AmericanHeritage.com / Best of the Web

The AmericanHeritage.com Guide to the Best of the Web
This is a critical guide to the World Wide Web's very best sites about history and about topics of historical interest, from the editors of AmericanHeritage.com and compiled by Jillian Sim. We want it to be comprehensive and definitive, so please send any comments, corrections, or recommended additions to comments@americanheritage.com.

Best of the Web \ African-American History

http://13thamendment.harpweek.com/
The creation of the Thirteenth Amendment--text, illustrations, and cartoons from the pages of Harper's Weekly.

http://aaregistry.com/
The African-American Registry. Achievements of black Americans for every day of the year.

http://afroamhistory.about.com/
About.com's page on African-American history. Many links and resources.

http://blackhistory.harpweek.com/
Harper's Weekly's black-history site, a nineteenth-century view of black people. Images and text pertaining to African-American history from 1857 to 1864, found on the pages of the magazine. Contains beautifully reproduced illustrations of disturbing events and images. Historical opinion and editorial content can be offensive, and the site comes with a warning. See a fine exhibit on the Thirteenth Amendment at: http://13thamendment.harpweek.com/.

http://blackhistorypages.com/
Black History on the Web, a portal to sites dedicated to black history.

http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/index.html
Cornell University's Making of America (MOA) project. Digitized preservation of primary sources ranging from 1800 to 1925. See also: http://www.hti.umich.edu/m/moagrp/--the University of Michigan's MOA project arm, and, also: http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/elw25/aa_digital_archiveshome.htm--Cornell's Guide to African-American Documentary Resources.

http://docsouth.unc.edu/
"Documenting the American South: Primary Resources for the Study of Southern History, Literature, and Culture." See also http://docsouth.unc.edu/washington/menu.html The entire text of Booker T. Washington's 1901 autobiography, Up From Slavery, is here.

http://landing.ancestry.com/aahistory/
Launched in February 2007, Ancestry.com announces the largest collection of African American family resources on the web. From personal experience, researching one’s African American roots is a daunting task, filled with dead ends and even more questions than answers, but the steady increase in online data and, in particular access to the powerful tools at the Ancestry site, where users can limit searches to persons of color only and search for elusive ancestors using just the first name, can turn what was before impossible into the joy of discovery. Tracing one’s African American roots has never been faster and easier. But the potential for discovery doesn’t come cheap at Ancestry; try it for three days before you buy.

http://library.duke.edu/specialcollections/research/guides/slaveletters.html
An assortment of rare letters written by enslaved people during the 19th century, presented by the Special Collections holdings at Duke University.

http://library.wustl.edu/vlib/dredscott/
An online exhibit of the Dred Scott case presented by the Washington University in St. Louis libraries. In 1846, a couple, Harriet and Dred Scott, living in St. Louis petitioned for their freedom and the resulting suit was argued for eleven years before the Supreme Court ultimately—and controversially—passed down the verdict that Dred Scott must remain a slave, urging the young American nation closer to war. For more on Dred Scott’s life, see http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2932.html

http://masshist.org/longroad/
The African-American Experience in the Massachusetts Court System, courtesy of the venerable Massachusetts Historical Society.

http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/abolitionism/narratives/Separation.htm
Abolitionism in America, the “I Will Be Heard!” online exhibition, at Cornell University’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections. Read short biographies of abolitionists, such as Sojourner Truth, Lewis Tappan, and Gerrit Smith, and also learn about some figures and instances of black resistance during the abolitionism era.

http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/collections/african-american-women.html
African American Women archival collections at Duke University online.

http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/franklin/
The John Hope Franklin Collection at Duke University, part of Duke's Rare Books and Manuscripts division, involved in African-American historical documentation.

http://www.aaffmuseum.org/
The African American Firefighting Museum. In Los Angeles.

http://www.afrigeneas.com
AfriGeneas--African-ancestry family research. Slave and plantation records. Search by surname.

http://www.amistadresearchcenter.org/
The Amistad Research Center, at Tulane University. The nation's largest independent research facility for African-American historical research.

http://www.archives.gov/research_room/genealogy/other_sites.html
The National Archives and Records Administration's Web links section, listing related online resources in genealogy, culture, and history.

http://www.archives.state.al.us/afro/afro.html
African-American records at the Alabama Department of Archives & History.

http://www.blackfacts.com/
Online database of black-history facts.

http://www.blackinventor.com/
Who invented the gas mask? Many say it was Garrett Morgan, the son of slaves. Discover some black scientists and inventors here.

http://www.buffalosoldier.net/
An educator-created site dedicated to honoring the sacrifices of African-American Buffalo Soldiers.

http://www.bunchecenter.ucla.edu/
The Ralph J. Bunche Center for African-American Studies, at UCLA.

http://www.ccharity.com
Christine's Genealogy Web site. Family researcher Christine Charity's comprehensive online tool for researching African-American genealogy. The archives are a valuable resource for finding family and also for learning black history.

http://www.daacs.org/
The Digital Archive of Comparative Slavery. Created by the Archaeology Department at Monticello, this database helps students and professionals understand the day to day lives of enslaved Africans of the Chesapeake and Carolinas and Caribbean. It’s both a virtual archeological dig and a very useful apparatus for tracking the lives and movements of people in bondage during America’s infancy.

