Guides: HIST 574: Topics in U.S. History: African North Americans and Citizenship: Home

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U.S. History
by Kristen Howard Last Updated May 3, 2024 417 views this year
Black Canadian Studies
by Kristen Howard Last Updated May 9, 2024 587 views this year
African History
by Kristen Howard Last Updated Apr 24, 2024 491 views this year
Latin American & Caribbean History
by Kristen Howard Last Updated Apr 25, 2024 119 views this year

Reference Sources

Black Canadians: History, Experiences, Social Conditions by Joseph Mensah
Call Number: FC106 B6 M45 2002
Publication Date: 2004

Oxford African American Studies Center
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The Oxford African American Studies Center brings the authority of carefully edited reference works to create a comprehensive collection of scholarship focusing on the lives and events which have shaped African American and African history and culture. Contains over 10,000 articles by top scholars in the field.

Oxford Research Encyclopedia: Latin American History
Peer-reviewed and regularly updated encyclopedia with over 600 articles on various aspects of Latin American history.

Find Secondary Sources

Find books

Find books by searching the Library Catalogue by keyword or by subject heading. Try subject heading searches such as:

su: Black people North America History 20th Century
- Tip: replace 20th Century with whatever century you are interested in (17th Century, 18th Century, etc.)
su: Black people Canada History

To learn more about how Subject Headings work, see this section of the Black Canadian Studies guide.

Tip: also try searching for books assigned in class and seeing what subject headings have been applied to those books.

Find peer-reviewed articles

America: History and Life
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Provides historical coverage of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. Includes information abstracted from over 2,000 journals published worldwide.
Historical Abstracts (EBSCO)
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This contains references to journal articles, book reviews and some dissertations about the history of all parts of the world from 1450 on, EXCLUDING Canada and the United States.

Tip! If you are searching for articles on the African Diaspora, try searching America: History & Life and Historical Abstracts simultaneously. After opening one of the databases, click "Choose Databases" next to the database title. Then, in the list of EBSCO databases, select both America: History & Life and Historical Abstracts.

Black Studies Center
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A cross-searchable gateway to Black Studies including scholarly essays, recent periodicals, historical newspaper articles and reference books.
Africa-Wide Information (Ebsco)
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Produced by NISC South Africa, this resource combines bibliographic databases from around the world to form a multidisciplinary aggregation of extensive coverage of all facets of Africa and African studies. Contains 3.2 million citations and abstracts dating back to the 16th century.
HAPI online
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Includes citations to articles and book reviews from the social sciences and humanities about Central and South America, as well as the U.S.-Mexico border region and Hispanics/Latinos in the U.S.

Find Primary Sources

Newspapers & Periodicals

African American Newspapers (Accessible Archives).
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This enormous collection of newspapers written by and for African Americans contains a wealth of information about cultural life and history during the 1800s and is rich with first-hand reports of the major events and issues of the day, including the Mexican War, Presidential and Congressional addresses, Congressional abstracts, business and commodity markets, the humanities, world travel and religion.

Historical African American Newspapers Available Online
This guide, curated by librarian Elizabeth Clarke (Marist College, NY) provides a list of historical African American Newspapers available online as part of digitization projects at libraries and historical societies as well as digitization projects done by Google.
The Black Press in 19th-Century Canada and Beyond
Access to online databases are available for the following historical newspapers:

-The Voice of the Fugitive (1851-1852)
-The Provincial Freeman (1853-1876)
-The Voice of the Bondsman (1856)
-The True Royalist (1860-1861)
-The Atlantic Advocate (1915-1917)
-The Dawn of Tomorrow (1923-1972)
-The Nova Scotia Gleaner (1929)
-The Clarion--For Church and Community (1946-1949)
Ebony Magazine Archive
Ebony Magazine Archive covers civil rights, education, entrepreneurship and other social topics with an African-American focus. It includes more than 800 issues providing a broad view of African-American culture from its first issue in 1945 through 2014.
JET Magazine Archive
JET Magazine Archive covers the civil rights movement, politics, education, and other social topics with an African American focus. It includes over 3,000 issues providing a broad view of news, culture, and entertainment from its first issue in 1951 through 2014.

More historic newspapers and magazines can be found on the Newspapers Guide, as well as under "Primary Sources" under the History Subject Guides linked above.

Primary Source Collections

U.S./Canada

Black Loyalist Refugees Database
During the American Revolution, the British and Loyalist forces evacuated New York in 1783. Hundreds of Loyalist refugees joined as the Port Roseway Associates with the intention of finding new homes and creating a new settlement together in Nova Scotia. These Loyalists, with their families, servants and slaves, founded the community of Port Roseway, shortly renamed Shelburne. The free Blacks amongst the Loyalists formed a separate enclave known as Birchtown. This database provides access to 1,498 references to the Muster Book of Free Blacks who settled in Birchtown held at Library and Archives Canada.

Black Abolitionist Papers
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Details the extensive work of African Americans to abolish slavery in the United States prior to the Civil War. The collection presents the international impact of African American activism against slavery, in the writings of the activists themselves. Covering the period 1830-1865,
African American Communities (Adam Matthew)
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Focusing predominantly on Atlanta, Chicago, New York, and towns and cities in North Carolina this resource presents multiple aspects of the African American community through pamphlets, newspapers and periodicals, correspondence, official records, reports and in-depth oral histories, revealing the prevalent challenges of racism, discrimination and integration, and a unique African American culture and identity.
Text mining is permitted, but certain conditions apply. Please contact Digital Scholarship Hub

Slavery, Abolition, Emancipation, and Freedom: Primary Sources from Houghton Library
Slavery, Abolition, Emancipation, and Freedom: Primary Sources from Houghton Library (SAEF) is a growing digital collection highlighting materials related to Black history and culture from Harvard University's Houghton Library. These materials were hand-selected to provide freely accessible digitized primary sources for scholars of all sorts. A handful of this sources are related to Black history in Canada; the link leads to a collection-wide search for "canad*".

