20th Century Newspaper & Magazine Articles (Primary Sources)
- CrisisFull text of W.E.B. DuBois' NAACP newspaper via Googlebooks.
- Alternative Press Index This link opens in a new windowIndexes 300 alternative, radical and left periodicals that report and analyze the practices and theories of cultural, economic, political and social change. Covers 1991 to present.
- Google Book Search This search tool can pull up some full text books, butt many of the results will just have excerpts and snippets.
Finding Books
Finding Scholarly Articles
Use these databases to search for scholarly history journal articles (secondary sources):
Resources through The New York Public Library
These online resources are accessible to anyone with a New York Public Library card, which is available to anyone with a New York State address.
African American Newspapers: The 19th Century. This full text database includes nine rare African American newspapers from the 1800s. In this database you can read Freedom's Journal, the first African American newspaper in the United States, as well as Provincial Freeman, a newspaper founded in Canada for African Americans who escaped slavery or chose to leave the United States.
African American Newspapers, 1827-1998. This database includes over 270 newspapers from 35 states, including titles such as Alaska Spotlight and Afro-Hawaii News.
ProQuest African American Historical Newspapers. Explore African American historical newspapers from major cities from 1912 to 2005 including the New York Amsterdam News and the Chicago Defender.
Independent Voices. This database includes independent magazines and journals from the later half of the 20th century, with strong coverage of the Black Power movement and the post-Vietnam era.
Essence Magazine in the Women's Magazine Archive. Read the first issues of Essence magazine and their coverage of film, literature, politics and culture, from 1970-2005.
African America, Communists, and the National Negro Congress, 1933-1947. This database includes digitized archives and manuscripts from the National Negro Congress, an organization established in 1936 to "secure the right of the Negro people to be free from Jim Crowism, segregation, discrimination, lynching, and mob violence" and "to promote the spirit of unity and cooperation between Negro and white people." This digitital archive includes over 98,600 images.
African American Experience. This full-text digital resource explores the history and culture of African Americans, as well as the greater Black Diaspora. This database is a great resource for middle school, high school, and undergraduate researchers.
Fight for Racial Justice and the Civil Rights Congress. This archive, from NYPL's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, documents the Civil Rights Congress (CRC) which was established in 1946.
NAACP Papers. This fully-searchable database of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)'s archives contains nearly two million pages of internal memos, legal briefings, and direct action summaries from national, legal, and branch offices.
ProQuest Civil War Era (1840-1865). This database includes more than 2,000 pamphlets and eight newspaper titles for the years 1840-1865, covering a vast range of Civil War Era research topics reflecting points of view of Northern, Southern, and Border States.
Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture & Law. This database brings together all known legal materials on slavery in the United States and the English-speaking world, as well as materials on free African-Americans in the colonies and the U.S. before 1870. Included are every statute passed by every state and colony, all federal statutes, all reported state and federal cases on slavery, and hundreds of books and pamphlets on the subject.
Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive. A historical archive of several million cross-searchable pages of books, serials, supreme court records and briefs, and key manuscript collections from the United States, Great Britain, and France concerning debates of slavery and abolition, the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the Institution of Slavery, and the Age of Emancipation.
African American Historical Serials Collection. This database documents the history of African American life and religious organizations from materials published between 1829 and 1922. The archive includes 170 titles from 75 different institutions.
African American Periodicals, 1825-1995. This database includes over 170 periodicals, published in 26 states, by and about African Americans, such as academic and political journals, commercial magazines, institutional newsletters, organizations' bulletins, and annual reports.
Black Studies Center.This fully cross-searchable gateway to Black Studies includes scholarly essays, periodical literature, historical newspaper articles, reference books, dissertations and more.
Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience. This resource, developed in cooperation with NYPL's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, provides an encyclopedic treatment of the formation and development of Black Studies. This database provides a core collection of primary and secondary resources in Black Studies, including full-text articles, book chapters, dissertations, reference materials, timelines, images and multimedia.
LGBT Life with Full Text. This database provides complete indexing and abstracting of content related to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender studies in over 230 journals, magazines, and newspapers. Users can access publications such as In Life: A Black Gay Anthology and Fighting Words: Personal Essays by Black Gay Men.
