Resources for Researching Traumatic Content
Resources for Working with Primary Sources
Comparative print culture : a study of alternative literary modernitiesPublication Date: 2020
Interpreting African American History and Culture at Museums and Historic Sites by Publication Date: 2014
Out of the closet, into the archives : researching sexual histories by Publication Date: 2015
Using non-textual sources : a historian's guide by Publication Date: 2015
Who wrote Citizen Kane? : statistical analysis of disputed co-authorship by Publication Date: 2023
An objective of this guide is discussion of race and racism. To place the literature in its proper historical context and understand allusions made in these texts, links to external sources are provided. These materials display and discuss offensive and violent content. Please practice self-care when researching and seek support.
Literature as a Primary Source
Since the purpose of this guide is to place literature in its proper context, it can be read as a primary source. Reads should ask themselves, "What does this work tell me about the time period?" "Do any of the story elements seem based on real events?" Considering various efforts at censorship, it must be asked why authors might create a story instead of discussing what actually happened. A common theme in African-American Literature is the effect of history on culture, so consider applying primary source analysis techniques to historical fiction.
Primary Sources in Literature Research
Primary sources provide valuable background information for analyzing texts. The most commonly used sources are the author's personal papers, autobiography, and other archival materials. A common difficulty that researchers may encounter is a lack of verifiable documentation on their subject. As a result, the authenticity of the surviving materials may be in dispute. Additionally important to consider is adaptations of these works. Do your best to verify that texts are first editions and original formats instead of reproductions. Adaptations may have significant changes to suit a different audience than the original author was writing for.
Since these are non-traditional sources, they require different information for use in citations. Always consult the formatting guide of the style guide that you are using. Some digital collections will offer example citations, but double-check your manual.
Start with these Resources
- Dictionary of Archives TerminologyThe Dictionary of Archives Terminology is the foremost reference on the archival lexicon. Entries draw primarily from the professional literature in the United States and Canada.
- Primary Sources: EvaluatingAn explanatory primer on evaluating primary sources (and evaluating whether or not these materials are primary source) from Lafayette College Library
- Making Sense of EvidenceHow-to guides and critical thinking advice for analyzing primary sources; organized by material type.
A scholarly project by the American Social History Project/Center for Media & Learning at the City University of New York in partnership with the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University
Primary Source Books
From peace to freedom : Quaker rhetoric and the birth of American antislavery, 1657-1761 by Publication Date: 2012In the first book to investigate in detail the origins of antislavery thought and rhetoric within the Society of Friends, Brycchan Carey shows how the Quakers turned against slavery in the first half of the eighteenth century and became the first organization to take a stand against the slave trade. Through meticulous examination of the earliest writings of the Friends, including journals and letters, Carey reveals the society’s gradual transition from expressing doubt about slavery to adamant opposition. He shows that while progression toward this stance was ongoing, it was slow and uneven and that it was vigorous internal debate and discussion that ultimately led to a call for abolition.
Interpreting a continent : voices from colonial America by Publication Date: 2009This reader provides students with key documents from colonial American history, including new English translations of non-English documents. The documents in this collection take the reader beyond the traditional story of the English colonies. Readers explore the Spanish, French, Dutch, Russian, German, and even Icelandic colonial efforts throughout North America, including California, New Mexico, Texas, the Great Plains, Louisiana, Florida, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New England.
Spectacular suffering : witnessing slavery in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic by Publication Date: 2016Spectacular Suffering focuses on commodification and discipline, two key dimensions of Atlantic slavery through which black bodies were turned into things in the marketplace and persons into property on plantations. Mallipeddi approaches the problem of slavery as a problem of embodiment in this nuanced account of how melancholy sentiment mediated colonial relations between English citizens and Caribbean slaves. The book's first chapters consider how slave distress emerged as a topic of emotional concern and political intervention in the writings of Aphra Behn, Richard Steele, and Laurence Sterne. As Mallipeddi shows, sentimentalism allowed metropolitan authors to fashion themselves as melancholy witnesses to racial slavery by counterposing the singular body to the abstract commodity and by taking affective property in slaves against the legal proprietorship of slaveholders. Spectacular Suffering then turns to the practices of the enslaved, tracing how they contended with the effects of chattel slavery. The author attends not only to the work of African British writers and archival textual materials but also to economic and social activities, including slaves' petty production, recreational forms, and commemorative rituals.
