Research Guides: African American Studies Research Guide: Databases and Journals

Background and Reference Sources

Multidisciplinary Databases

Multidisciplinary databases provide access to a wide range of subjects in one interface, meaning you can search for information on a topic from the perspectives of several disciplines. This type of database is great for the beginning stages of your research or for understanding social and cultural context on your topic.

Academic Search Complete
Full text of thousands of academic journals, magazines, and other publications across a wide range of disciplines, including the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and more.
JSTOR
Explore over 2,800 academic journals across more than 60 disciplines, including the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences.

ARTstor on JSTOR
Existing ARTstor logins automatically work on JSTOR. The separate artstor.org platform will be available until Aug 1, 2024, when it is scheduled to be retired.

Open Access books on JSTOR
More than 10,000 open access (OA) books from 125+ publishers, including Brill, Cornell University Press, University College of London, and University of California Press.

19th Century British Pamphlets
Nearly 26,000 pamphlets from collections in seven universities spanning more than one million pages. Brings together a corpus of primary sources for the study of sociopolitical and economic factors impacting 19th-century Britain.

New Collections Added Aug 2023
Thematic Collections
Three collections focusing on emerging areas of research and containing multiple types of content, including journals and open research reports. Collections include:
•Lives of Literature - Academic journals devoted to the deep study of writers and texts associated with core literary movements.
•Security Studies - Academic and open policy research on international and national security problems and foreign policy issues.
•Sustainability - Academic and open policy research on environmental stresses and their impact on society. Looks at sustainability and resilience through a broad lens spanning more than 30 disciplines.

Primary Sources
Global Plants
A growing collection of nearly three million high-resolution type plant specimens and related materials from over 300 community contributors around the world.

Struggles for Freedom: Southern Africa
27,000 objects and 190,000 pages of documents and images related to the liberation struggles and end of Apartheid in Southern Africa during the 20th Century, with an emphasis on Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.

World Heritage Sites: Africa
More than 86,000 objects of visual, contextual, and spatial documentation of African heritage and rock art sites.
Wiley Online Library
Full text of over 1,600 e-journals covering life, health and physical sciences, social science, and the humanities. Coverage is generally 1997-present. The library does not license all content offered on the Wiley site. The 'Full Access' lock icon denotes content available to UM users. Non-licensed content may be requested through Interlibrary loan or Article Galaxy Scholar (AGS) services. See more… for details.

To request non-licensed articles directly from the Wiley site including pre-1997 volumes, install the LibKey Nomad extension. To request Wiley articles without installing Nomad, you can look up the article DOI or PMID through LibKey.iO or OneSearch. See Get the article through Interlibrary Loan or Article Galaxy Scholar (AGS) for more information.

Reference and Web Sources

Reference sources provide broad overviews of topics, and are a great place to start your search for information. These types of sources include encyclopedias, dictionaries, textbooks, handbooks, books, and websites that broadly explore a subject.

BlackPast.org
BlackPast is the largest online encyclopedia on African American and Global African history on the Internet. African American history featured on this site concentrates on the history of people of African Ancestry in the United States. Global African history focuses on people of African ancestry outside the United States.

Credo Reference
Continuously updated full text collection of over 1,300 general and subject specific titles from 121 publishers with particular emphasis on encyclopedias, dictionaries, atlases, and reference handbooks.

Google Scholar
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. You can search across many disciplines and sources.

Specialized Databases

As you narrow down your research topic, specialized databases can offer more in-depth explorations of your area of interest.

African American Newspapers
Digitized full-text newspapers from the 1800s, authored by African Americans for African American communities. The collection also includes early biographies, vital records, essays, editorials, poetry, prose, and advertisements.
Black Abolitionist Papers
Over 15,000 digitized primary sources from African Americans active in the abolition movement between 1830 and 1865. This archive includes letters, speeches, sermons, lectures, articles, essays, editorials from more than 200 newspapers, as well as poems and various other documents. The majority of materials originate from the United States, Canada, and the British Isles.
Chicago Defender Historical
(1909-1975) Full text digitized newspaper covering politics, society, and events of the time from an African-American perspective
History Vault
Full text of several million pages of digitized primary source materials drawn from the National Archives, presidential libraries, and the archival papers of key organizations and individuals, presented in eight modules.
Ethnic NewsWatch
Full text of current newspapers, magazines, and journals from ethnic and minority presses, along with historical archives of Native American, African American, and Hispanic American publications from 1959 to 1989.