http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/black_voices/black_voices.cfm
The University of Houston, partnering with outstanding research centers like the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and Chicago Historical Society, have produced an online American history textbook for teachers, students, and historians. Of particular relevance here, is the “African American Voices” section, which includes profiles of important leaders, figures, and events in African-American history.

http://www.dusablemuseum.org
The DuSable Museum of African-American History. Chicago, Illinois.

http://www.ed.gov/about/inits/list/whhbcu/edlite-list.html
The government's site for Historically Black Colleges, listed state by state.

http://www.history.umd.edu/Freedmen/
The Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland. “A Documentary History of Emancipation.”

http://www.historycooperative.org/btw/
The Booker T. Washington Papers. One of the best contributions to American historical study available on the World Wide Web.

http://www.indiana.edu/~bfca/index.html
The Black Film Center Archive at Indiana University.

http://www.innercity.org/holt/contents.html
Interesting site on inner-city Washington, D.C.--its slavery history and chronology, 1619 and onwards, with a focus on the Holt House, a mansion built by slave labor and owned by the Washington Zoo. Read about the slave cemetery that became a garbage dump.

http://www.jimcrowhistory.org/
Jim Crow History, 1870 to 1950. Essays.

http://www.kn.pacbell.com/wired/BHM/bh_hotlist.html
Black History Hotlist is a good, basic resource for links to black history sites.

http://www.legacymuseum.org/
Artifacts and documents preserving the record of African-American communities in central Virginia.

http://www.lib.iastate.edu/collections/eresourc/aa.html
Iowa State University's guide to African-American history research on the Internet.

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/african/afam001.html
The Library of Congress's "African-American Mosaic" site, with a resource guide to the study of black history and culture. See also http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aaohtml/exhibit/aointro.html --the "African-American Odyssey" exhibit at the Library of Congress, and http://lcWeb2.loc.gov/ammem/sthtml/--"Slaves and Courts, 1740-1860", a collection of pamphlets documenting the lives and movements of slaves and freedmen as directly affected by legal decisions.

http://www.maah-detroit.org/
The Charles H. Wright Museum of African-American History, in Detroit, Michigan.

http://www.mnh.si.edu/africanvoices/
The Smithsonian Institution's African Voices site. Another jewel in the Smithsonian crown. The interactive timeline is especially fine.

http://www.nmaahc.si.edu/
The Smithsonian is adding a new museum to its domain: the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Visitors to the National Mall, in Washington, should expect the NMAAHC – a long-needed repository for important images, documents, and recordings spanning over four hundred years of African American history -- to open its doors sometime within the next decade. In the meantime, check in with the interactive site for online exhibits, information, and virtual tours.

http://www.nypl.org/research/sc/sc.html
The New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. One of the most important collections of African-American culture and history in the country. See the online exhibit of nineteenth-century images of African-Americans at: http://digital.nypl.org/schomburg/images_aa19/.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/home.html
PBS's Web resources for the Africans in America series. Be sure to see the Resource Bank Index for essential documents and images.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/race/etc/road.html
PBS's Frontline contrasts the black leaders W.E.B DuBois and Booker T. Washington. Highlight: the full-text version of DuBois's 1903 work, The Souls of Black Folk.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/aalives/
In the PBS program African American Lives, the author and historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr., explores African American heritage, tracing the ancestry of prominent black Americans, such as Oprah Winfrey, Whoopi Goldberg, and Quincy Jones, back to slavery and to Africa, using both DNA and traditional genealogical evidence. The program’s companion site offers resources for further exploration of the nature of race, genes, and human identity.

http://www.portchicagomutiny.com/
A forgotten event in African-American history.

http://www.prairiebluff.com/aacemetery
African-American Cemeteries, an ongoing database project. Data submitted by volunteers. See also: http://www.virginia.edu/woodson/projects/aacac/index.php?page_id=aacac--the African-American Cemetery Project, in Thomas Jefferson's Albemarle County, Virginia.

http://www.si.umich.edu/CHICO/Harlem/
"Harlem 1900 to 1940: An African-American Community." A Schomburg Center exhibit at the University of Michigan's School of Information. Portraits and profiles of figures in arts and politics: Marcus Garvey, Countee Cullen, Adam Clayton Powell, and Duke Ellington.

http://www.uga.edu/~iaas/History.html
African-Americans in history, from the University of Georgia. Short profiles and portraits of some better-known black leaders, reformers, artists, and politicians.

http://www.virginia.edu/woodson/
Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. Teaching and resource center.

http://www.visibleblackhistory.com/Resources.htm
African American history research resources in the state of Maine.

http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/libraryarchives/aanp/freedom/
Digitized scans of all 103 issues of the weekly Freedom's Journal, the first African American-owned paper, published between 1827 and 1829. Adobe Acrobat reader is required, and the original copy is difficult to read. At the Wisconsin Historical Society.

http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/turningpoints/tp-049/?action=more_essay
A first-rate online exhibition and information pages on Desegregation with particular attention paid to the Civil Rights Era in Wisconsin. At the Wisconsin Historical Society.

http://www.yale.edu/glc/
Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. A solid resource for pertinent online documents and links.