Research Guides: African American Literature: Home

Library of Congress Holdings

Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives
Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938, contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves collected as part of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration.
From Slavery to Freedom: The African-American Pamphlet Collection
From Slavery to Freedom: The African-American Pamphlet Collection, 1822-1909 presents 396 pamphlets from the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, published from 1822 through 1909, by African-American authors and others who wrote about slavery, African colonization, Emancipation, Reconstruction, and related topics.
Images of African-American Slavery and Freedom
These images were selected to meet requests regularly received by the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. This list represents a modified form of a printed "illustrated list" made available for many years by the Division.
Slavery Resource Guide
The digital collections of the Library of Congress contain a wide variety of material related to slavery, including photographs, documents, and sound recordings. This guide compiles links to slavery resources throughout the Library of Congress Web site. In addition, it provides links to external Web sites focusing on slavery and a bibliography containing selections for both general and younger readers.

African American History
American History Online presents a multitude of articles concerning African American History and Culture, including the Great Migration, Jim Crow, Lynching, and the story behind "Strange Fruit."

Please click on the heading of the topic to be directed to the suggested database for that topic.

African American Literary Tradition
From Literature of the Reconstruction and the Literature of the Harlem Renaissance to the literature that was inspired by oral traditions, such as Virginia Hamilton's "The People Could Fly."
African American Oral Tradition
For tales of the Trickster and Badman characters, including Signifying Monkey, John Henry, Stagolee.
Realism, Naturalism, and Modernism in African American Literature
Cultural and historically themed literature from such esteemed authors as James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lorraine Hansberry.
Slave Narratives
Slave Narratives of such figures as Alaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, and Frederick Douglas.
Spirituals
Spirituals (or Negro spirituals) are religious songs that were created by enslaved African people in the United States. Spirituals were originally an oral tradition that imparted Christian values while also describing the hardships of slavery.
The Black Arts Movement
The Black Arts Movement (also commonly known as the Black Aesthetics Movement, or BAM) is the artistic branch of the Black Power movement.
The Blues
Blues is a genre and musical form that originated in African-American communities in the United States around the end of the 19th century.

African American Experience
The African American Experience is an authoritative research tool for African American history and culture. Contains essays, biographies, speeches, court cases, quotations, advertisements, statistics, photographs, maps and more.

American History Online and African American Experience are wonderful resources for African American History.

American History Online
Spans more than 500 years of political, military, social, and cultural history, highlighting the important people and events of the American experience.

American Memory This link opens in a new window
American Memory provides free and open access through the Internet to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience. It is a digital record of American history and creativity. These materials, from the collections of the Library of Congress and other institutions, chronicle historical events, people, places, and ideas that continue to shape America, serving the public as a resource for education and lifelong learning.

U.S. History - Civil War
The Civil War digital collection contains nearly 500 significant documents of the time--personal narratives, monographs, regimental histories, collected essays, sermons, songs, legal tracts, and political speeches.
U.S. History Collection
This database provides balanced coverage of both the current thought and events in US History, as well as scholarly work being established in the field; useful both to the novice historian and to the advanced academic researcher.
World History Collection
This database provides information on all aspects of world history and contains articles from over 40 history-related journals.

Artemis Literary Sources combines all of our literary databases into one for ease of use.