Check Out these databases for your Black History Month needs

Hello all!

Just wanted to remind you of some of the great digital resources we have. These can help you with your Black History Month classes and projects. (They may even help you with our little contest).

Black Thought and Culture

Black Thought and Culture, from Alexander Street Press, is intended for research in black studies, political science, American history, music literature and art. BLTC contains 1,297 sources with 1,110 authors, covering the nonfiction works of African-Americans from colonial times to the present.Primary sources begin with the works of abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass (whose Feb. 14 birthday was one of the reasons this month was chosen as Black History Month). The collection specifically includes the works of W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Bunche, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Angela Davis,Thurgood Marshall, Jesse Jackson and many others. Click here for my full review.

The African American Experience

The African American Experience is a full-text digital resource exploring the history and culture of African Americans, as well as the greater Black Diaspora. The stated goals of the collection are "to provide rock-solid information from authorities in the field, and to allow African Americans to speak for themselves through a wealth of primary sources."

The African American Experience contains full-text content from more than 400 titles,over 2000 images, 5,000 primary sources, and 250 vetted Web sites. Included in the collection are more than 3,000 interviews with former slaves, indexed and fully searchable. The collection is updated twice a year with additional titles.

Black Drama, Second Edition
This database contains the work of more than 200 playwrights from North America, English-speaking Africa, the Caribbean, and other African diaspora countries. 1,379 plays are published here in their entirety. More than 25% of these plays are published here for the first time, including some by such notable writers as Langston Hughes, Ed Bullins, Willis Richardson, Alice Childress, Amiri Baraka, Randolph Edmonds, Zora Neale Hurston, among others. Many other works included here are rare or out-of-print. Click here for more information.

African American Music Reference

Covering jazz, blues, gospel and other forms of African American music, this database provides 50,000 tracks for your listening pleasure. More than just entertainment, these recordings provide another way to connect with a people's history. You can listen to songs from the post-Reconstruction era to the Civil Rights movement, as the musicians express their life experiences through their art. There are big names like Ma Rainey, Mahalia Jackson, Lead Belly and Duke Ellington, and in most cases their entire catalogs are available. There are some early recordings dating back to the late 19th century. Many of the songs have never been published before. There are field recordings of spirituals, farming and labor songs, war songs, drinking songs, children's songs and more.