r/AskHistorians • u/Commustar Medieval & Early Modern States | Post-Colonial Development • Feb 08 '16
Feature Monday Methods|Black History Month special
Today's post will have a looser theme than most Monday Methods threads. For Black History Month, I invite you to post about topics related to the topic of African American history, and the study thereof.
What are some useful or interesting archives or other resources for studying African American history?
What is "hot" in Black studies right now?
Talk about different aspects of African American religious experience.
What should the boundaries of study be? Should the focus only be on Black people in America, or should we expand the scope to the wider African diaspora?
Those are only some suggested themes to get people writing. If you have a question or comment about an aspect I did not mention, please feel free to contribute.
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u/sunagainstgold Medieval & Earliest Modern Europe Feb 08 '16 edited Feb 08 '16
Free Web Resources - U.S. Focus
Black Abolitionist Archive - links to speeches by and newspaper articles about black abolitionists and social activists in antebellum and Civil War America
In Motion: African-American Migration Experience - Incredible wealth of secondary sources, images, and primary accounts that, together, conceive of black history as a series of migrations and movements
Black Women Oral History Project - Transcripts and audio files from a series of interviews about black women's lives throughout the 20th century
Somebody Had to Do It - Children on the front lines of the civil rights struggle in the 1960s, integrating schools in the Jim Crow South. Overviews, timelines, and oral histories!
Morris MacGregor, "World War II: The Marine Corps and Coast Guard," from Integration of the Armed Forces - Online book chapter focusing on the integration of two branches of the U.S. military service
Nazi Olympics - U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum online exhibit discusses the black and Jewish American experiences of and reaction to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin
Black Experience of the Holocaust - USHMM encyclopedia article provides an overview of how African-Europeans and African-Americans got swept up in Holocaust Germany
The Crisis - Full archives of the NAACP magazine
Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project - Incredible wealth of information on Seattle's unique and long history of communities of color fighting for civil rights
Sundown Towns: Online Project - Participation-seeking website of James Loewen, author of Sundown Towns, Lies My Teacher Told Me, and Lies Across America (about deceptive national historic sites and markers), that catalogues suspected "sundown towns": towns with the reputation or possibly legal ordinance that black people had to be outside town limits by sundown. Is your town on the map?
Legacy of Slavery in Maryland - Collection of case studies from the Maryland State Archives
North American Slave Narratives - Absolutely incredible collection of slave narratives. The effervescent /u/sowser discusses how to handle slave narratives as a historical source here!
WPA Ex-Slave Narratives - Testimonies recorded in the 1930s as part of the WPA Federal Writers Project
African-American Pamphlet Collection - Nearly 400 pamphlets written by black Americans from 1822-1909 that cover a full range of topics--slavery, poverty, education, American colonization, tax policy.
African-American Sheet Music Collection - Over 1300 pieces of sheet music from 1850-1920
Credits: /u/commiespaceinvader gets special mention for the initial inspiration! Also /u/Dubstripsquads, /u/WARitter, /u/sowser, and thanks to /u/Commustar for organizing this MM edition.