Black History Month: Articles & Databases

This collection features documentaries, newsreels, interviews, and archival footage surveying the evolution of black culture in the United States. Includes California Newsreel's African American Classics collection that includes films covering history, politics, art and culture, family structure, social and economic pressures, and gender relations. This current release includes 145 videos totaling 141 hours.

Black Drama contains the full text of 1,200 plays written from the mid-1800s to the present by more than 100 playwrights from North America, English-speaking Africa, the Caribbean, and other African Diaspora countries. The plays are accompanied by reference materials, significant ancillary information, a rich performance database, and images. Coverage: 1850-present.

Thousands of essays, images, liner notes and more covering blues, jazz, spirituals, civil rights songs, slave songs, minstrelsy, rhythm and blues, gospel, and other forms of black American musical expression. Includes biographies of 185 African American composers.

This collection of African American newspapers contains a wealth of information about cultural life and history during the 1800s and is rich with first-hand reports of the major events and issues of the day.

Provides access to approximately 270 U.S. newspapers chronicling a century and a half of the African American experience. This collection features papers from more than 35 states—including many rare and historically significant 19th century titles. Coverage: 1827-1998.

Features more than 170 wide-ranging periodicals by and about African Americans. Published in 26 states, the publications include academic and political journals, commercial magazines, institutional newsletters, organizations' bulletins, annual reports and other genres. These diverse periodicals—which have shaped, and in turn been shaped by, African American culture—will enable new discoveries on lives of African Americans as individuals, as an ethnic group and as Americans.