ENG 329: African American Literature: Relevant Websites

The purpose of this site is to provide information on a course offered at Yale College. The course examines the African American experience in the United States from 1863 to the present. Prominent themes include the end of the Civil War and the beginning of Reconstruction; African Americans’ urbanization experiences; the development of the modern civil rights movement and its aftermath; and the thought and leadership of Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X.

The official Website of the poet, short story writer, novelist, essayist, anthologist, teacher, editor, publisher, womanist and activist, Alice Malsenior Walker.

This online anthology of American slave narratives provides an excellent opportunity to read a sample of slave narratives, see some of the photographs taken at the time of the interviews, listen to audio files, and access related readings.

A Library of Congress source about the movement.

The Frederick Douglass site will be especially useful to Douglass scholars.

A brief note on Harlem Renaissance from the Academy of American Poets. Contains many helpful links to Black Heritage.

HathiTrust Digital Library is a digital preservation repository and highly functional access platform. It provides long-term preservation and access services for public domain and in copyright content from a variety of sources, including Google, the Internet Archive, Microsoft, and in-house partner institution initiatives.

An International Labour Organization site.

The Ideologies of War, Genocide and Terror site publishes thoughts on societal forms of violence, establishing a resource for scholars around the world.

In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience presents a new interpretation of African-American history, one that focuses on the self-motivated activities of peoples of African descent to remake themselves and their worlds.

Maintained by Ferris State University, the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, has one of the nation's largest public collections of artifacts spanning the segregation era, from Reconstruction until the civil rights movement, and beyond.

An article by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Maintained by a digital publishing initiative from the University of North Carolina Library at Chapel Hill, this collection includes all the existing autobiographical narratives of fugitive and former slaves published as broadsides, pamphlets, or books in English up to 1920. Also included are many of the biographies of fugitive and former slaves and some significant fictionalized slave narratives published in English before 1920.

Created by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation, Poetry Out Loud is administered in partnership with the State Arts Agencies of all 50 states, the District of Columbia, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico.

A very helpful map depicting the forced movement of millions of enslaved Africans to the Americas over a span of 4 centuries.

This is the official site of the Toni Morrison Society. Hosted by Georgia State University, the purpose of the site is to provide information on the society’s activities which aims to study the life and works of Toni Morrison.

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database is a collaborative research project from scholars of slave trade, librarians, archivists, historians, curriculum specialists, cartographers, computer programmers, and web designers from universities in Europe, Africa, South America, and North America. The National Endowment for the Humanities is the principal sponsor of the project, and it is an Emory University Digital Library Research Initiative.

This Zora Neale Hurston Website contains useful information on the author and links to relevant sites.