Includes reference encyclopedias and handbooks, which feature easy-to-read overviews and background information on thousands of topics. Credo also includes videos, illustrations, photographs, visual aids, and maps.
Gale eBooks has reference encyclopedias that you can view online, which are useful for giving you a brief overview and important aspects of your topic.
African American History, 4 Volume Set by Salem PressExploring fundamental primary sources from African American history, this new edition provides in-depth, analytical essays on 150 iconic documents and speeches from the 1600s to the present day. Coverage includes important legislative documents such as the Reconstruction era amendments; critical Supreme Court decisions such as Dred Scott v. Sandford, Plessy v. Ferguson, and Brown v. Board of Education; and historic speeches and writings by leaders such as Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Barack Obama.
Call Number: eBook 2017
The Columbia Guide to African American History Since 1939 by Robert L. Harris; Rosalyn Terborg-Penn (Editors)This book is a multifaceted approach to understanding the central developments in African American history since 1939. It combines a historical overview of key personalities and movements with essays by leading scholars on specific facets of the African American experience, a chronology of events, and a guide to further study. Marian Anderson's famous 1939 concert in front of the Lincoln Memorial was a watershed moment in the struggle for racial justice. Beginning with this event, the editors chart the historical efforts of African Americans to address racism and inequality. They explore the rise of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements and the national and international contexts that shaped their ideologies and methods; consider how changes in immigration patterns have complicated the conventional "black/white" dichotomy in U.S. society; discuss the often uneasy coexistence between a growing African American middle class and a persistent and sizable underclass; and address the complexity of the contemporary African American experience. Contributors consider specific issues in African American life, including the effects of the postindustrial economy and the influence of music, military service, sports, literature, culture, business, and the politics of self-designation, e.g.,"Colored" vs. "Negro," "Black" vs. "African American". While emphasizing political and social developments, this volume also illuminates important economic, military, and cultural themes. An invaluable resource, The Columbia Guide to African American History Since 1939 provides a thorough understanding of a crucial historical period.
Call Number: eBook 2006
The African American AlmanacThe most complete and affordable single-volume reference of African American culture available today, this almanac is a unique and valuable resource devoted to illustrating and demystifying the moving, difficult, and often lost history of black life in America.
Call Number: DVC - Pleasant Hill Library - Reference E185 .B8127 2012
Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present by Paul Finkelman (Editor)Focusing on the making of African American society from the 1896 "separate but equal" ruling of Plessy v. Ferguson up to the contemporary period, this encyclopedia traces the transition from the Reconstruction Era to the age of Jim Crow, the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Migration, the Brown ruling that overturned Plessy, the Civil Rights Movement, and the ascendant influence of African American culture on the American cultural landscape.
Call Number: DVC - Pleasant Hill Library - Reference E185 .E5453 2009
Life upon These Shores by Henry Louis GatesHenry Louis Gates, Jr., gives us a sumptuously illustrated landmark book tracing African American history from the arrival of the conquistadors to the election of Barack Obama.
Call Number: DVC - Pleasant Hill Library - Reference E185 .G27 2011
American Decades Primary Sources by Cynthia Rose (Editor)"American Decades Primary Sources is designed as a stand-alone set and also as a companion to Thomson Gale's 10-volume "American Decades Series. Each "Primary Sources volume covers a decade in American history corresponding to an original "American Decades volume, amplifying and illuminating the decade with first-hand accounts and other primary source documentation.
Call Number: DVC - Pleasant Hill Library - Reference E169.1 .A471977 2004
Selected Books online and on the shelf
Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer by Kate Clifford LarsonWalk with Me does justice to the full force of Hamer's activism and example. Based on new sources, including recently opened FBI files and Oval Office transcripts, the biography features interviews with some of the people closest to Hamer and conversations with Civil Rights leaders who fought alongside her.Larson's biography will become the standard account of an extraordinary life.
Call Number: eBook 2021
The African American Experience During World War II by Neil A. WynnDrawing on more than thirty years of teaching and research, Neil A. Wynn combines narrative history and primary sources as he locates the World War II years within the long-term struggle for African Americans' equal rights. It is now widely accepted that these years were crucial in the development of the emerging Civil Rights movement through the economic and social impact of the war, as well as the military service itself. Wynn examines the period within the broader context of the New Deal era of the 1930s and the Cold War of the 1950s, concluding that the war years were neither simply a continuation of earlier developments nor a prelude to later change. Rather, this period was characterized by an intense transformation of black hopes and expectations, encouraged by real socio-economic shifts and departures in federal policy. Black self consciousness at a national level found powerful expression in new movements, from the demand for equality in the military service to changes in the shop floor to the "Double V" campaign that linked the fight for democracy at home for the fight for democracy abroad. As the nation played a new world role in the developing Cold War, the tensions between America's stated beliefs and actual practices emphasized these issues and brought new forces into play. More than a half century later, this book presents a much-needed up-to-date, short and readable interpretation of existing scholarship. Accessible to general and student readers, it tells the story without jargon or theory while including the historiography and debate on particular issues.
Call Number: eBook 2010
I've Been Here All the While by Alaina E. RobertsPerhaps no other symbol has more resonance in African American history than that of "40 acres and a mule"--the lost promise of Black reparations for slavery after the Civil War. In I've Been Here All the While, we meet the Black people who actually received this mythic 40 acres, the American settlers who coveted this land, and the Native Americans whose holdings it originated from.
Call Number: DVC - Pleasant Hill Library - Stacks E185.6 .A76 2003
African American Frontiers by Alan B. GovenarA collection of first hand narratives and oral histories portraying the African American experience from slavery through emancipation and into the 20th century. African American Frontiers concentrates on the period from 1703, the date of the first published narrative of an African slave's attainment of freedom in the American colonies, to 1948, the year in which President Harry S. Truman integrated the United States armed forces through Executive Order 9981. This book is an invaluable historical resource that brings together diverse first-person accounts of individual African Americans through primary source documents, including: Henry "Box" Brown, who escaped the South by express mailing himself to Philadelphia in a wooden crate; Herb Jeffries, who introduced the black cowboy in Westerns; and Eunice Jackson, whose funeral home was destroyed in the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. Such little known stories, most of them previously unpublished, resonate with the determination, forbearance, moral strength, and imagination of the tellers, and give readers an opportunity to see the world as it once was, as told by the men and women who lived in it. Includes primary source documents
Call Number: DVC - Pleasant Hill Library - Stacks E444 .G68 2000