Africana Studies: Free Digital Resources--Africa & African-American

This collection features digital copies of 113 antique maps of Africa and accompanying text dating from the mid-16th Century to the early 20th Century. All scanned maps are authentic and originally collected by the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies.

Digital collection of maps, documents and photographs.

The African Activist Archive is preserving and making available online the records of activism in the United States to support the struggles of African peoples against colonialism, apartheid, and social injustice from the 1950s through the 1990s.

Ruling party of the Republic of South Africa.

AODL benefits a wide variety of scholars, students, and institutions by producing multilingual, multimedia materials for both scholarly research and public viewing audiences. AODL serves scholars and students conducting research and teaching about West and South Africa as well as teachers and students of African languages in both the United States and Africa.

From the Univ. of Oregon. The African Political Ephemera and Realia Project is an online collection of ephemeral material—pamphlets, t-shirts, cloths, posters, to name just a few examples—that documents the material culture of politics in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The African Studies Collection brings together primary and secondary resources; research and teaching materials created by University of Wisconsin faculty and staff; and unique or valuable items related to this field held by the University of Wisconsin Libraries.
Selected by librarians, scholars, and other subject specialists along a wide range of criteria, this collection includes published materials as well as archival documents. The items were digitized from a variety of formats including books, manuscripts, sound recordings, photographs, maps, and other resources.

To expand free, online access to journals published in Africa, the African e-Journals Project has digitized full text of articles of eleven social science and humanities journals and made them available on this web site.

Dr. Harold Scheub is the Evjue-Bascom Professor of Humanities in the Department of African Languages and Literature and one of the world's leading scholars in African oral traditions and folklore. To record oral traditions he has walked more than 6000 miles through South Africa, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, and Lesotho. Dr. Scheub has published more than two dozen books and more than 70 articles.

From Fordham University. On this site historical sources on the history of human societies in the continent of Africa are presented, when available, without making prejudgements about what is "African".

The Trans-Atlantic and Intra-American slave trade databases are the culmination of several decades of independent and collaborative research by scholars drawing upon data in libraries and archives around the Atlantic world. The new Voyages website itself is the product of three years of development by a multi-disciplinary team of historians, librarians, curriculum specialists, cartographers, computer programmers, and web designers, in consultation with scholars of the slave trade from universities in Europe, Africa, South America, and North America.

SAHA's archival collections are largely made up of documents, posters, photographs, ephemera and oral histories donated to SAHA by individuals and organizations involved in past and ongoing struggles for justice in South Africa.

The Sudan Open Archive offers free digital access to knowledge about all regions of Sudan. It is an expanding, word-searchable, full-text database of historical and contemporary books and documents.

The Archives holds a wealth of material documenting the Black experience.

"African American Perspectives" gives a panoramic and eclectic review of African American history and culture and is primarily comprised of two collections in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division: the African American Pamphlet Collection and the Daniel A.P. Murray Collection with a date range of 1822 through 1909. Most were written by African-American authors, though some were written by others on topics of particular importance in African-American history. Among the authors represented are Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Benjamin W. Arnett, Alexander Crummel, Emanuel Love, Lydia Maria Child, Kelly Miller, Charles Sumner, Mary Church Terrell, and Booker T. Washington, among others.
The Library of Congress contains many digital collections of African American history and culture. Explore the site for more.

The sheet music in this digital collection has been selected from the Sheet Music Collection at the John Hay Library at Brown University. The full collection consists of approximately 500,000 items, of which perhaps 250,000 are currently available for use. It is one of the largest collections of sheet music in any library in the United States. The sheet music, primarily vocal music of American imprint, dates from the 18th century to the present day, with the largest concentration of titles in the period 1840-1950.

From Indiana University.

A collection of over 300 recorded oral history interviews chronicling African-American life during the age of legal segregation in the American South, from the 1890s to the 1950s. From Duke University.

From the National Archives.

The Civil Rights Digital Library promotes an enhanced understanding of the Movement by helping users discover primary sources and other educational materials from libraries, archives, museums, public broadcasters, and others on a national scale.

The digital collections of the Library of Congress contain a wide variety of material related to civil rights, including photographs, documents, and sound recordings. This guide compiles links to civil-rights resources throughout the Library of Congress Web site. In addition, it provides links to external Web sites focusing on civil rights and a bibliography containing selections for both general and younger readers.

Freedom's Journal was the first African-American owned and operated newspaper published in the United States. Founded by Rev. Peter Williams, Jr. and other free black men in New York City, it was published weekly as a four-page, four-column newspaper, starting with the March 16, 1827 issue. Freedom's Journal circulated in 11 states, the District of Columbia, Haiti, Europe, and Canada.

A Library of Congress collection.

Explore or reconstruct the lives of individuals who were enslaved, owned slaves, or participated in the historical trade.

Virginia Untold provides access points to the individual stories of African Americans who lived in Virginia from the establishment of slavery in the 1600s until its demise in 1865. Taken as a whole, these individual stories help to shed light on the narrative of a people that has not been fully told. From the Library of Virginia.