African Studies at the MSU Libraries: Primary Sources

The Blue Book was a key item of considerable standing in 19th century colonial administration, Colonial Regulations of the time state that: "The Annual Blue Book containing accounts of the Civil Establishment, of the Colonial Revenue and Expenditure and of various statistical particulars etc. must be completed as early as possible after the close of each year. The various returns which it comprises must be filled up with the greatest possible accuracy and the Statistical Tables must be full and complete, blank copies of the book in sheets will be annually transmitted to each Colony from the Colonial Office". The bare statistical material which the Blue Book provided was somewhat daunting, and the annual report was intended to present in a readable form the gist of the information which the book contained.

A portal to Gale's primary source material which permits cross-searching within Artemis subcollection.

Black Studies Center is a fully cross-searchable gateway to Black Studies including scholarly essays, recent periodicals, historical newspaper articles, and much more.

It combines several resources for research and teaching in Black Studies: Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience, International Index to Black Periodicals (IIBP), The Chicago Defender, and the Black Literature Index.

This series from Microform Academic Publishers includes archival materials such as journals, correspondence, official records and personal papers over a two hundred year period, all related to British involvement in the Atlantic region, including both Africa and the Americas. This database is also known as British Online Archives.

AllAfrica is a voice of, by and about Africa - aggregating, producing and distributing 2000 news and information items daily from over 130 African news organizations and our own reporters to an African and global public. We operate from Cape Town, Dakar, Lagos, Monrovia, Nairobi and Washington DC.

Includes Series I (1805-1922) and Series II (1835-1925).

For over 40 years, Heinemann's African Writers Series has published the key texts of modern African literature. It has a unique importance in the history of postcolonial writing.

Release Two of this electronic edition includes 121 volumes of fiction, poetry, drama and non-fictional prose, including works by Ama Ata Aidoo, Steve Biko, Dennis Brutus, Cyprian Ekwensi, Buchi Emecheta, Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head, Doris Lessing, Jack Mapanje, Dambudzo Marechera, Tayeb Salih and Veronique Tadjo.

World Heritage Sites: Africa is made up of 20 sub-collections and more than 57,000 objects. Selected sub-collections include the Heinz Rüther Collection from the University of Cape Town, the Kilwa Archive from the British Institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA), and the Smithsonian Heritage Collection. World Heritage Sites: Africa links visual, contextual, and spatial documentation of African heritage sites.

Struggles for Freedom: Southern Africa
The collection consists of more than 190,000 pages of documents and images, including periodicals, nationalist publications, records of colonial government commissions, local newspaper reports, personal papers, correspondence, UN documents, out-of-print and other particularly relevant books, oral histories, and speeches. The collection’s materials were selected with the guidance of national advisory committees consisting of leading scholars, archivists, and public intellectuals in the six countries, as well as scholars from outside the region. Content contributors range from South Africa’s pioneering digitization project, Digital Innovation South Africa (DISA), to libraries and archives from Mozambique, Namibia, and beyond.

Apartheid South Africa makes available British government files from the Foreign, Colonial, Dominion and Foreign and Commonwealth Offices spanning the period 1948 to 1980.

This collection covers a broad sweep of history from the 1830s to the 1960s, taking in all countries and territories of Africa, independent and ruled by colonial powers, with the exception of Egypt.

Empire Online offers about 60,000 images of original documents linked to essays by leading scholars in the field of Empire Studies. The sections cover Cultural Contacts, (1492-1969); Empire Writing and the Literature of Empire; the Visible Empire; Religion and Empire; and Race, Class, and Colonialism (c1783-1969). Maps, manuscripts, pamphlets, paintings, drawings, and rare books are included. Five centuries of history are represented.

This resource includes documents from the United States and Europe, as well as other parts of the world. In addition to newspaper collections and books published in the antebellum era, Slavery and Anti-Slavery contains documents from several archives. Includes:

Part I: Debates Over Slavery and Abolition
Part II: Slave Trade in the Atlantic World
Part III: The Institution of Slavery
Part IV: The Age of Emancipation

This resource is designed as an important portal for slavery and abolition studies, bringing together documents and collections covering an extensive time period 1490-2007, from libraries and archives across the Atlantic world. Close attention is being given to the varieties of slavery, the legacy of slavery, the social justice perspective and the continued existence of slavery today.