Black Freedom Struggle in the United States: A Selection of Primary Souces
This website contains over 3,000 documents focused on six different phases of Black Freedom:
Slavery and the Abolitionist Movement (1790-1860)
The Civil War and the Reconstruction Era (1861-1877)
Jim Crow Era from 1878 to the Great Depression (1878-1932)
The New Deal and World War II (1933-1945)
The Civil Rights and Black Power Movements (1946-1975)
The Contemporary Era (1976-2000)
Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice, 1490-2007 (Adam Matthew)
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Bringing together primary source documents from archives and libraries across North America and the UK, this resource allows students and researchers to explore and compare unique material relating to the complex subjects of slavery, abolition and social justice.
Black Thought and Culture (Alexander Street Press)
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A landmark electronic collection of approximately 100,000 pages of non-fiction writings by major American black leaders—teachers, artists, politicians, religious leaders, athletes, war veterans, entertainers, and other figures—covering 250 years of history. In addition to the most familiar works, this database presents a great deal of previously inaccessible material, including letters, speeches, prefatory essays, political leaflets, interviews, periodicals, and trial transcripts. The ideas of over 1,000 authors present an evolving and complex view of what it is to be black in America.

SlaveVoyages
The SlaveVoyages website is a collaborative digital initiative that compiles and makes publicly accessible records of the largest slave trades in history. Search these records to learn about the broad origins and forced relocations of more than 12 million African people who were sent across the Atlantic in slave ships, and hundreds of thousands more who were trafficked within the Americas. Explore where they were taken, the numerous rebellions that occurred, the horrific loss of life during the voyages, the identities and nationalities of the perpetrators, and much more.

Latin America & African Diaspora

African Diaspora: Cultural, Social and Political History, 1860-present (Alexander Street Press)
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This database allows scholars to discover the migrations, communities, and ideologies of the African Diaspora through the voices of people of African descent. With a focus on communities in the Caribbean, Brazil, India, United Kingdom, and France, the collection includes never-before digitized primary source documents, including personal papers, organizational papers, journals, newsletters, court documents, letters, and ephemera.
Colonial Caribbean (Adam Matthew)
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Stretching from Jamaica and the Bahamas to Trinidad and Tobago, Colonial Caribbean makes available materials from 27 Colonial Office file classes from The National Archives, UK. Covering the history of the various territories under British colonial governance from 1624 to 1870, this extensive resource includes administrative documentation, trade and shipping records, minutes of council meetings, and details of plantation life, colonial settlement, imperial rivalries across the region, and the growing concern of absentee landlords.

Slave Trade in the Atlantic World
Slave Trade in the Atlantic World charts the inception of slavery in Africa and its rise as perpetuated on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, placing particular emphasis on the Caribbean, Latin America, and United States. International in scope, this collection was developed by an international editorial board with scholars specializing in North American, European, African, and Latin American/Caribbean aspects of the slave trade.

Black Drama - 1850 to the Present (Alexander Street Press)
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Contains approximately 1200 plays from the mid-1800s to the present by more than 200 playwrights from North America, English-speaking Africa, the Caribbean, and other African diaspora countries. Some 440 of the plays are published here for the first time, including a number by major authors. The plays themselves have been selected using leading bibliographies and with the editorial advice of James V. Hatch, co-author with Errol G. Hill of A History of African American Theatre and a leading expert in this area.

Films

Black Film Archive
A living register of Black films, showcasing Black films made from 1898-1989 currently streaming. Search film by decade, genre, or country.
NFB Abroad: Africa on Screen
Discover a selection of National Film Board (Canada) films made across Africa that illuminate the continent and its people, arts and culture, in addition to Canadian intersections with Africa over the years.

Find films on Black Canadian History on this page of the Black Canadian Studies guide.

Citations

History as a discipline uses the Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition) for citations, and usually the Notes-Bibliography form. This requires creating properly formatted footnotes footnotes and a Bibliography for your assignments. Resources to understand the Chicago style of citations are included below.

The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th Edition
Publication Date: 2017
There is a copy of the current Chicago Manual of Style available for reference at the McLennan Service Desk (first floor).
A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, Ninth Edition by Kate L. Turabian
Call Number: LB2369 T8 2018
Publication Date: 2018
A guide to Chicago Manual of Style with more information on hard-to-cite or unusual sources than the original manual.

Guides

Chicago Manual of Style Citation Quick Guide
McGill Library Citation Subject Guide
Under "citation styles by subject", select "History" for more resources on Chicago style.

Library Support

Chicago Workshops
McGill Librarians offer two virtual Chicago Citation Style workshops per term. Follow this link to find and register for upcoming workshops!
Citation Management
Attend a workshop to learn how to use Zotero or EndNote, useful citation management systems. Zotero is highly recommended for History students!

Liaison Librarian

Kristen Howard

she/her

Email me

Subjects: Classical studies, History, Indigenous studies, Religious studies

McGill University Collections Centre

Books are on the move from McLennan Redpath in Winter 2024!

Check on the progress of the move of the McLennan-Redpath Libraries' circulating collection at the Collections Centre website.