English & American Literature : African American Literature

Literary foundation and publisher of Poetry Magazine, its mission is to promote poetry in the wider culture; the site links to selected poems and provides short but insightful literary biographies of poets worldwide.

Created by the Academy of American Poets. Portal to thousands of poems as well as hundreds of poet biographies, essays, interviews, and poetry recordings—with new material being added continuously.

Poems by poets worldwide. Search for poems and poets using the Poetry Search Engine.

[Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The NYPL] Digital collection of @52 published works by 19th-century black women writers. Includes brief biographical profiles.

This collection present ten plays (four sketches and six full length plays) written by Hurston (1891-1960).

The online collection, containing approximately 7,400 items (38,000 images), spans the years 1841-1964, with the bulk of the material dating from 1862 to 1865.

This online collection offers complete page images of the 396 titles in the African American Pamphlet Collection, as well as searchable electronic texts and bibliographic records.

Supported by the American Antiquarian Society and Common-place: The Journal of Early American Life, the "Just Teach One" website provides a body of publicly available scholarly transcriptions of early texts. This is a sister project, whose focus is lesser-known early African American text, usually 30 pages or less.

Comprehensive archive that brings together primary source materials from the collections of many libraries, museums, public broadcasters, and other organizations. There is also a collection of links to secondary educational materials.

In the left side bar, click "Manuscript/Mixed Material" in the Original Format category.

From 1936 to 1938, over 2,300 former slaves from across the American South were interviewed by writers and journalists under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). This website provides an opportunity to read a sample of these narratives, and to see some of the photographs taken at the time of the interviews. The entire collection of narratives can be found in George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Call Number: E441.A58 19 vols, 2nd floor).

Donated to Cornell University in 1870, this is the collection of Rev. Samuel Joseph May of over 10,000 titles (pamphlets and leaflets), which document the anti-slavery struggle at the local, regional, and national levels. The collection is comprised of sermons, position papers, offprints, local Anti-Slavery Society newsletters, poetry anthologies, freedmen's testimonies, broadsides, and Anti-Slavery Fair keepsakes.

Digital publishing initiative that provides access to primary sources (texts, images, and audio files) related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes sixteen thematic collections (including North American Slave Narratives) of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs.

Digital version of all issues of LIFE magazine from 1936-1970. A valuable resource for studying American culture during this time period.

This collection is part of "Independent Voices," an open access digital collection of alternative press newspapers, magazines and journals, drawn from the special collections of participating libraries. Date coverage (varies by publication): 1951-2016. In the "Black American" collection, the dates range from the 1960s to the 1980s.

v.1 (1901) to v. 17 (1909)

Official magazine of the NAACP, founded in 1910. HathiTrust holdings: v. 5-6 (1912-1913, v. 18 (1919), and v. 23 (1921-1922)

v. 31 (1902) to v. 51 (1922)

v. 1 (1825) to v. 66 (1890)

no. 1-9 (1892-1896) and no.19-27 (1901-1906)

v. 1-2 (1866-1867)

Weekly African American news and entertainment magazine, published since 1951. Full digital version available from Google Books from 1951 to Oct. 2008.

Monthly magazine for the African American market, published since 1945. Full digital version available from Google Books from Nov 1959 to 2008.