Subject Guides: Black History Month Resources: Articles and Primary Sources

Databases for Scholarly Articles

America: History and Life
Index to research on the history of the United States and Canada

News articles -

Ethnic NewsWatch

American Slavery: A Composite Autobiography This link opens in a new window
Between 1936 and 1938, the WPA Federal Writers' Project hired field workers to collect the life histories of former slaves. Transcripts for 2,000 interviews, from seventeen states, were then compiled by the Library of Congress. The collection and the index are now searchable online.

Black Abolitionist Archive
The Black Abolitionist Digital Archive is a collection of over 800 speeches by antebellum blacks and approximately 1,000 editorials from the period. These important documents provide a portrait of black involvement in the anti-slavery movement; scans of these documents are provided as images and PDF files.
Black Freedom Struggle in the United States
An index of primary sources related to slavery, abolition, the Jim Crow era, the Civil Rights era, Black Power, and the contemporary era.
Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database
Repository of data about the trans-Atlantic and intra-American slave trade. It is focused on Digital Humanities and providing access to quantitative data. It also supports the creation of tables, charts, and other data visualization tools.
Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture & the Law
Database of primarily legal material related to slavery in the US 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. This includes cases from the 20th century related to issues emanating from slavery. The database also includes modern law review articles discussing slavery.

America's Historical Newspapers
America's Historical Newspapers allows users to search more than 1,000 U.S. historical newspapers published between 1690 and 1922, including titles from all 50 states.

Eighteenth Century Collections Online
A vast eighteenth-century library at your desktop—a fully text-searchable corpus of books, pamphlets and broadsides in all subjects printed between 1701 and 1800. It currently contains over 180,000 titles amounting to over 32 million fully-searchable pages. It includes sources mainly from the UK and the United States but also includes sources from other countries.
Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers This link opens in a new window
Provides access to primary source newspaper content from the 19th century, featuring full-text content and images from numerous newspapers from a range of urban and rural regions throughout the U.S. The collection encompasses the entire 19th century, with an emphasis on such topics as the American Civil War, African-American culture and history, Western migration and Antebellum-era life, among other subjects.

Newspapers.com
Database of newspapers from the 17th century to the present. The collection covers much more recent newspapers than other databases.

Enslaved.org
A digital humanities project affiliated with Michigan State University. It collects and normalizes disparate information to allow for identification of individual slaves and their stories to be told.
Frederick Douglass Newspapers
This online collection presents newspapers edited by Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), the African American abolitionist who escaped slavery and became one of the most famous orators, authors, and journalists of the 19th century.
Historical African American Newspapers Available Online
This research guide compiled by Marist College lists African American newspapers that have been digitized by different entities. A small number of the newspapers will not be available to U Maine students, but most are available for public use.
Library of Congress: Digitized African American Newspapers
Umbra Search
Named in honor of a group of Black writers and poets in the 1960s, Umbra Search brings together hundreds of thousands digitized materials from over 1,000 libraries and archives across the country.

For further information check out these other research guides: