New in Oxford: Black Thought and Culture

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Following a trial period, and positive feedback from readers, I am pleased to announce that the Vere Harmsworth Library has purchased access to the online resource, Black Thought and Culture.

This impressive database contains a 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, Black Thought and Culture presents a great deal of previously inaccessible material, including letters, speeches, prefatory essays, political leaflets, interviews, periodicals, and trial transcripts.

The collection spans from the works of Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois and Ida B. Wells Barnett, to Zora Neal Hurston, Audra Lorde, and Jesse Jackson. Most notably, the collection includes items previously undigitized, and difficult to obtain, such as:

  • The transcript of the Muhammad Ali trial
  • A full run of The Black Panther newspaper, with full-colour images of every page as well as searchable text
  • 2,500 pages of exclusive Black Panther oral histories owned by the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation
  • Selected audio files, heard here for the first time
  • the full run of Artist and Influence journal, tracking African American cultural trends in the 20th Century.

This resource will be of interest to those interested in African American history, politics, literature and culture.

You may access the resource here.

American National Biography Update: March 2021

Believing that the life of a nation is told by the lives of its people, the American National Biography consists of over 19,000 scholarly biographies of significant, influential, or notorious figures from American history. The latest update to the American National Biography adds thirteen new essays in celebration of Women’s History Month.

New additions include Nina Allender (1872­–1957), who merged art and activism to have a lasting effect on the women’s suffrage movement. Allender’s art aimed to entertain, but the imagery provided important commentary on politics, race, and gender. She also collaborated with Alice Paul to promote the National Woman’s Party’s positions in her illustrations. Allender carved out new space for professional female artists and activists within social movements and in public life. Her work challenged decades of negative anti-suffrage cartoons and advanced a new (and lasting) stereotype of suffragists as fashionable, young, white women.

Alice Coachman (1923­–2014), track and field sensation who in 1948 became the first Black woman to win an Olympic gold medal, in the high jump event. A lifelong competitor whose athleticism propelled her from poverty, segregation, and gender constraints to international triumph, Coachman is now revered as a civil rights pioneer. She presented as demurely feminine off the track and scorched competitors on it, proving her worth in elite global contests and challenging racism and sexism by virtue of her success. She set the standard in U.S. track and field for Wilma Rudolph, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Allyson Felix, and other black women athletes who, since 1948, have realized their own potential because of her leadership in American sports.

Angel De Cora (1868 or 1869–1919), Winnebago artist and educator who insisted on the inherent artistic ability of indigenous people and the distinctiveness of the art they produced. De Cora promoted an alternative to the European American aesthetic, arguing that Indian art be viewed by its own standards rather than European American ones. She simultaneously pushed for recognition of Native American productions as art rather than ethnographic artifacts and aimed to establish Native American art as a cultural category in mainstream American society

Alvenia Fulton (1906–1999), African American health food promoter and celebrity dietitian who looked to improve community health through fasting and vegetarianism. Fulton’s sought to confront racism in whatever form it took—whether by helping black athletes and celebrities overcome racial barriers in their respective fields, helping families get healthy affordable food, or creating sustainable and anti-racist techniques for reversing heart disease. Ultimately, Fulton’s pioneering work as a healer and community leader laid the groundwork for the black vegan movement of the 21st century, with its attention to issues of health and racial equality.

Rose Winslow (1899–unknown), suffragist and labor activist whose life reveals the connections forged between working-class immigrant women and women’s middle-class reform movements in the Progressive Era. Working as a hosiery knitter and then a shopgirl, Winslow became an organizer for the National Woman’s Party, the National Consumers’ League, and the Women’s Trade Union League. Jailed for picketing the White House, she also had an audience with President Woodrow Wilson, where she made the working-class case for woman suffrage.

Neith Boyce (1872–1951) feminist-anarchist novelist and playwright whose work with the Provincetown Players made them one of the twentieth century’s most influential theater groups. She was also an important forecaster of strains on the institution of marriage as it changed during the twentieth century. Her life exemplifies how modernism was more than an artistic aesthetic; it was a new way of conceptualizing human relationships.

