LibGuides: MC 202: Fabricating Race: Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance (Fore): Primary Sources

What is a Primary Source?

Primary Sources are recorded or written down at the time of the event and include items such as diaries, letters, newspaper accounts, photographs, artifacts, literature, maps and government documents.

Learn more about how to recognize and use primary sources in your research via the MSU Libraries' Special Online Exhibit: Primary Sources.

AM Research Skills
Designed as a tool to support students of the humanities and social sciences, Research Methods Primary Sources introduces the key approaches to working with source materials and historical evidence. Includes nearly 200 essays, videos, "How to" guides and case studies by subject specialists. From guidance on locating historical documents, to the questions on how best to approach analyzing the content they hold, this platform gathers together practical advice and instruction from experts working around the world. Includes these modules:
Research Skills Foundations
Interrogating Colonial Documents and Narratives

Primary Source Collections

Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History & Culture
Provides reference, primary and secondary source (easy-reader level) content
Teaching American History
Primary source documents, including speeches, with introductory reference material.

Black Thought and Culture
This collection is intended for research in black studies, political science, American history, music, literature, and art. The collection begins with the works of Frederick Douglass and is targeted to include the works of W.E.B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, Alain Locke, Mary McLeod Bethune, Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Ralph Bunche, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Angela Davis, Houston Baker, Jesse Jackson, Ida B. Wells, Bobby Seale, and many others.
American Mosaic: The African American Experience
Developed with the guidance of African American librarians and subject specialists, The American Mosaic: The African American Experience (AAE) is the widest ranging and easiest-to-use online database collection on African American history and culture....The African American experience encompasses the contributions of myriad individuals from the black community who have achieved success in the arts, science, business, the military, and in politics as well as nameless others that endured the travails of slavery and institutionalized discrimination.
AM Explorer
AM Explorer is the gateway to a broad and diverse range of primary source content spanning the fifteenth to twenty-first centuries.
Archives Unbound Collections
Specific collections of archival materials
American History in Video
As a biographical resource, American History in Video will include hundreds of profiles of great American leaders and personalities. As an encyclopedia of history, it provides footage of seminal historic events. Compare Kennedy’s rhetorical flair with Nixon’s. Examine racial stereotypes as presented in newsreels featuring African Americans prior to 1950. Consider Ed Herlihy’s use of alliteration and other tropes of propaganda in WW2 newsreels. These and thousands of other searches are easy with American History in Video.
Music Online: African American Music Reference
Music Online: African American Music Reference brings together reference texts, biographies, chronologies, sheet music, images, lyrics, liner notes, and discographies which chronicle the diverse history and culture of the African American experience through music. Coverage includes blues, jazz, spirituals, civil rights songs, slave songs, minstrels, rhythm and blues, gospel, and other forms of black American musical expression.
African American Newspapers 1827-1998
Provides online access to approximately 270 U.S. newspapers chronicling a century and a half of the African American experience. This unique collection features papers from more than 35 states—including many rare and historically significant 19th century titles.

Newly digitized, these newspapers published by African Americans can now be browsed and searched as never before. Part of the Readex America's Historical Newspapers collection, African American Newspapers, 1827-1998 was created from the most extensive African American newspaper archives in the United States—those of the Wisconsin Historical Society, Kansas State Historical Society and the Library of Congress. Selections were guided by James Danky, editor of "African-American Newspapers and Periodicals: A National Bibliography." Beginning with Freedom's Journal (NY)—the first African American newspaper published in the United States—the titles in this resource include The Colored Citizen (KS), Arkansas State Press, Rights of All (NY), Wisconsin Afro-American, New York Age, L'Union (LA), Northern Star and Freeman's Advocate (NY), Richmond Planet, Cleveland Gazette, The Appeal (MN) and hundreds of others from every region of the U.S. A richly detailed record of the African American past African American Newspapers, 1827-1998 offers researchers valuable primary sources for such diverse disciplines as cultural, literary and social history; ethnic studies and more. Users can compare and contrast African American views on practically every major theme of the American past. Coverage spans life in the Antebellum South; the spread of abolitionism; growth of the Black church; the Emancipation Proclamation; the Jim Crow Era; the Great Migration to northern cities, the West and Midwest in search of greater opportunity; rise of the N.A.A.C.P.; the Harlem Renaissance; the Civil Rights movement; political and economic empowerment and more. Teachers and students will find firsthand perspectives on notable Americans from Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington to W.E.B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as obituaries, advertisements, editorials and illustrations.