Primary Sources - United States: African-Americans

A comprehensive reference that provides a history of African Americans based on documents from authors, musicians, artists, politicians and more.

Features a diverse range of voices that cut across class and political affiliations as well as across regions and generations

See sections on Civil Rights.

This two-volume set provides readers with a balanced collection of materials that captures the wide-ranging experiences of African American people over the history of America. Volume 1 begins with the enslavement and transportation of slaves to North America and ends with the Civil War; Volume 2 continues with the beginning of Reconstruction through the election of Barack Obama to the American presidency. Each volume provides a chronology of major events, a historic overview, and sections devoted to domestic, material, economic, intellectual, political, leisure, and religious life of African Americans for the respective time spans. Volume 1 covers a wide variety of topics from a multitude of perspectives in such areas as enslavement, life during the Civil War, common foods, housing, clothing, political opinions, and similar topics. Volume 2 addresses the civil rights movement, court cases, life under Jim Crow, Reconstruction, busing, housing segregation, and more. Each volume includes 100-110 primary sources with suggested readings from government publications, court testimony, census data, interviews, newspaper accounts, period appropriate letters, Works Progress Administration interviews, sermons, laws, diaries, and reports.

This book explores the transformative energy and excitement that African Americans expressed in aesthetic and civic currents that percolated the opening of the 20th century and proved a force in the modernization of America.

The authors o fMinds Stayed on Freedom are eighth and ninth grade students, most from low-income households, who spent thousands of hours researching the local Movement, honing their questioning techniques, conducting interviews, transcribing tapes, editing their texts, and mastering the other tasks that went into the production of this book. Their success shows that ordinary people not only can make history, they also can best record it.

The letters were written by black settlers who had migrated from North America to Sierra Leone. They record an attempt by self-liberated ex-slaves to obtain political and land rights, which they felt had been unjustly denied them, using their literacy in English as a tool.

Primary documents at the end of the book.

Part intellectual history, part advice book, and part polemic, this collection of original essays and poetry presents a defense and celebration of the achievements--moral, material, intellectual, and artistic--of black women in Victorian America. Writing as a Christian, a mother, and a wife, Mrs. Mossell held exemplary models of black womanhood before the public eye, called for the end to caste and color discrimination, and challenged the so-called "cult of true womanhood." A source of instruction and inspiration in its own time, The Work of the Afro-American Woman today remains a valuable document of black American cultural and intellectual history and forges a powerful link between past and present.