Maria Gertrudes “La Tules” Barceló (c.1800–1852), entrepreneur who operated the most extravagant gambling halls and saloons in nineteenth-century Santa Fe. La Tules’s saloon served as the site where men of all social standings and backgrounds gathered, including soldiers, traders, businessmen, the upper-class, and immigrants, both Anglo and Spanish. Barceló actively participated in gambling and surprised men with her winning skills in the Spanish game of Monte. Her saloon served as a bridge between New Mexicans and Euro Americans, who shared and exchanged cultural and economic commodities, and it provided a place for Euro Americans to grow accustomed to the New Mexican society.

American National Biography Update: February 2021

Believing that the life of a nation is told by the lives of its people, the American National Biography consists of over 19,000 scholarly biographies of significant, influential, or notorious figures from American history.

The latest update to the American National Biography adds six new essays in celebration of black history month.

New additions include Bo Diddley (1928–2008), guitarist, singer, and songwriter who bridged the transition between the blues and rock and roll. Easily identifiable by his trademark sunglasses and black hat, Diddley was most associated with the Twang Machine, his homemade electric guitar. It featured a cigar box-shaped square body that he crafted himself and attached to the neck and electronics from a Gretsch guitar. Diddley’s career spanned generations; he became even more popular in the 1990s when he starred alongside Bo Jackson in a series of Nike advertisements.

Marsha P. Johnson (1945–1992), gay and trans rights activist, participated in the Stonewall Riots of 1969 and was a founding member of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF). In 1970, Johnson and her friend Sylvia Rivera co-founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) in New York City, the first LGBTQ youth shelter in North America and one of the first organizations in the United States founded by transgender women of color. She was also an AIDS activist associated with ACT UP, a direct-action political group combatting governmental and institutional neglect of the AIDS crisis. Johnson’s fierce passion for justice defines her as a founder and legend of the LGBTQ rights movement in the United States.

Florynce “Flo” Kennedy (1916–2000), lawyer and feminist activist, described herself as “too erratic to lead and too undisciplined to follow.” She was a pivotal and wide-reaching figure, building bridges between the civil rights, Black Power, feminist, anti-war, and reproductive rights movements that helped define the 20th century. She skillfully used the media to spread her message, writing a weekly column and hosting a radio and television show. She was also a lawyer and defended a number of Black Power activists, including H. Rap Brown, Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, and Afeni Shakur. Kennedy was an original and instrumental member in the National Organization for Women (NOW) and the National Women’s Political Caucus; was influential in the founding of the National Black Feminist Organization; and organized the Feminist Party.

Gladys Bentley (1907­­–1960), blues singer and pianist, brazenly defied race, gender, and sexual stereotypes in Renaissance-era Harlem and later Los Angeles. She performed wearing tailored men’s shirts and jackets, skirts, and close-cropped hair. Langston Hughes called her “an amazing exhibition of musical energy—a large, dark, masculine lady, whose feet pounded the floor while her fingers pounded the keyboard.” Bentley was a forerunner of post-Stonewall views toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender lives and experiences.

Lerone Bennett, Jr. (1928­–2018), author, journalist, and editor, was the major force behind Ebony magazine’s reporting on the civil rights movement. Many of his early stories became the impetus for his first book, Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America, (1619-1962). The book placed African Americans, whose American history was one year deeper than that of the Puritans who arrived on the Mayflower, at the forefront of American history. He also wrote an influential biography about his old Morehouse classmate, What Manner of Man: A Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr.

James D. Saules (1806?–1850s), sailor and musician, is best known for likely inspiring Oregon’s first black exclusion law. He arrived in the Willamette Valley joining the U.S. Exploring Expedition (1838-1842), also known as the Wilkes Expedition. On May 1, 1844, he was arrested for allegedly inciting several indigenous men to threaten the life and property of Charles E. Pickett, a proslavery Virginian and white supremacist. The all-white jury found Saules guilty and he was forced to leave the Willamette Valley. The newly-created Provisional Government of Oregon passed its first black exclusion law on June 25, 1844. In 1857 Oregon’s state constitution banned all African American immigration.