The 1619 Project : a new origin story by Publication Date: 2021he animating idea of The 1619 Project is that our national narrative is more accurately told if we begin not on July 4, 1776, but in late August of 1619, when a ship arrived in Jamestown bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric and unprecedented system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country's original sin, but it is more than that: It is the country's very origin. The 1619 Project tells this new origin story, placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country.
Revolutionary America, 1763-1815 by Publication Date: 2010Revolutionary America, 1763–1815: A Sourcebook is a collection of dynamic primary sources intended to accompany the second edition of Revolutionary America, 1763-1815: A Political History. While the structure of the collection parallels the textbook, either can be used independently as well. Each chapter contains excerpts of crucial documents from the Revolutionary period, and begins with a brief introduction. A companion website holds the full text of all excerpted documents, as well as links to other valuable online resources. This Sourcebook helps give students a sense of the human experience of that turbulent time, bringing life to the struggle to found the United States. For additional information and classroom resources please visit the Revolutionary America companion website at www.routledge.com/textbooks/revolutionaryamerica.
The rise of aggressive abolitionism : addresses to the slaves by Publication Date: 2014The American conflict over slavery reached a turning point in the early 1840s when three leading abolitionists presented provocative speeches that, for the first time, addressed the slaves directly rather than aiming rebukes at white owners. By forthrightly embracing the slaves as allies and exhorting them to take action, these three addresses pointed toward a more inclusive and aggressive antislavery effort. These addresses were particularly frightening to white slaveholders who were significantly in the minority of the population in some parts of low country Georgia and South Carolina. The Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism includes the full text of each address, as well as related documents, and presents a detailed study of their historical context, the reactions they provoked, and their lasting impact on U.S. history.
Revolutions without borders : the call to liberty in the Atlantic world by Publication Date: 2015Nation-based histories cannot do justice to the rowdy, radical interchange of ideas around the Atlantic world during the tumultuous years from 1776 to 1804. National borders were powerless to restrict the flow of exciting new visions of human rights and universal freedom. This expansive history explores how the revolutionary ideas that spurred the American and French revolutions reverberated far and wide, connecting European, North American, African, and Caribbean peoples more closely than ever before. Historian Janet Polasky focuses on the eighteenth-century travelers who spread new notions of liberty and equality. It was an age of itinerant revolutionaries, she shows, who ignored borders and found allies with whom to imagine a borderless world. As paths crossed, ideas entangled. The author investigates these ideas and how they were disseminated long before the days of instant communications and social media or even an international postal system. Polasky analyzes the paper records--books, broadsides, journals, newspapers, novels, letters, and more--to follow the far-reaching trails of revolutionary zeal. What emerges clearly from rich historic records is that the dream of liberty among America's founders was part of a much larger picture. It was a dream embraced throughout the far-flung regions of the Atlantic world.
Signatures of Citizenship : Petitioning, Antislavery, and Women's Political Identity by Publication Date: 2003In this comprehensive history of women's antislavery petitions addressed to Congress, Susan Zaeske argues that by petitioning, women not only contributed significantly to the movement to abolish slavery but also made important strides toward securing their own rights and transforming their own political identity. By analyzing the language of women's antislavery petitions, speeches calling women to petition, congressional debates, and public reaction to women's petitions from 1831 to 1865, Zaeske reconstructs and interprets debates over the meaning of female citizenship. At the beginning of their political campaign in 1835 women tended to disavow the political nature of their petitioning, but by the 1840s they routinely asserted women's right to make political demands of their representatives. This rhetorical change, from a tone of humility to one of insistence, reflected an ongoing transformation in the political identity of petition signers, as they came to view themselves not as subjects but as citizens. Having encouraged women's involvement in national politics, women's antislavery petitioning created an appetite for further political participation that spurred countless women after the Civil War and during the first decades of the twentieth century to promote causes such as temperance, anti-lynching laws, and woman suffrage.
