Africana /African American Studies Subject Guide
Digital Collections
11 resources available
- Restricted to WMU users 
- Open Access
African American Biographical Database
Biographical profiles, full-text sketches and photographs of prominent African Americans from all walks of life between 1790-1950.
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African American Music Reference
Contains reference texts, biographies, chronologies, sheet music, images, lyrics, liner notes, and discographies chronicling the diverse history and culture of the African American experience through music. Covers blues, jazz, spirituals, civil rights songs, slave songs, minstrelsy, rhythm and blues, gospel, and other forms of black American musical expression. Links to the audio streaming database American Song enable users to listen to music that accompanies the liner notes and album information in the database.
African American Newspapers: The 19th Century
Eventually this database will contain the full-text of major 19th century African-American newspapers providing first-hand stories by way of biographies as well as statistics, essays, editorials, and advertisements serving as primary source historical documentation. Search individual newspapers or group together.
Multimedia collections from the Library of Congress of digitized documents, photographs, sound recordings, motion pictures, and texts. Over 100 collections, including, for example, African-American pamphlets, Chautauqua flyers, Depression photographs, Coca-Cola advertising, and the papers of Alexander Graham Bell, to name just a few.
More than 100,000 tracks of streaming audio, including songs by and about African Americans, American Indians, miners, immigrants, slaves, children, pioneers, and cowboys. Includes songs of the Civil Rights movement, political campaigns, Prohibition, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, anti-war protests, and more. Note: Content from the former African American Song database is now in American Song.
Full text of more than 1,300 plays from the mid-1800s to the present written by 200 African or African-American playwrights. Each play is indexed by keyword and by numerous subjects. Enhanced by reference materials, ancillary information and images.
Includes more than 6,400 stories and folktales by African, African American, and Caribbean authors. (When complete the collection will contain approximately 8000 works.) Most of the stories are in English, but some in French, Portuguese, and Gullah language are also included. Search by keyword, title, author, language and date.
A digital collection of monographs, essays, articles, speeches, and interviews by leaders within the black community from the earliest times to 1975.
Full-text as well as images from the important American magazine Harper's Weekly. Coverage: 1857-1912.
Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience
This multimedia database contains essays and articles, a time line, videos, and images of the African experience throughout the Americas.
Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000: Scholar's Edition
A collection of full text books, pamphlets, articles, documents and images of American women's reform movements over the last 400 years including special subjects such as African-American Women and the Equal Rights Debate in the 1920s. Includes the bibliographic dictionary Notable American Women 1907-1950.
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