 

Trial Access: Black Authors and Native American Indians (ended 9th March 2021)

Note: These trials ended on 9th March, 2021.

I am pleased to report that the Vere Harmsworth Library has organised trial access to two online resources for Bodleian Readers; Black Authors, 1556-1922 and Native American Indians, 1645-1819.The trials will run until the 9th March, 2021.

These trials are running alongside our trial access of Black Thought and Culture, which you can read about in our previous blogpost. 

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Black Authors, 1556-1922

Created from the renowned holdings of the Library Company of Philadelphia, Black Authors, 1556-1922, offers more than 550 fully catalogued and searchable works by black authors from the Americas, Europe and Africa, expertly compiled by the curators of Afro-Americana Imprints collection, the largest existing collection of its kind. Genres include: personal narratives, autobiographies, histories, expedition reports, military reports, novels, essays, poems and musical compositions.

Authors included are Ignatius Sancho, Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, Solomon Northrup, Harriet Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Frederick Douglass, Bethany Veney, Paul Laurence Dunbar, W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles W. Chestnutt, Booker T. Washington, James Weldon Johnson and hundreds of others.

You can access this resource here.

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Native American Indians, 1645-1819

Native American Indians provides a comprehensive record of Native America in the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries. It Includes more than 1,600 publications, which offer unparalleled insight into the relationship between Native Americans and European settlers, alongside text analysis tools, author biographies and more.

Genres include treaties, transcribed letters from Native American leaders, the minutes of tribal meetings, histories of numerous tribes, missionary reports, captivity narratives, first-hand accounts of battles, trading records, military rosters, expedition logs and maps, trial records, legislative bills, books on Native American languages and grammar, military rosters, governors’ and legislators’ reports, ballads, songs, plays and more.

You can access this resource here.

Please send any feedback you have regarding this resource to bethan.davies@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

 

Trial Access: Black Thought and Culture (ended 1st March 2021)

Note: This trial ended on 1st March, 2021. decoration only

 

 

 

I am pleased to report that the Vere Harmsworth Library has organised trial access to the online resource, Black Thought and Culture. The trial will run until the 1st March, 2021.

This impressive database contains a 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, Black Thought and Culture presents a great deal of previously inaccessible material, including letters, speeches, prefatory essays, political leaflets, interviews, periodicals, and trial transcripts.

The collection spans from the works of Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois and Ida B. Wells Barnett, to Zora Neal Hurston, Audra Lorde, and Jesse Jackson. Most notably, the collection includes items previously undigitized, and difficult to obtain, such as:

  • The transcript of the Muhammad Ali trial
  • A full run of The Black Panther newspaper, with full-colour images of every page as well as searchable text
  • 2,500 pages of exclusive Black Panther oral histories owned by the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation
  • Selected audio files, heard here for the first time
  • the full run of Artist and Influence journal, tracking African American cultural trends in the 20th Century.

This resource will be of interest to those interested in African American history, politics, literature and culture.

You may access the resource here.

Please send any feedback you have regarding this resource to bethan.davies@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

You can also find out more about our other two trials for Native American Indians and Black Authors on our new blogpost. 

 

New in Oxford: African American Periodicals

I am pleased to announce that the Vere Harmsworth Library has purchased online access to the resource African American Periodicals for the University.

 

 

 

Based on the work of James P. Danky in African-American Newspapers and Periodicals: A National Bibliography (Harvard, 1998), this vast collection covers over 150 years of American history, from slavery up to the modern era. The collection features over 170 titles, written by and for African Americans.

Primary sources found here include news, commentary, advertisements, literature, drawings and photographs, Key titles in this unique resource include African Repository, El Mulato, The Black Warrior, Pennsylvania Freedmen’s Bulletin, Colored Harvest, Voice of the Negro, Horizon: A Journal of the Color Line, The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races, Blue Helmet: A Magazine for the American Negro Soldier of All Wars, Harlem Pointer, African World, Black Pride Newsletter, Right On! and others from every region of the United States. Primary sources found here include news, commentary, advertisements, literature, drawings and photographs, helping to capture the voice of African American history and culture.