Long Past Slavery by Call Number: 305.896 S849LPublication Date: 2016From 1936 to 1939, the New Deal's Federal Writers' Project collected life stories from more than 2,300 former African American slaves. These narratives are now widely used as a source to understand the lived experience of those who made the transition from slavery to freedom. But in this examination of the project and its legacy, Catherine A. Stewart shows it was the product of competing visions of the past, as ex-slaves' memories of bondage, emancipation, and life as freedpeople were used to craft arguments for and against full inclusion of African Americans in society. Stewart demonstrates how project administrators, such as the folklorist John Lomax; white and black interviewers, including Zora Neale Hurston; and the ex-slaves themselves fought to shape understandings of black identity. She reveals that some influential project employees were also members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, intent on memorializing the Old South. Stewart places ex-slaves at the center of debates over black citizenship to illuminate African Americans' struggle to redefine their past as well as their future in the face of formidable opposition.
Remembering slavery : African Americans talk about their personal experiences of slavery and emancipation by Call Number: 306.362 R386SPublication Date: 1998This set contains: two sixty-minute audiotapes that include original live recordings of interviews with former slaves and dramatic readings by celebrities from written interviews; and, a hardcover book that includes a comprehensive introductory essay by preeminent slavery historian Ira Berlin, chapters on aspects of slave life, including relationships with owners, work, family culture, the Civil War, and Emancipation; complete transcript of the live recordings and dramatic readings of interviews with former slaves, contained on the companion tapes; extensive additional interviews with former slaves; little-known period photographs, including some of the former slaves interviewed on the companion tapes.
We ask only for even-handed justice : Black voices from Reconstruction, 1865-1877 by Publication Date: 2013The sesquicentennial of the Civil War and Reconstruction invites reflection on the broad meaning of American democracy, including the ideals of freedom, equality, racial justice, and self-determination. In We Ask Only for Even-Handed Justice, John David Smith brings together a wealth of primary texts--editorials, letters, newspaper articles, and personal testimonies--to illuminate the experience of emancipation for the millions of African Americans enmeshed in the transition from chattel slavery to freedom from 1865 to 1877. The years following Appomattox offered the freed people numerous opportunities and challenges. Ex-slaves reconnected with relatives dispersed by the domestic slave trade and the vicissitudes of civil war. They sought their own farms and homesteads, education for their children, and legal protection from whites hostile to their new status. They negotiated labor contracts, established local communities, and, following the 1867 Reconstruction Acts, entered local, state, and national politics. Though aided by Freedmen's Bureau agents and sympathetic whites, former slaves nevertheless faced daunting odds. Ku Klux Klansmen and others terrorized blacks who asserted themselves, many northerners lost interest in their plight, and federal officials gradually left them to their own resources. As a result, former Confederates regained control of the southern state governments following the 1876 presidential election.
Measuring the Harlem Renaissance : the U.S. Census, African American Identity, and Literary Form by Publication Date: 2017In this provocative study, Michael Soto examines African American cultural forms through the lens of census history to tell the story of how U.S. officialdom--in particular the Census Bureau--placed persons of African descent within a shifting taxonomy of racial difference, and how African American writers and intellectuals described a far more complex situation of interracial social contact and intra-racial diversity. What we now call African American identity and the literature that gives it voice emerged out of social, cultural, and intellectual forces that fused in Harlem roughly one century ago. Measuring the Harlem Renaissance sifts through a wide range of authors and ideas--from W. E. B. Du Bois, Rudolph Fisher, and Nella Larsen to Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Wallace Thurman, and from census history to the Great Migration--to provide a fresh take on late nineteenth--and twentieth--century literature and social thought. Soto reveals how Harlem came to be known as the "cultural capital of black America," and how these ideas left us with unforgettable fiction and poetry.