Archives of Sexuality and Gender. This online archive contains 18 digitized archival collections exploring LGBTQ history and culture since 1940. Patrons can access independent LGBTQ publications such as, the Black Lesbian Newsletter and the National Coalition of Black Gays.
The New York Public Library provides more than 500 online research options, many accessible from home with a library card, we challenge you to go beyond the search engine and dig deeper online with NYPL.
Digital Document Collections
- One Person, One Vote: The Legacy of SNCC and the Fight for Voting RightsThis resource features historical documentation on the formation of SNCC as well as other stories from the movement. It also features profiles of all the people who were involved in SNCC. There are links to blog posts and three major categories that give a general overview of the Civil Rights Movement. The site also features an interactive timeline of major events from 1960-1966. The website was updated as recently as May 2016.
Todd Christensen, a recent Geneseo graduate, worked on creating the One Person One Vote collection, writing many of the organizational and geographical profiles.
- Civil Rights Movement VeteransThis database contains primary sources telling the story from the civil rights activists’ point of view. The entirety of the source was put together by people who experienced the civil rights movement first hand. The site lists all its contributors and a profile.
- Historical Publications of the United States Commission on Civil RightsThis resource provides access to the historical record of the US Commission on Civil Rights, a federal agency established in 1957 to examine and resolve issues related to race, ethnicity, religion and, more recently, sexual orientation. It includes reports of the commission as well as articles by members of the commission on how the community reacted to the Commission's early hearings and how members of the Commission viewed their role in the 1960s. The best way to search it is to click on "Subject" and look for an interesting topic.
- Civil Rights in the Mississippi Digital ArchiveFrom the libraries of the University of Mississippi, this massive digital collection of data centers around the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi. It contains original photographs, letters, diaries, maps, yearbooks, newspapers, and written documentation/recordings of oral history/interviews from dates ranging well beyond the conventionally understood time frame of the movement. Easily navigated, one only has to click “browse”, or to enter a “Keyword Search”, on the homepage to access the database.
- NAACP PapersTo use this digital collection, you need a New York Public Library card, which is free and available to any NY State resident for a three month period of time, and renewable after that. Apply here: https://www.nypl.org/library-card/new
- Seattle Black Panther Party History and Memory ProjectThis source includes newspaper articles about the black panthers, photographs and oral histories. Additionally it has scanned news stories of black panther party articles, and testimonies of black panther cases.
Image Collections & Search Tools
- Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online CatalogThe Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC) contains catalog records and digital images representing a rich cross-section of still pictures held by the Prints & Photographs Division and, in some cases, other units of the Library of Congress. The Library of Congress offers broad public access to these materials as a contribution to education and scholarship.
The collections of the Prints & Photographs Division include photographs, fine and popular prints and drawings, posters, and a - New York Public Library Digital CollectionsFree and open access to over 700,000 images digitized from the The New York Public Library's vast collections, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints, photographs and more.
- FlickrUse Flickr's advanced search to find photos and images which are available copyright free or through a Creative Commons license that allows for reuse.
Flickr provides access to works by professional and amateur photographers as well as several collections from major world museums as well as to those of lesser quality. - Bing ImagesBing doesn't offer an advanced search feature. Rather, the user begins with a keyword search and then is guided through several options to narrow to the image they want based on topic, size, layout, or color among others.
Civil Rights Music, Posters, Radio, etc.
Digital Personal Narratives
- Civil Rights Movement VeteransThis database contains primary sources telling the story from the civil rights activists’ point of view. The entirety of the source was put together by people who experienced the civil rights movement first hand. The site lists all its contributors and a profile.
- Awesome StoriesA gathering place of primary-source information. To help educators and individuals find original sources, located at national archives, libraries, universities, museums, historical societies and government-created web sites.
History Research Help
Alan Witt (Geneseo's history librarian) is best reached by emailing him at witt@geneseo.edu. Ask for a research consultation, and he will work with you to set up a time that works for both of you, either in person or via Teams. He does have some limited offices hours from time to time, but email is the quickest way to get an appointment.
- Request a Research ConsultationIf you need help researching your topic, sign up for a one-on-one Research Consultation with a reference librarian who can help guide you through your research project.
