Research Guides: AFRS 1501: Survey of African American Experience: Find Primary Sources

Archival Collections at Savannah State University

Special Collections at Asa H. Gordon Library has been established to appraise, collect, organize, describe, preserve, and make available University records of permanent institutional and historical value. The manuscripts collection contains papers of faculty, staff, and alumni related to the University’s growth and development.

Helpful Links

What is a Primary Source?

A primary source is generally defined as document or physical object which was written or created during the time under study. These sources were present during an experience or time period and offer an inside view of a particular event. Depending on your research topic and perspective, primary sources can include:

Original Documents (autobiographies, personal correspondance and diaries, speeches and oral histories, newspapers, government documents, audio and video recordings, photographs, and maps)
Creative Works (Art, drama, poetry, music, novels)
Relics or Artifacts

["Boston Massacre, 03-05-1770 - NARA - 518262" by Unknown or not provided. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons]

Suggested GALILEO Databases

Ancestry (Library Edition)
Offers unparalleled coverage of the United States and the United Kingdom, including census, vital, church, court, and immigration records, as well as record collections from Canada, Europe, Australia and other areas of the world.

African-American Newspapers: The 19th Century This link opens in a new window
AFRICAN-AMERICAN NEWSPAPERS: The 19th Century with over 89,000 records and more than 50 million words) contains a wealth of information about the cultural life and history during the 1800s. The database contains large numbers of early biographies, vital statistics, essays and editorials, poetry and prose, and advertisements all of which embody the African-American experience.
African American Biographical Database This link opens in a new window African American Biographical Database (AABD) brings together the biographies of thousands of African Americans, many not to be found in any other reference source. These biographical sketches (including photographs and illustrations) have been assembled from biographical dictionaries and other sources. AABD draws its initial content from Chadwyck-Healey's Black Biographical Dictionaries 1790-1950.The collection contains extended narratives of African American activists, business people, former slaves, performing artists, educators, lawyers, physicians, writers, church leaders, homemakers, religious workers, government workers, athletes, farmers, scientists, factory workers, and more--both the famous and the everyday person.Database Provider: ProQuestDatabase Tutorial: ProQuest LibGuide
American Slavery: A Composite Autobiography This link opens in a new window
AMERICAN SLAVERY: A COMPOSITE AUTOBIOGRAPHY gives researchers the only resource that preserves the stories of American slaves as told by the former slaves themselves. From 1936 to 1938, ex-slaves in the United States told, for the first time, stories of what it was like to be a slave in America and what life was like after freedom finally came. The narratives were collected under the auspices of the Work Projects Administration.
Civil Rights Digital Library This link opens in a new window
The Civil Rights Digital Library (CRDL) promotes an enhanced understanding of the Civil Rights Movement through its three principal components:
a digital video archive delivering 30 hours of historical news film allowing learners to be nearly eyewitnesses to key events of the Civil Rights Movement
a civil rights portal providing a seamless virtual library on the Civil Rights Movement by aggregating metadata from 75 libraries and allied organizations from across the nation
instructional materials to facilitate the use of the video content in the learning process

The CRDL links to primary sources and other educational materials from libraries, archives, museums, public broadcasters, and others on a national scale. The CRDL features a collection of more than 30 hours of unedited news film from the WSB (Atlanta) and WALB (Albany, Ga.) television archives held by the Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia Libraries. These moving images - about 450 clips - cover a broad range of key civil rights events, including the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas (1957); the Atlanta Temple bombing (1958); Atlanta sit-ins (1960); Freedom Rides (1961); desegregation of the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech (1961); the Albany Movement (1961-1962); desegregation of Ole Miss (1962) and University of Alabama (1963); and Americus Movement (1963, 1965); Birmingham demonstrations (1963); among many other topics.
CRDL is a partnership among librarians, technologists, archivists,educators, scholars, academic publishers, and public broadcasters. The initiative receives support through a National Leadership Grant for Libraries awarded to the University of Georgia by the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Database Provider: Digital Library of Georgia
Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database This link opens in a new window
Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database is the result of the African Origins Project, a scholar-public collaborative endeavor to trace the geographic origins of Africans transported in the transatlantic slave trade. Many have contributed to this international research project, which is based at Emory University. The database provides information on almost 35,000 slaving voyages that forcibly embarked over 10 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The Voyages section of the database tracks 35,000 slaving expeditions between 1514 and 1866 and includes the ship's name, captain, owners, and nation as well as the number of slaves and some other information about the voyage. The African Names Database identifies over 67,000 African men, women, and children, including name, age, gender, origin, and place of embarkation. A section on assessing the slave trade provides statistics, a timeline, and maps that track the flow of the slave trade over time.

Learn more about the project.>
Database Provider: Emory University Libraries

Suggested Digital Collections

Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers This link opens in a new window
Chronicling America provides access to nearly 3,000 digitized newspapers. The site was developed as an Internet-based, searchable database of U.S. newspapers with descriptive information and select digitization of historic pages. Use Chronicling America to search digitized newspaper pages from 1789-1963 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information.
Digital Library of Georgia This link opens in a new window
The Digital Library of Georgia is a gateway to Georgia's history and culture found in digitized books, manuscripts, photographs, government documents, newspapers, maps, audio, video, and other resources.
Many of the materials are from the holdings of GALILEO member institutions. The Digital Library of Georgia continues to grow through its partnerships with libraries, archives, museums, government agencies, and allied organizations across the state.
To search or browse the holdings of the Digital Library of Georgia, visit the DLG homepage at: https://dlg.usg.edu/
A complete listing of digital collections available through the DLG is at: https://dlg.usg.edu/collections
Database Provider: Digital Library of Georgia

Suggested Books

Milestone Documents in African American History by Paul Finkelman
Call Number: E184.6 .M55 2010