Tag Archives: African-American history

Black Folklore for Halloween

Posted by on October 23, 2018 No comments

If you’re the type of person who likes to curl up with a creepy story around Halloween, look no further than this list from Shondaland.com, a website founded by Shonda Rhimes. The list features several pivotal works of African-American folklore, such as Virginia Hamilton’s The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales, to get you into that Halloween mood!

“Hamilton’s expansive set of folktales is the perfect introduction to a staple of African trickster characters, slave folklore, and the tradition of oral storytelling that black Americans have long held close. Perhaps most importantly, Hamilton provides a straightforward, blunt explanation of the origin and importance of black folklore in America, noting that while you’re having fun reading these stories you must remember, “these were once a creative way for oppressed people to express their fears and hopes to one another… We must look look on the tales as a celebration of the human spirit.”

You can find The People Could Fly; The Dark-Thirty: Southern Tales of the Supernatural by Patricia C. McKissack; Her Stories: African American Folktales, Fairy Tales, and True Tales by Virginia Hamilton; and The Annotated African American Folktales by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Maria Tatar right here at The Ames Library. If you need help locating them on the shelf, just drop by a librarian’s office on our first floor.

 

 

 

Free Digital Archive of Black Newspapers Goes Live

Posted by on June 15, 2018 No comments

As of June 2018, the Obsidian Collection Archives is now available online. This digital collection of historic black newspaper archives was started when executive director Angela Ford realized that physical archives of papers like Chicago Defender were rapidly deteriorating and in need of preservation. ”To make matters worse, when she told her son about newsworthy things that had happened when she was growing up, he often found there was no record of those, either. ‘He’d go to Google it, and it wasn’t there,’ she says. ‘I thought, ‘Wait, what?… My past was disintegrating. That’s how I got involved: to save black history and to save myself.'” (Source)

Eight exhibitions are now live, with many more to be added.

Woman and girls on Maxwell Street, Shakir Karriem, Photographer 1983-08. From the collection of
The Obsidian Collection Archives.

From the Obsidian Collection’s mission statement:

Our primary goal is to preserve and share images from African American newspapers to future generations. As Black people moved about the country, the documentation of their lives was recorded on very few mediums. The African American Newspapers were of the few published tools of the first half of the twentieth century to capture any record of our lives, our goals, our suffering and our strength.

The list of partner newspapers can be accessed here, and you can read more about the project at Atlas Obscura and Smithsonian.com.

New trial databases on African-American history at Ames Library

Posted by on October 23, 2017 No comments

Ames Library is currently evaluating two databases for future subscription, African Americans and Reconstruction: Hope and Struggle, 1865-1883 and African Americans and Jim Crow: Repression and Protest, 1883-1922. Together, the databases comprise approximately 2,400 printed works on the post-Civil War and Post-Reconstruction periods in African-American history. The works are drawn from The Library Company of Philadelphia’s Afro-Americana Collection.

African Americans and Reconstruction: Hope and Struggle [and African Americans and Jim Crow ] offers a comprehensive survey of the black experience during the crucial post-Civil War period [and during the period from post- Reconstruction through the early 1920s]. Using this multifaceted collection researchers can easily uncover patterns of thought and compare points of view comprehensively. Students will find numerous new topics for term papers, group study and oral presentations, and teachers and faculty will discover multiple paths for classroom study. And by using helpful features such as “Suggested Searches,” users at all levels can drill into the content by topic, time period, theme or subject matter. (Readex)

The databases are searchable by subject, each of which includes subcategories such as African-American Women Authors, Antislavery Literature, Economic Conditions in the South, Miscegenation, White Supremacy Movements and Groups, African-American Churches and Clergy, African-American Colleges and Universities, and so on.

This 30-day trial is good until November 12th, 2017. You can access the databases using the links above or by visiting our A–Z Resources page (http://libguides.iwu.edu/az.php). (New and trial databases are located on the right-hand side of the page and are also searchable by title.)

What do we want from you? Check them out! Tell us if you like them. The Ames Library regularly signs up for trial subscriptions each year and we love to get your feedback on resources that could strengthen our collections. We have a virtual suggestion box here: https://www.iwu.edu/library/information/Suggestion-Box.html

Washington Conference on the Race Problem in the United States. How to Solve the Race Problem : The Proceedings of the Washington Conference on the Race Problem in the United States (Washington, DC: Beresford, Printer, 1903)

Keckley, Elizabeth. Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (New York: G.W. Carleton, 1868)

A 1902 novel from black author, Simon E. Griggs.

Griggs, Sutton E. Unfettered: A Novel (Nashville: The Orion Publishing Company, 1902)