African American History: Reference and Additional Sources

Bertrand Library guide to online reference sources.

Documents the full range of the African American experience during that period and shows how all aspects of American culture, history, and national identity have been profoundly influenced by the experience of African Americans.

Focuses on the making of African American society from the 1896 "separate but equal" ruling of Plessy v. Ferguson up to the contemporary period.

Online collection of over 38,000 items, with new additions added regularly.

Historic and contemporary maps of all regions of the world provided by the University of Texas Libraries.

Link to the online version of the Chicago Manual of Style 17th ed.

Provides access to over 60,000 personal profiles of individuals from around the world and across disciplines and fields of endeavor.

Provides access to authoritative information on more than 170,000 places and areas around the world. Entries cover: demography, physical geography and political boundaries; industry, trade, and agriculture; cultural, historical, and archaeological points of interest; transportation lines, longitude, latitude, and elevations; official government place-names and changed or variant names and spellings.

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, one of The New York Public Library’s renowned research libraries, is a world-leading cultural institution devoted to the research, preservation, and exhibition of materials focused on African American, African Diaspora, and African experiences.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture is the only national museum devoted exclusively to the documentation of African American life, history, and culture. It was established by Act of Congress in 2003, following decades of efforts to promote and highlight the contributions of African Americans.

The goal of The 1619 Project is to reframe American history by making explicit how slavery is the foundation on which the United States of America is built, and by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as the nation's birth year. By placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the story citizens tell of themselves and about who they are as a country, the hope is to paint a fuller picture of the institution that shaped the nation. The project consists of essays on different aspects of contemporary American life, from mass incarceration to rush-hour traffic, that have their roots in slavery and its aftermath. Alongside the essays are 17 original literary works that bring to life key moments in African-American history over the past 400 years, and a special section from the New York Times newspaper on the history of slavery made in partnership with the Smithsonian Institution.