More Resources: Collections

MORE RESOURCES: BLACK COLLECTIONS

The Black Press Research Collective

The Black Press Research Collective (BPRC) is an interdisciplinary group of scholars committed to generating digital scholarship about the historical and contemporary role of black newspapers in Africa and the African Diasporas.

Building the Black Press

Black Media Architecture is a research project, developed by 2013 and 2015 BMRC Fellow James West. The project explores the places and spaces of black media outlets in Chicago and the broader intersections of race, media, and architecture in the United States. "Building the Black Press" is a digital history project about the Black press and the built environment. Consult Dr. West's website to discover more about his writings and projects.

South Side Home Movie Project Digital Archive

Over 200 home movies, spanning more than half a century of South Side visual history, is available via the South Side Home Movie Project Digital Archive. The online portal is home to movies shot by residents of Chicago’s South Side neighborhoods from 1929-1982 archived by the South Side Home Movie Project (SSHMP).

Archives of African American Music & Culture

The special collections at the AAAMC contain unique materials documenting a wide range of topics and musical genres. Visit our Special Collections page for a list of all collections, or explore selected topics such as Black Radio, Hip Hop, Classical Music, Popular Music, and the Music Industry.

The Digital Colored American Magazine

The Digital Colored American Magazine makes freely available full-color reproductions of unbound issues of the Colored American Magazine (1900-1909) which was among the most important early twentieth-century American periodicals and among the first general magazines addressed to a middle-class African American readership. Issues of the Colored American Magazine digitized for this project belong to the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection in the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and were photographed by the Beinecke’s digital imaging studio.

Digital Howard

Digital Howard is a virtual showcase that allow the community to relive and make new history in creative and unique ways through ongoing projects such as a collection of digitized HU yearbooks, historic photographs and faculty research. Digital Howard contains faculty papers, student scholarship, and annual reports to open-access journals, conference proceedings, and monographs.

The Green Book Database, 1936-1967

The Green Book Database consists of Victor Green’s entire collection of The Negro Motorist Green Book as digitized by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, located in Harlem, New York. The Negro Motorist Green Book kept African Americans from harm along the highways and byways of Jim Crow America. From 1936 to 1966 (with only a pause for WWII), Green published the directories known today as the Green Book. (The actual titles were variously: The Negro Motorist Green Book; The Negro Travelers’ Green Book; The Travelers’ Green Book). These listed—first in NYC only, later throughout much of the world—hotels, restaurants, beauty salons, nightclubs, bars, gas stations, etc. where black travelers would be welcome. In an age of sundown towns, segregation, and lynching, the Green Book became an indispensable tool for safe navigation.

National Archives and Records Administration: Black History

The Black History section from the National Archives explores such topics as: slavery, abolition, reconstruction, segregation and black migration as well as civil rights. Resources include: photographs of black Chicago by John White during the 1970s; black family research post civil war, records pertaining to the American and international slave trade as well as other federal sites with research resources. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is an independent agency of the United States government charged with preserving and documenting government and historical records.

Umbra: Search African American History

The urgency of representing African American history and culture as fully as possible drives Umbra: Search African American History, a free digital platform that brings together the content of diverse African American archives and enables the creation of new works—curricula, scholarship, art of all kinds—that illuminate parts of our history that have not been broadly accessible. Through partnerships, open data, and technology, Umbra is working against centuries of loss and erasure to expand the historical record for students, scholars, and the general public.

---

MORE RESOURCES: CHICAGO & ILLINOIS

The Chicago Collections Consortium

Chicago Collections is committed to preserving and sharing Chicago’s rich history and culture. Our region’s heritage should be available for all of us to explore— freely, easily, and openly. We want to keep Chicago’s history alive and evolving.

The Archives of American Art

In 2015, with funding provided by the Terra Foundation for American Art, more than 75 Chicago archival repositories were surveyed. The result is Chicago’s Art-Related Archival Materials, A Terra Foundation Resource. Browse by repository or search across the nearly 900 records to discover the history of American Art in Chicago.

Knowledge@UChicago

Knowledge@UChicago preserves and shares the scholarly, creative, and administrative assets of the University to support researchers, instructors, and staff.

Illinois State Archives: Databases

The Illinois State Archives serves by law as the depository of public records of Illinois state and local governmental agencies which possess permanent administrative, legal, or historical research values. Its collections do not include manuscript, newspaper, or other nonofficial sources.

CARLI Digital Collections

CARLI Digital Collections was established in 2006 as a repository for digital content created by member libraries of the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI) or purchased by the consortium for use by its members. CARLI Digital Collections delivers digital representations of myriad special collections including printed and manuscript materials, images, and sound recordings, and guarantees researchers access to cross-institution and cross-collection searches integrating previously disparate and possibly remote special collections.