Africana/African Studies

Databases of journals, videos, written works and more.

• Academic Search Premier - Multi-disciplinary database provides full text for more than 4,600 journals, including full text for nearly 3,900 peer-reviewed titles.

• Black Studies Center - Combines resources for research and teaching in Black studies: Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience, International Index of Black Periodicals Full Text (IIBP), The Chicago Defender Archive, ProQuest Dissertations for Black Studies, and Black Literature Index.
• Literature Resource Center (Gale) - Provides biographical information, overviews, full-text literary criticism and reviews on more than 130,000 writers in all disciplines, from all time periods and from around the world. Draws from a number of Gale sources: Contemporary Literary Criticism, Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism,...
• America: History & Life (EBSCO) - Indexes over 1,800 journals as well as dissertations on the history, culture, area studies, and current affairs literature of the United States and Canada.
• Historical Abstracts (EBSCO) - Index covering the history of the world from 1450 to the present (excluding the United States and Canada which are covered by "America: History & Life"), including world history, military history, women's history, and history of education.
• Ethnic NewsWatch + Ethnic NewsWatch: A History (ProQuest) - Provides a full-text collection of ethnic and minority press content from the U.S. and Canada offering additional viewpoints from those proffered by the mainstream press. Includes scholarly journals and working papers, trade journals, magazines, newspapers, newsletters, and dissertations...
• eHRAF World Cultures - Contains ethnographic collections on the cultures of the world, past and present, indexed by culture and subject, and covering all aspects of cultural and social life.
• Black Studies in Video Streaming video database with over 500 hours of documentaries, newsreels, interviews and archival footage surveying the evolution of black culture in the United States.
• Black Thought and Culture - A collection of approximately 100,000 pages of non-fiction writings by major American black leaders—teachers, artists, politicians, religious leaders, athletes, war veterans, entertainers, and other figures—covering 250 years of history. In addition to the most familiar works, Black Thought and Culture presents a great deal of previously inaccessible material, including letters, speeches, prefatory essays, political leaflets, interviews, periodicals, and trial transcripts.
• United States Census Bureau on Race - Statistics regarding racial data collected through the census.

For issues relating to race and ethnicity as it pertains to today's socio-political environment, it is important to consider the relative positions people have on a topic prior to preparing your own argument. This will expose areas of friction or disjunction from which to analyze the opinions or evidence provided by various individuals or constituent groups.  The database Opposing Viewpoints in Context covers today’s "hottest" social issues. It features viewpoint articles, topic overviews, full-text magazine, academic journal and newspaper articles, primary source documents, statistics, images and podcasts, and links to Websites. Updated daily.

• Los Angeles Sentinel (ProQuest Historical Newspapers)
  Full-page and article images from the Los Angeles Sentinel, the oldest and largest black newspaper in the western United States and the largest African-American-owned newspaper in the U.S., covering issues concerning the African-American community and its readers.
• African American Newspapers, 1827-1998
  Digital archive of more than 270 historically significant African American newspapers published in the 19th and 20th centuries.
• Chicago Defender (ProQuest Historical Newspapers)
  Full-text digital archive of the influential black newspaper Chicago Defender.
• Black Studies Center. Newspapers
  Full-text digital archive of the influential black newspapers Chicago Defender and Daily Defender.
• Independent Voices
  Chronicles the 60s, 70s, and 80s through the lens of an independent alternative press. Independent Voices provides over 1,000 titles from the special collections of dozens of libraries. Independent Voices provides easy access to the voices of feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Latinos, gays, lesbians, and more. This collection contains 12,992 issues comprising 388,368 pages.

Explore Census Data regarding race in the United States as it pertains to populations, education, income and more. Note that limitations of census data include self-reporting, which is not verified and that the data only reflect those in the United States who completed and submitted the form to the federal government. 

For a full list of publicly available data, see our Open Data Sets guide.