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Black History Month

2008 Theme: Carter G Woodson and the Origins of Multiculturalism

Reading Lists | Internet Sites

Freedom Summer Volunteers to Speak on Monday, February 11

Participants in the voting rights drive in 1964, a campaign that became known as Freedom Summer, will read from their letters and discuss their experiences at the Central Library Community Room on Monday, February 11 at 6 pm. The book containing these letters, entitled Letters from Mississippi, was recently re-published by Zephyr Press. The book has been described by Barney Frank as 'an irreplaceable record of an extraordinary movement in American social and cultural history at midcentury.' For more details on this program, click here.

 

Reading Lists from the Springfield City Library:

For more recommended reading, visit:

Selected Internet Resources:

Museums and Online Exhibits:

  • The African Presence in the Americas: 1492 - 1992: A survey of the experience of Africans in the New World, divided into the themes of migration, work, culture and resistance. An exhibition from the New York Public Library's Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture. Includes a timeline, aids for teachers, maps, and short essays.
  • Drop Me Off in Harlem: Discover the themes and works that emerged when creative and intellectual voices intersected during the Harlem Renaissance. From ARTSEDGE, a project of the Education Department of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
  • Wrapped in Pride: Ghanaian Kente and African-American Identity: An unusual and quite beautiful exhibit from the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian, exploring the history of kente cloth, perhaps the most famous of all African textiles. Several other exhibits of African art are available at the museum site.
  • African Art Museum: Subtitled an online reference to the tribal art of Africa, this site features a collection of images of over 1,000 artifacts from over 100 ethnic groups, from the Ababua to the Zukuma. Although a commercial site, this online museum offers some beautiful graphics of African art throughout the centuries.
  • John Brown's Holy War: Background, timeline, maps and more describing John Brown, his abortive crusade against slavery, and his influence on the events leading to the Civil War. From PBS' American Experience series.
  • Our Shared History: African American Experience: Check out Our Shared History to find all the exciting and innovative sites related to African American heritage available across the NPS web site, ParkNet. They vary widely from far-reaching travel guides to new information on the Underground Railroad to ways to find African American ancestors who fought in the Civil War.

General History and Culture:

  • African-American Mosaic: A Library of Congress Resource Guide for the Study of Black History and Culture. And don't miss the excellent Library of Congress exhibit, African American Odyssey.
  • African-American History Month (Library of Congress): Highlights the many resources on African-American history and culture available from the Library's extensive online collections.
  • African American History Timeline: A timeline of historic events in African-American history from 1600 to 2000, from Professor Quintard Taylor Jr at the University of Washington. Includes an African Americans in the West timeline, and links to research guides and websites, vignettes of significant people and places in African-American history, and a comprehensive bibliography.
  • Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH): Founders of Black History Month. ASALH has chosen to devote the 2008 National Black History Theme to studying the historian Carter G Woodson and his influence.
  • Patchwork of African-American Life: Interactive websites created as models for integrating the Internet into the classroom learning experience. Includes a hotlist of Black history links, a treasure hunt, a subject sampler, and WebQuest projects on the Little Rock school integration case and the Tuskegee syphilis study scandal. From the Pacific Bell Knowledge Network Explorer.
  • Exploring Amistad: A comprehensive site from Mystic Seaport about the history of the Amistad, the Amistad incident, and its legacy. Includes a timeline, teacher's resources, and an extensive library of primary documents: newspapers, government documents, personal papers, maps, and more.
  • Facts for Features: Black History Month 2008: Statistics and other information gleaned from the US Census.

Primary Sources:

  • The Story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott: Free access to articles from the Montgomery Advertiser archives from 1955-57, and video clips from participants in this seminal episode in the Civil Rights struggle.
  • African American Perspectives: Primary source materials from the Library of Congress. The Daniel A. P. Murray Pamphlet Collection presents a panoramic and eclectic review of African-American history and culture, spanning almost one hundred years from the early nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries, with the bulk of the material published between 1875 and 1900. Among the authors represented are Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Benjamin W. Arnett, Alexander Crummel, and Emanuel Love.
  • African Americans at War: Fighting Two Battles: Interviews with African Americans who served in the US military, from the Library of Congress Veterans History Project.
  • North American Slave Narratives: Beginnings to 1920: Documents the individual and collective story of the African American struggle for freedom and human rights in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. When completed, it will include all the narratives of fugitive and former slaves published in broadsides, pamphlets, or book form in English up to 1920 and many of the biographies of fugitive and former slaves published in English before 1920. From the Documenting the American South collections at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
  • The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record: Hundreds of images in a searchable database selected from a wide range of sources, most of them dating from the period of slavery. From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the Digital Media Lab at the University of Virginia Library.
  • Voices from the Days of Slavery: Almost seven hours of recorded interviews with 23 former slaves. Includes transcriptions, essays and biographies. From the American Memory project at the Library of Congress.

Biography:

Genealogy

  • African American Lives: Online companion to the PBS program tracing the roots of African-Americans, hosted and narrated by Henry Louis Gates Jr. Includes a genealogy guide and other features.
  • Afrigeneas: A site devoted to African American genealogy, to researching African ancestry in the Americas in particular and to genealogical research and resources in general, including an e-mail discussion list and message boards.

Study Guides, Directories and Other Resources:


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This page last updated: February 13, 2008