Browse Libraries' Databases for Black History Month Materials

In honor of Black History Month, the University of Arkansas Libraries invite you to explore African American history and culture from the comfort of your keyboard, through online collections and databases, including: this month only, Gale's new Slavery and Antislavery Archive, an online collection of thousands of original books and documents debating slavery and abolition. In addition to newspaper collections and books published in the antebellum era, Slavery and Anti-Slavery contains 7,247 books, 80 serials, more than fifteen manuscript collections, and court records.

Alexander Street's Music Library Online includes a large selection of African American music, featuring jazz, blues, and gospel by premier artists such as Ma Rainey, Lead Belly, Mahalia Jackson, Alberta Hunter, Tampa Red, and William Johnson. At least 5,000 of the tracks are rare or never-before-published and some 16,000 tracks are great historical recordings from Document Records.

The Oxford African American Studies Center offers timelines, images, and more than 8,000 signed articles drawn from authoritative reference sources, including:

• African American National Biography, a new scholarly compilation of more than 4,000 lives from the earliest days of European exploration to the present day.
• Africana, an encyclopedia of the African and African American experience in five volumes
• The Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895
• The Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present
• Black Women in America, the comprehensive 2nd edition of an important biographical source

The Studies Center offers the ability to search or browse entries for persons, topics, time periods, primary source documents, maps, and charts and tables. Includes links to recommended web sources as well as teaching materials and features.

Black Short Fiction and Folklore from Africa and the African Diaspora is the most comprehensive collection yet created of stories from Africa and the African Diaspora. When complete, it will offer more than 8,000 short stories and folktales, ranging thematically from oral traditions that date back many hundreds of years to contemporary tales of modern life. In addition to these works, the database includes complete runs of selected literary magazines, such as Kyk-Over-Al and The Beacon. Black Short Fiction and Folklore from Africa and the African Diaspora currently features over 6,400 short stories and more than 47,000 pages.

Land of (Unequal) Opportunity: Documenting the Civil Rights Struggle in Arkansas, is an online collection created by the University Libraries that offers documents and images tracing the history of civil rights in the state of Arkansas. The Web site contains over 2000 pages of documents, photographs, broadsides, pamphlets, drawings, cartoons, and other images. While the project emphasizes the 1957 Little Rock Central High School integration crisis and the rights of African American Arkansans, it covers all time periods and includes civil rights issues pertaining to women, homosexuals, and the Japanese Americans held in Arkansas relocation camps during World War II.& Users may browse the digital collection or search by keywords.

Black Drama currently offers approximately 1450 plays by 250 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. The database also includes selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays. Plays date from the mid-1800s to the present and were written by authors from North America, English-speaking Africa, the Caribbean, and other African diaspora countries. Many of the works are rare, hard-to-find, or out of print. Nearly a quarter of the collection will consist of previously unpublished plays by writers such as Langston Hughes, Ed Bullins, Willis Richardson, Femi Euba, Amiri Baraka, Randolph Edmonds, Zora Neale Hurston, and many others.

Black Thought and Culture currently contains contains 1297 sources with 1100 authors, which includes the non-fiction published works of leading African Americans. When complete, Black Thought and Culture will provide approximately 100,000 pages of monographs, essays, articles, speeches, and interviews written by leaders within the black community from the earliest times to 1975. The collection includes the works of W.E.B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, Alain Locke, Mary McLeod Bethune, Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Ralph Bunche, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Angela Davis, Houston Baker, Jesse Jackson, Ida B. Wells, Bobby Seale, and many others. Search or browse by author, title, subject, year, topic, historical event, or by keyword in full text.

Black Women Writers is a growing collection that currently offers more than 35,000 pages of poetry and prose. Including fiction, poetry, and essays from three continents and 20 countries, the database gives an unparalleled view of black women's struggles through time. Some of the authors whose works are now available include: Rita Dove, Audre Lourde, Phyllis Wheatley, Lucille Clifton, Nikki Giovanni, Harriet Jacobs, and Sojourner Truth.

For quick links to these databases and other Collections News, visit the Libraries' Website at http://libinfo.uark.edu/eresources/news/collectionsnews.asp.