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Table of Contents

Collection Description

 The Libraries’ at UM have an excellent collection of primary source materials such as books, articles, newspapers, and literary sources covering all aspects of African history. This guide is intended for graduate and undergraduate students and presents a variety of library and open web resources. Please contact Adrian Legaspi, History Liaison Librarian, for an individual research consultation or for more information about resources in African history.

General Database Resources  

Subject Specialist

  • Adrian Legaspi

    History, Religious Studies, Political Science, International Studies, and Modern Languages & Literatures Librarian

    axl641@miami.edu

    305-284-3257

Subject Specialist

  • Adrian Legaspi

    History, Religious Studies, Political Science, International Studies, and Modern Languages & Literatures Librarian

    axl641@miami.edu

    305-284-3257

Select Visual Resources

  • Africa: Sights and Sounds of a Continent - UW Madison: Contains more than 3000 slides, 500 photographs, and 50 hours of sounds from African countries.
  • Africana & Black History (NYPL):  Provides photographs from the transatlantic slave trade, Western migration, the colonization movement, the Great Migration, and the contemporary immigration of Caribbean’s, Haitians, and sub-Saharan Africans.
  • JSTOR with Image Search: ​ARTstor images are now available via JSTOR image search. When you search for images on JSTOR, you can now find Artstor's 3.2+ million licensed images and more than 800 additional collections alongside JSTOR's books and journal articles. The ARTstor collections are comprised of contributions from museums, individual photographers, scholars, special collections at libraries, and photo archives. All images are accompanied by comprehensive metadata and are rights-cleared for educational use.
  • Humphrey Winterton Collection of East African Photographs: 1860-1960: Includes about 7000 photographs, organized in 76 separate albums that depict life, primarily in East Africa, between about 1860 and 1960.
  • Ijele: Art eJournal of the African World: An online journal of contemporary art, architecture, and art history, focusing on the visual creative expressions of artists in Africa and other regions of the world. 
  • Slavery Images: Includes over 1,200 images detailing the experiences of enslaved Africans in the Americas.
 

Subject Specialist

  • Adrian Legaspi

    History, Religious Studies, Political Science, International Studies, and Modern Languages & Literatures Librarian

    axl641@miami.edu

    305-284-3257

Maps and Atlases

  • Maps of Africa: Provides a well-organized collection of historical and current maps on Africa. All maps are in the public domain, and may be freely downloaded and copied.
  • Maps of Africa: An Online Exhibit: Presents a digital collection of historical African maps digitized by Stanford University Libraries.
  • Maps of Liberia, 1830 to 1870: Presented by the Library of Congress, this map collection was created in 1817 by the American Colonization Society (ACS) to resettle free blacks in Sierra Leone and Liberia.
  • Old Maps of Africa: A collection of historical and current maps of the African continent.


Robert Sayer's Atlantic or Western Ocean (1815) from the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University

Subject Specialist

  • Adrian Legaspi

    History, Religious Studies, Political Science, International Studies, and Modern Languages & Literatures Librarian

    axl641@miami.edu

    305-284-3257




Register of "liberated Africans" freed from the slave schooner "Olimpa." (British National Archives, 1840). 

Subject Specialist

  • Adrian Legaspi

    History, Religious Studies, Political Science, International Studies, and Modern Languages & Literatures Librarian

    axl641@miami.edu

    305-284-3257

Subject Specialist

  • Adrian Legaspi

    History, Religious Studies, Political Science, International Studies, and Modern Languages & Literatures Librarian

    axl641@miami.edu

    305-284-3257

Recommended Books

Electronically Available Books

Digital Libraries

AfroCubaWeb: the African cultures in Cuba - Abakwa - Congo - Dahomey - Haiti - Yoruba - West Indies 
AfroCuba Web is an extensive online resource of news articles, essays, biographies, statistics, art, music, culture, politics, religion, links to websites. and more with the objective of educating about and preserving Afro-Cuban culture. 

At the Crossroads: Afro-Cuban Orisha Arts in Miami 
A digital exhibition from HistoryMiami Museum. 

Digitales – Afrocubanas 
Afrocubanas Magazine's list of links to blogs and websites dedicated to Afro-Cuban history and culture. 

Historia Negra de Cuba  
Instagram page of blogger and Afro-Cuban advocate Marley Pulido, includes an archive of articles and other links. 

General Databases

Global Newsstream (ProQuest)
Covers national and leading regional newspapers including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. International coverage includes The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, Jerusalem Post, and El Pais.

JSTOR
Provides digital versions of the backfiles (3 to 5 years) of major scholarly journals.

ProQuest Research Library
Has in-depth coverage of the top 150 core academic subject, including 5,060 titles over 3,600 in full text-from 1971 forward. It features a highly-respected, diversified mix of scholarly journals, trade publications, magazines, and newspapers.

Nuevo Herald (1976 - Current)
A Spanish-language newspaper published daily by the Miami Herald, Miami, Florida. Includes a Cuban section, news of interest to many Latin groups in the Miami area, as well as international, national, and regional news, cultural information, and services.
 
HathiTrust
Includes full-text access to over 6.4 million public domain works.
 
Humanities Full Text (H.W. Wilson)
Has more than 300 key humanities journals. Abstracts of journal articles are included from the spring of 1994.

Anthropology Plus
Covers anthropology, archaeology, and interdisciplinary studies. Includes Anthropological Index from1957-present.
 
Sociological Abstracts
Includes indexes and abstracts research literature published worldwide in journals and other serial publications.

UM Archival Collection

Alberto del Pozo's Orichas Collection 
The collection consists of a series of drawings by Cuban-born artist Alberto del Pozo (1946-1992) of the deities of Afro-Cuban Santería. 
 
Lydia Cabrera Papers 
Cabrera traveled throughout Cuba conducting interviews, collecting oral histories, recording stories and music, documenting rituals and practices, and cataloging “Africanisms” in Spanish Cuba. Post-exile, she published one of her most well-known works, Anaforuana, about the secret Abakuá society, in 1975. Cabrera also produced what is considered the most complete and important body of research on Afro-Caribbean religions and folklore. She was one of the first to recognize the richness of African culture and its vital contributions to Cuban identity. Selected items have been digitized and can be viewed here.
 
Jorge Castellanos Papers 
Author and professor born in 1915 in Guantánamo, Cuba. Exiled to the United States by way of Jamaica in 1961. After retirement, he continued to publish books on Cuban culture, most notably his series Cultura Afrocubana, co-authored with his daughter Isabel Castellanos, from 1988 to 1994.