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Research Guides

African History and Studies

Collection Description
 The Libraries’ at UM have an excellent collection of primary source materials such as books, articles, newspapers, and literary sources covering all aspects of African history. This guide is intended for graduate and undergraduate students and presents a variety of library and open web resources. Please contact Shatha Baydoun, History Liaison Librarian, for an individual research consultation or for more information about resources in African history.

General Database Resources  

Subject Specialist

Katherine Villa

  • Peer Research Consultant / UGrow Fellow 2020-21
  • kkv8@miami.edu
  • (305) x

Shatha Baydoun

Research Tools and Databases
Select Topics and Databases Current and Historical Newspapers
Subject Specialist

Katherine Villa

  • Peer Research Consultant / UGrow Fellow 2020-21
  • kkv8@miami.edu
  • (305) x

Shatha Baydoun

Select Visual Resources
  • Africa: Sights and Sounds of a Continent - UW Madison: Contains more than 3000 slides, 500 photographs, and 50 hours of sounds from African countries.
  • Africana & Black History (NYPL):  Provides photographs from the transatlantic slave trade, Western migration, the colonization movement, the Great Migration, and the contemporary immigration of Caribbean’s, Haitians, and sub-Saharan Africans.
  • ARTstor: Comprised of contributions from museums, individual photographers, scholars, special collections at libraries, and photo archives. All images are accompanied by comprehensive metadata and are rights-cleared for educational use.
  • Humphrey Winterton Collection of East African Photographs: 1860-1960: Includes about 7000 photographs, organized in 76 separate albums that depict life, primarily in East Africa, between about 1860 and 1960.
  • Ijele: Art eJournal of the African World: An online journal of contemporary art, architecture, and art history, focusing on the visual creative expressions of artists in Africa and other regions of the world. 
  • Slavery Images: Includes over 1,200 images detailing the experiences of enslaved Africans in the Americas.
 
Subject Specialist

Katherine Villa

  • Peer Research Consultant / UGrow Fellow 2020-21
  • kkv8@miami.edu
  • (305) x

Shatha Baydoun

Maps and Atlases
  • Maps of Africa: Provides a well-organized collection of historical and current maps on Africa. All maps are in the public domain, and may be freely downloaded and copied.
  • Maps of Africa: An Online Exhibit: Presents a digital collection of historical African maps digitized by Stanford University Libraries.
  • Maps of Liberia, 1830 to 1870: Presented by the Library of Congress, this map collection was created in 1817 by the American Colonization Society (ACS) to resettle free blacks in Sierra Leone and Liberia.
  • Old Maps of Africa: A collection of historical and current maps of the African continent.

Robert Sayer's Atlantic or Western Ocean (1815) from the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University
Subject Specialist

Katherine Villa

  • Peer Research Consultant / UGrow Fellow 2020-21
  • kkv8@miami.edu
  • (305) x

Shatha Baydoun

Select Databases

Petition by Inhabitants of Pennsylvania for Effecting Change in the Constitution for the Abolition of Slavery (1830) from the New York Historical Society
 
Subject Specialist

Katherine Villa

  • Peer Research Consultant / UGrow Fellow 2020-21
  • kkv8@miami.edu
  • (305) x

Shatha Baydoun

Primary Sources
Slavery and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade UM Special Collections  Activism and the Civil Rights Movement in Florida Caribbean South Florida University of Miami Sources
Secondary Sources
General Florida/Miami Resources General Databases  General Citation Sources  Sources for Writing History Papers
Subject Specialists

Katherine Villa

  • Peer Research Consultant / UGrow Fellow 2020-21
  • kkv8@miami.edu
  • (305) x

Shatha Baydoun

Recommended Books

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Electronically Available Books

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Digital Libraries

AfroCubaWeb: the African cultures in Cuba - Abakwa - Congo - Dahomey - Haiti - Yoruba - West Indies 
AfroCuba Web is an extensive online resource of news articles, essays, biographies, statistics, art, music, culture, politics, religion, links to websites. and more with the objective of educating about and preserving Afro-Cuban culture. 

At the Crossroads: Afro-Cuban Orisha Arts in Miami 
A digital exhibition from HistoryMiami Museum. 

Digitales – Afrocubanas 
Afrocubanas Magazine's list of links to blogs and websites dedicated to Afro-Cuban history and culture. 

Historia Negra de Cuba  
Instagram page of blogger and Afro-Cuban advocate Marley Pulido, includes an archive of articles and other links. 

General Databases
Global Newsstream (ProQuest)
Covers national and leading regional newspapers including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. International coverage includes The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, Jerusalem Post, and El Pais.

JSTOR
Provides digital versions of the backfiles (3 to 5 years) of major scholarly journals.

ProQuest Research Library
Has in-depth coverage of the top 150 core academic subject, including 5,060 titles over 3,600 in full text-from 1971 forward. It features a highly-respected, diversified mix of scholarly journals, trade publications, magazines, and newspapers.

Nuevo Herald (1976 - Current)
A Spanish-language newspaper published daily by the Miami Herald, Miami, Florida. Includes a Cuban section, news of interest to many Latin groups in the Miami area, as well as international, national, and regional news, cultural information, and services.
 
HathiTrust
Includes full-text access to over 6.4 million public domain works.
 
Humanities Full Text (H.W. Wilson)
Has more than 300 key humanities journals. Abstracts of journal articles are included from the spring of 1994.

Anthropology Plus
Covers anthropology, archaeology, and interdisciplinary studies. Includes Anthropological Index from1957-present.
 
Sociological Abstracts
Includes indexes and abstracts research literature published worldwide in journals and other serial publications.
UM Archival Collection
Alberto del Pozo's Orichas Collection 
The collection consists of a series of drawings by Cuban-born artist Alberto del Pozo (1946-1992) of the deities of Afro-Cuban Santería. 
 
Lydia Cabrera Papers 
Cabrera traveled throughout Cuba conducting interviews, collecting oral histories, recording stories and music, documenting rituals and practices, and cataloging “Africanisms” in Spanish Cuba. Post-exile, she published one of her most well-known works, Anaforuana, about the secret Abakuá society, in 1975. Cabrera also produced what is considered the most complete and important body of research on Afro-Caribbean religions and folklore. She was one of the first to recognize the richness of African culture and its vital contributions to Cuban identity. Selected items have been digitized and can be viewed here.
 
Jorge Castellanos Papers 
Author and professor born in 1915 in Guantánamo, Cuba. Exiled to the United States by way of Jamaica in 1961. After retirement, he continued to publish books on Cuban culture, most notably his series Cultura Afrocubana, co-authored with his daughter Isabel Castellanos, from 1988 to 1994.
Primary Sources
Cuban History​
 
History of Slavery 
Subject Specialist

Katherine Villa

  • Peer Research Consultant / UGrow Fellow 2020-21
  • kkv8@miami.edu
  • (305) x

Shatha Baydoun

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