Black History Month

Archives Unbound provides access to rare primary source documents topically focused into digital collections covering US foreign policy, civil rights, global affairs, colonial studies, British history, Holocaust studies, LGBT studies, Latin America and Caribbean studies, Middle East studies, political science, religious studies, and women’s studies. Includes over 340 collections.

Focusing predominantly on Atlanta, Chicago, New York, and towns and cities in North Carolina this resource presents multiple aspects of the African American community through pamphlets, newspapers and periodicals, correspondence, official records, reports and in-depth oral histories, revealing the prevalent challenges of racism, discrimination and integration, and a unique African American culture and identity.

This collection includes over 250 volumes of fiction, poetry, drama and non-fictional prose, including works by Ama Ata Aidoo, Steve Biko, Buchi Emecheta, Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head, Doris Lessing, Nelson Mandela, Dambudzo Marechera, Christopher Okigbo, Okot p'Bitek and Tayeb Salih.

The databases documents American History from the earliest settlers to the mid-twentieth century. It is sourced from the Gilder Lehrman Collection, one of the finest archives available for the study of American History.

Apartheid South Africa makes available British government files from the Foreign, Colonial, Dominion and Foreign and Commonwealth Offices spanning the period 1948 to 1980.

Black Thought and Culture is 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. The ideas of over 1,000 authors present an evolving and complex view of what it is to be black in America.

More than a million-and-a-half Africans, along with many Indians and South Asians, were brought to the Caribbean between the 15th and 19th centuries. Today, their descendants are active in literature and the arts, producing literature with strong and direct ties to traditional African expressions. This literary connection, combined with the tales of survival, exile, resistance, endurance, and emigration to other parts of the Americas, makes for a body of work that is essential for the study of the Caribbean and the Black Diaspora.

The Organizational Records and Personal Papers bring a new perspective to the Black Freedom Struggle via the records of major civil rights organizations and personal papers of leaders and observers of the 20th century Black freedom struggle. The three major civil rights organizations are the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs. Papers of civil rights leaders included in this module are those of the civil rights and labor leader A. Philip Randolph; the long-time civil rights activist and organizer of the March on Washington, Bayard Rustin, and the papers of the pioneering educator Mary McLeod Bethune. Through records of Claude A. Barnett's Associated Negro Press, this module also branches out to cover other aspects of African American life in the 20th century, like religion, sports, education, fraternal organizations, and even the field of entertainment.

This Black Freedom module is highlighted by the records of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Africa-related papers of Claude Barnett, and the Robert F. Williams Papers. SNCC, formed by student activists in 1960 after the explosion of the sit-in movement, was one of the three most important civil rights organizations of the 1960s, alongside SCLC and the NAACP. CORE was formed in 1941 and organized the pioneering Journey of Reconciliation in the 1940s and the Freedom Rides in the early 1960s; both events are documented in the CORE records in this module. With the addition of SNCC and CORE records, History Vault now includes SNCC, SCLC, CORE, and NAACP records. Rounding out this module are the papers of Chicago Congressman Arthur W. Mitchell, the Chicago chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality, and records pertaining to the Mississippi Freedom Summer.

Based at Fisk University from 1943-1970, the Race Relations Department and its annual Institute were set up by the American Missionary Association to investigate problem areas in race relations and develop methods for educating communities and preventing conflict.

Documenting three pivotal decades in the fight for civil rights, this resource showcases the speeches, reports, surveys and analyses produced by the Department’s staff and Institute participants, including Charles S. Johnson, Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., and Thurgood Marshall.

Bringing together primary source documents from archives and libraries across the Atlantic world, this resource allows students and researchers to explore and compare unique material relating to the complex subjects of slavery, abolition and social justice.

Colonial America makes available all 1,450 volumes of the CO 5 series from The National Archives, UK, covering the period 1606 to 1822. CO 5 consists of the original correspondence between the British government and the governments of the American colonies.

Originally known as the 'Government Gazettes', each item contains the colonial laws for the year they were published. The legal records also include property for sale, probate records and bankruptcy notices

These gazettes contain copies of the laws and ordinances which were introduced in the years they cover. Each item was originally published as the Government Gazette for a colony and year. Their contents include tenders of property, probate records and insolvency notices. This is the third part of the three part series Colonial Law in Africa. These papers cover the Mau Mau uprising, the creation of the first legislative councils and legal changes to transfer power to those councils.

The Colonial State Papers offers access to over 7,000 hand-written documents and more than 40,000 bibliographic records with this incredible resource on Colonial History. In addition to Britain's colonial relations with the Americas and other European rivals for power, this collection also covers the Caribbean and Atlantic world. It is an invaluable resource for scholars of early American history, British colonial history, Caribbean history, maritime history, Atlantic trade, plantations, and slavery.

The documents in Confidential Print: Africa begin with coastal trading in the early nineteenth century and the Conference of Berlin of 1884 and the subsequent Scramble for Africa. They then follow the abuses of the Congo Free State, fights against tropical disease, Italy’s defeat by the Abyssinians, World War II, apartheid in South Africa and colonial moves towards independence. Together they cover the whole of the modern period of European colonisation of the continent from the British Government’s perspective.

This resource brings together manuscript, printed and visual primary source materials for the study of 'Empire' and its theories, practices and consequences. The materials span across the last five centuries and are accompanied by a host of secondary learning resources including scholarly essays, maps and an interactive chronology.

The colony of Kenya was managed by the government departments who wrote these A1:F79 reports. They start when Kenya was a part of the East Africa Colony and continue until independence. The statistics for Kenya are included in Colonial Africa in official statistics, 1821-1953. These reports explain why those statistics are at the levels recorded. The contents pages at the front of each report list the departments which existed at that time. Comparing the contents pages reveals how the structure of the colonial government changed over time.

This collection contains annual reports compiled by successive British colonial administrations in Nigeria and Cameroon. The documents cover the period from the establishment of the Colony and Protectorate of Lagos to the creation of an independent Nigerian state.

This collection contains annual reports by successive colonial administrations in Rhodesia. It ranges from the period of corporate colonisation in the late 19th century right through to the creation of an independent Zimbabwean republic in 1980. The documents provide an overview of the evolution of colonial rule from the perspective of colonial administrators. They highlight their response to early anti-colonial resistance such as the Shona and Ndeble Risings of 1896-1897. The records also highlight the difficulties caused by the Smith government’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965 and ensuing decades of white minority rule.