Research Guides: HIST 3393 / HIST 5340: African American History: Find Books

Librarian

Contact:

936-294-1520
kclaunch@shsu.edu
Library (NGL) Room 223G

Purpose

This guide is intended to help you begin researching a wide variety of topics in African American history.

This guide is not comprehensive; it does not list all of the resources on this subject or in related disciplines owned by the Library or available on the Internet. This guide serves merely as a starting point for research.

Need Paper Topic Ideas?

Term Paper Resource Guide to African American History
Call Number: E184.7 .N47 2009
Hundreds of term paper topics and resources to explore.

Dictionaries, Encyclopedias, and Other Reference Books

What are reference books good for? A lot!

Verify facts (with more authority than Wikipedia)!
Browse contextual essays for inspiration in finding a research paper topic.
Read topical entries to increase your background knowledge of a topic.
Read essays, topical entries, and bibliographies to refine your topic into a focused research question.
Quickly access timelines of events, maps, key primary documents, extensive bibliographies (that is, lists of key books and articles on focused topics), and more to supplement your research and help you decide what sources to read next.
When you're reading primary sources, use a historical dictionary to find definitions of or context for slang words or unfamiliar cultural references.

Encyclopedia of the Great Black Migration
Call Number: E185.6 .E54 2006 volumes 1-3 (2nd floor Reference)
The Great Black Migration: A historical encyclopedia of the American mosaic
Call Number: Read Online
The Jim Crow Encyclopedia
Call Number: Ebook, Read Online - Print also available: E185.61 .J53 2008 volumes 1-2 (2nd floor Reference)
Historical Statistics of Black America
Call Number: E185 .H543 1995 volumes 1-2 (2nd floor Reference)
Encyclopedia of African American History
Call Number: E185 .E544 2010 volumes 1-3 (2nd floor Reference)
African American National Biography
Call Number: E185.96 .A4466 2008 volumes 1-8 (2nd floor Reference)
Atlas of African-American History
Call Number: E185 .C55 2007 (2nd floor Reference)
Black Firsts: 4,000 ground-breaking and pioneering historical events
Call Number: E185 .B574 2003 (4th floor)
Encyclopedia of African American Culture and History
Call Number: Ebook, Read Online - Print also available: E185 .E54 2006 volumes 1-6 (2nd floor Reference)
Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895
Call Number: E185 .E545 2006 volumes 1-3 (2nd floor Reference)
Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present
Call Number: E185 .E5453 2009 volumes 1-5 (2nd floor Reference)
African Americans in the West
Call Number: Ebook, Read Online - Print also available: E185.925 .F536 2009 (2nd floor Reference)
Encyclopedia of the Reconstruction Era
Call Number: E668 .E53 2006 volumes 1-2 (2nd floor Reference)
The Story of Black Military Officers, 1861-1948
Call Number: REF E185.63 .S26 2014
First complete and conclusive work to specifically examine the history of black commissioned officers.

Browse the Collection

An excellent way to discover additional resources is to browse for books in relevant call number ranges. All of these call numbers will be located on the 4th floor of the library.

E184.5 - E185.98 - United States, Elements in the Population, Afro-Americans

HT851 - HT1445 - Classes, Slavery

HT1501 - HT1595 - Races, including race as a social group and race relations

To discover the call number ranges for broader, narrower, or different subjects, consult the Library of Congress Classification Outline.

Search the Library Catalog

Video Refresher: Intro to Searching the Catalog

Click the icon in the bottom right corner of the video player to view it in full screen!

A Sampling of Books in the Main Collection

From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Call Number: Read Online - Or E185.86 .T367 2016 (4th floor)
Publication Date: 2016
The eruption of mass protests in the wake of the police murders of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner in New York City have challenged the impunity with which officers of the law carry out violence against Black people and punctured the illusion of a postracial America. The Black Lives Matter movement has awakened a new generation of activists. In this stirring and insightful analysis, activist and scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor surveys the historical and contemporary ravages of racism and persistence of structural inequality such as mass incarceration and Black unemployment. In this context, she argues that this new struggle against police violence holds the potential to reignite a broader push for Black liberation.
Peace Be Still: Modern Black America from World War II to Barack Obama by Matthew C. Whitaker
Call Number: Read Online - Or print is available at E185.6 .W57 2013 (4th floor)
Publication Date: 2014
From book summary: "A concise, engaging, and provocative history of African Americans since World War II, Peace Be Still is also nothing less than an alternate history of the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries."
The Other Great Migration: The movement of rural African Americans to Houston, 1900-1941 by Bernadette Pruitt
Call Number: Read Online - Or print is available: F394 .H89 N48 2013 (4th floor)
Houston Bound by Tyina Steptoe
Call Number: F394 .H89 A27 2016 (4th floor)
Beginning after World War I, Houston was transformed from a black-and-white frontier town into one of the most ethnically and racially diverse urban areas in the United States. This interdisciplinary book provides both an innovative historiography about migration and immigration in the twentieth century and a critical examination of a city located in the former Confederacy.
Fly Away: The Great African American Cultural Migrations
Call Number: E185.6 .R87 2010 (4th floor)
The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations
Call Number: E185 .B473 2010 (4th floor)
Making a Way Out of No Way: African American Women and the Second Great Migration
Call Number: Ebook, Read Online - Print also available: E185.86 .B6325 2009 (4th floor)
The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America
Call Number: HB1971 .A3 G74 2005 (4th floor)
In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience
Call Number: E185 .D625 2004 (4th floor)
Free Blacks in Antebellum Texas
Call Number: E185.93 .T4 F74 2015 (4th floor)
Collects the essays of Harold R. Schoen and Andrew Forest Muir, early scholars who conducted the most complete studies on this topic.
The Fight for Interracial Marriage Rights in Antebellum Massachusetts
Call Number: HQ1031 .M68 2015 (4th floor)
Well known as an abolitionist stronghold before the Civil War, Massachusetts had taken steps to eliminate slavery as early as the 1780s. Nevertheless, a powerful racial caste system still held sway, reinforced by a law prohibiting marriage between whites and blacks. Assembling information from court and church records, family histories, and popular literature to chronicle a grassroots movement to overturn the state's ban on interracial unions. This pre-Civil War effort to overturn antimiscegenation law was a crucial chapter in the deep history of the African American struggle for equal rights.
A Chosen Exile: A history of racial passing in American life
Call Number: Read Online - Or print is available E185.625 .H63 2014 (4th floor)
Between the eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, countless African Americans passed as white, leaving behind families and friends, roots and community. By the dawning of the civil rights era, more and more racially mixed Americans felt the loss of kin and community was too much to bear, that it was time to embrace a black identity. This revelatory history of passing explores the possibilities and challenges that racial indeterminacy presented to men and women living in a country obsessed with racial distinctions.

Subject Headings

Subject headings allow you to find books according to precisely defined topics.

Below are sample subjects. To browse for different, broader, or narrower subjects, go to the library catalog and click "Exact Search." Enter a term and click "subject" to browse a list of subjects.

You can start browsing for a broad subject like African Americans, then look for more specific subjects, such as African Americans Historians.

Once you know some subject headings, you can also use them as keywords during an advanced search, using the subject row.