for civil rights, politics, sports, education, science, medicine, and more."  Visit the NYPL  Resource Lists on the following topics for additional online resources:

Atlantic Slave Trade   

Regionalism and Slavery

West African Societies

Middle Passage

America: History and Life

Index and some fulltext to journal articles and reviews on the history and culture of the United States and Canada. Inlcudes CLIO notes (see top of interface) providing chronologies and brief summaries of  significant events and themes in history.

American History in Video

More than 5,000 hours of videos from commercial and governmental sources, archival footage, public affairs footage, and important documentaries. Note:  The content of this collection is now available through  Academic Video Online (AVON/Alexander Street Press).

AnthroSource

From the  American Anthropology Association, provides full access to AAA's current publications including  an archive of all AAA journals.

Black Drama

Full text of plays by playwrights from the USA, the Caribbean, and English-speaking countries in Africa. Excellent source for Harlem Renaissance writers.

Black Thought and Culture

Contains the non-fiction published works of leading African Americans, and includes interviews, journal articles, speeches, essays, pamphlets, letters and other ephemeral material.

Diversity Studies Collection

Provides access to scholarly journals and magazines from AcademicOneFile and General OneFile databases that explore cultural differences, contributions, and influences in the global community.

Ethnic Newswatch

Provides access to more than 200 newspapers, magazines and journals from the ethnic, minority and native press. Includes materials in Spanish. To find movie reviews limit the document type to movie review.

Films on Demand (Infobase Learning)

A comprehensive streaming video collection  of 1,000s of full length educational videos and clips covering a broad range of topics.

You can search by title, by keywords in segments, browsing titles alphabetically, and browsing or searching within the subject area. Most of the titles in the collection have closed-captioning and many have interactive transcripts.

History Vault (available through the NYPL)

To access this database you must login with your NYPL library card.  If you don't already have a NYPL library card you can apply for one here.

This is a digital collection of manuscript and archival materials focusing on the 20th Century including main collections such as:

Black Freedom Movement and Civil Rights (includes records of four of the most important civil rights organizations of the 1950s and 1960s: NAACP, SCLC, SNCC, and CORE).

Southern Life and Slavery (documenting the realities of slavery "at the most immediate grassroots level in Southern society" providing "some of the most revealing documentation in existence on the functioning of the slave system."

Independent Voices

An open access digital collection of alternative press newspapers, magazines and journals, drawn from the special collections of participating libraries. These periodicals were produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century.

Northeast Slavery Records Index (NESRI)

A searchable compilation of records that identify individual enslaved persons and enslavers in the states of New York, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut and New Jersey. NESRI indexes census records, slave trade transactions, cemetery records, birth certifications, manumissions, ship inventories, newspaper accounts, private narratives, legal documents and many other sources.

The index contains over 35,000 records and it is expected to grow as John Jay College professors and students locate and assemble data from additional sources.

Oxford Bibliographies Online

Topic overviews and bibliographies on pertinent topics in African Studies, Atlantic History, Chinese Studies, Criminology, Islamic Studies, Latino Studies, Military History and  Psychology with links to the full text of sources when available.

Slavery and Anti-Slavery

Includes collections on the transatlantic slave trade, the global movement for the abolition of slavery, the legal, personal, and economic aspects of the slavery system, and the dynamics of emancipation in the U.S. as well as in Latin America, the Caribbean, and other regions.

Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture & Law

Brings together all known 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. Much of the non-legal material in this collection is based on the holdings of the Buffalo Public Library. Its rare book collection contains hundreds of nineteenth century pamphlets and books on slavery.  A quick reference guide on how to ue this collection can be found at  https://heinonline.org/HeinDocs/SlaveryQRG.pdf

Social Sciences Full Text

Provides accesses to journals in anthropology, criminology, economics, law, geography, policy studies, psychology, sociology, social work, and urban studies from 1983 to the present and indexes material from 1929 to 1983.

SocINDEX with Full Text

Contains core coverage journals dating back to 1895, and some priority coverage journals. Also includes full text for many books, monographs, and conference papers.

Sociological Abstracts

Scholarly articles, books, and dissertations in sociology and subdisciplines. Coverage from 1952 to the present.

Umbra Search

A searchable collection of over 500,000 primary source documents relating to African American history and culture digitized by over 1,000 libraries libraries and archives across the country.