Afro American Studies  Tags: afro_american african_american black_studies  

Put all your references in RefWorks, create quick and easy bibliographies, build your knowledgebase.

Books

For books at UMass, use the Five Colleges Library Catalog and click on the UMass link. Be as specific as possible in your searching. Start with a subject search (use keyword if subject yields no results). You can use broad categories to browse for sub-topics or to later limit (by date, words in subject or words in title) for more focussed results.

If UMass doesn't have the book(s) you need, try the other Four Colleges.

TIP: Use WorldCat and Other Library Catalogs when UMass and Five College system are not sufficient.

Secondary Sources

• America: History and Life - Citations and abstracts for journal articles, dissertations, and book reviews relating to United States and Canadian history. Citations can be exported directly to RefWorks.
• Biography Resource Center - Brief biographies from a variety of reference sources.
• Black Studies Center - Combines several resources for research in Black Studies: Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience, International Index to Black Periodicals (IIBP), The Chicago Defender, and the Black Literature Index. IIBP provided indexing and abstracting of 150 African, American and Caribbean periodicals, with full text of forty core journals. The Chicago Defender was at one point the most widely-read black newspaper in the country, with more than two thirds of its readership based outside Chicago.
• Black Thought and Culture - Contains 619 sources with 246 authors, including the nonfiction published works of leading African Americans.
• Ethnic NewsWatch - Full-text articles from the newspapers, magazines and journals of ethnic communities in the United States. Most articles are in English, but many from Latino periodicals are in Spanish. Citations can be exported directly to RefWorks.
• JSTOR (full text) - Scholarly journals from many disciplines. From the earliest issue of each journal to between two and five years prior to the present. Therefore, does NOT contain very recent scholarship. Citations can be exported directly into RefWorks.

Using primary sources in your paper?

Apply for the

Friends of the Library

Undergraduate Research Award

First place award - $750

Two honorable mentions $250 each

All undergraduate students enrolled at UMass Amherst are eligible. Projects must represent work completed for a class or independent study in any field within the 18 months prior to the application deadline. Criteria will be based on use of primary sources, creativity and originality, and clarity and effectiveness of writing. Deadline February 13, 2009

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Primary Sources