Our online platform allows our readers to search the African American Periodicals by full-text, or to browse by periodical title, historic period, or themes. Readers may also search via article type, such as advertisements, or opinion pieces. You may access the resource by clicking here

Bodleian readers may also search across our Readex databases, using Readex AllSearch. This allows researchers to cross-search across multiple primary resources, including the African American Newspapers and Ethnic American Newspapers.

Similar resources include:

If you would like any advice on using our databases or resources, please contact the Vere Harmsworth Librarian, Bethan Davies bethan.davies@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

New in Oxford: Black Abolitionist Papers, and more!

I am delighted to announce that access to a number of major new e-resources are now available.

The Bodleian Libraries have committed substantial external funding to a one-off set of purchases of electronic research resources deemed to be important to researchers in the University. This follows a project to identify desiderata across all subjects and to list suggestions from readers.

Of particular interest to US Studies are the Black Abolitionist Papers (1830-1865) 

This collection covers a unique set of primary sources from African Americans actively involved in the movement to end slavery in the United States between 1830 and 1865. The content includes letters, speeches, editorials, newspaper articles, sermons, and essays from libraries and archives in England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, and the United States. Over 15,000 items written by nearly 300 Black men and women are available for searching,with over 30% consisting of handwritten and unique documents.

As described on the Black Abolitionist Paper’s website 

“This collection, when first published in microfilm, literally transformed scholarly understanding of Black activism during this period. Now it is available in a searchable, easily accessible format for research, teaching, and study.”

Other resources recently purchased that may be of interest include:

Trench Journals and Unit Magazines of the First World War

Published by every type of military and support service unit, from every involved nation, trench journals were a means of expression through which men and women engaged in all aspects of World War I could share their thoughts and experiences. Over 1,500 periodicals, drawn from the holdings of major libraries and research collections, make this resource the most comprehensive collection of trench journals available to scholars anywhere in one place.

Collections can be narrowed to specific nations, languages and army units. This resource would be useful for Americanists interested in the US involvement in World War 1, the perception of US forces by other allied forces, and further social-cultural studies of US forces in the early 20th Century.

This resource brings together complete runs of journals from disparate sources. Functionality allows both browsing and precision searching for editorials, advertisements, poetry, cartoons and illustrations, photographs, and obituaries, opening up opportunities for research in multiple fields: literature, history, war studies, cultural studies, and gender studies.

Women and Social Movements, International

Through the writings of women activists, their personal letters and diaries, and the proceedings of conferences at which pivotal decisions were made, this collection lets you see how women’s social movements shaped much of the events and attitudes that have defined modern life. This digital archive includes 150,000 pages of conference proceedings, reports of international women’s organizations, publications and web pages of women’s non-governmental organizations, and letters, diaries, and memoirs of women active internationally since the mid-nineteenth century.  It also includes photographs and videos of major events and activists in the history of women’s international social movements. Additionally, there are 30 essays from leading contemporary scholars exploring themes illuminated by the primary documents in the archive.

Researchers can limit their searches to specific geographic areas, or search across resources to review information on specific themes or topics.

LGBT Magazine Archive

The resource archives of 26 leading but previously hard-to-find magazines are included in LGBT Magazine Archive, including many of the longest-running, most influential publications of this type in the US . The complete backfile of The Advocate is made available digitally for the first time. As one of the very few LGBT titles to pre-date the 1969 Stonewall riots, it spans the history of the gay rights movement.

Art and Architecture Archive

Full-text archive of periodicals (cover-to-cover colour scans) in the fields of art and architecture. Date range: 19thC – 21stC. Subjects covered include fine art, decorative arts, architecture, interior design, industrial design, and photography worldwide.

Oxford researchers should use their SSO to gain remote access. The resources can be access via SOLO or Databases A-Z.