New York panorama : a comprehensive view of the metropolis by Call Number: 917.471 F29NPublication Date: 1938- The voice of the Negro, 1919 by Call Number: 301.451 K39VISBN: 68054163Publication Date: 1968 (Reprint of the 1920 edition)
The WPA History of the Negro in Pittsburgh by Publication Date: 2004In the 1930s, the WPA's Federal Writers' Project provided work to thousands of unemployed writers, editors, and researchers of all races. The monumental American Guide Series featured books on stats, cities, rivers, and ethnic groups, opening an unprecedented view into the lives of the American people. University of Pittsburgh English professor J. Ernest Wright was selected to compile and edit "The Negro in Pittsburgh." He assembled an impressive, racially mixed team of writers and other professionals - including newspaper editors, teachers, preachers, and social workers - but when a hostile Congress abruptly terminated funding for the program in 1939, the nearly completed project languished, almost forgotten in the depths of the Pennsylvania State LibraryNever before published, The WPA History of the Negro in Pittsburgh combines the original texts with an introduction and explanatory notes by historian Laurence Glasco." "The essays in this pioneering history of African Americans in Pittsburgh were written before World War II and the economic recovery that followed the Great Depression; before the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and desegregation: before the destruction of a black cultural locus in the lower Hill District. The book, therefore, not only tells the history of African Americans in Pittsburgh from colonial times to the 1930s, but also captures the perspective of the period in which it was created.
Exhibiting Slavery : The Caribbean Postmodern Novel As Museum by Publication Date: 2009Exhibiting Slavery examines the ways in which Caribbean postmodern historical novels about slavery written in Spanish, English, and French function as virtual museums, simultaneously showcasing and curating a collection of primary documents within their pages. As Vivian Nun Halloran attests, these novels highlight narrative objects extraneous to their plot--such as excerpts from the work of earlier writers, allusions to specific works of art, the uniforms of maroon armies assembled in preparation of a military offensive, and accounts of slavery's negative impact on the traditional family unit in Africa or the United States. In doing so, they demand that their readers go beyond the pages of the books to sort out fact from fiction and consider what relationship these featured objects have to slavery and to contemporary life. The self-referential function of these texts produces a museum effect that simultaneously teaches and entertains their readers, prompting them to continue their own research beyond and outside the text.
The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. by Publication Date: 1992More than two decades after his death, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s ideas - his call for racial equality, his faith in the ultimate triumph of justice, and his insistence on the power of nonviolent struggle to bring about a major transformation of American society - are as vital and timely as ever. The wealth of his writings, both published and unpublished, that constitute his intellectual legacy are now preserved in this authoritative, chronologically arranged, multivolume edition. Faithfully transcribing the texts of his letters, speeches, sermons, student papers, and articles, this edition has no equal.
Risking Everything : A Freedom Summer Reader by Publication Date: 2014Risking Everything: A Freedom Summer Reader documents the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project, when SNCC and CORE workers and volunteers arrived in the Deep South to register voters and teach non-violence, and more than 60,000 black Mississippians risked everything to overturn a system that had brutally exploited them. In the 44 original documents in this anthology, you’ll read their letters, eavesdrop on their meetings, shudder at their suffering, and admire their courage. You’ll witness the final hours of three workers murdered on the project’s first day, hear testimony by black residents who bravely stood up to police torture and Klan firebombs, and watch the liberal establishment betray them. These vivid primary sources, collected by the Wisconsin Historical Society, provide both first-hand accounts of this astounding grassroots struggle as well as a broader understanding of the Civil Rights movement. The selected documents are among the 25,000 pages about the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project in the archives of the Wisconsin Historical Society.
The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer : To Tell It Like It Is by Publication Date: 2011Most people who have heard of Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977) are aware of the impassioned testimony that this Mississippi sharecropper and civil rights activist delivered at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Far fewer people are familiar with the speeches Hamer delivered at the 1968 and 1972 conventions, to say nothing of addresses she gave closer to home, or with Malcolm X in Harlem, or even at the founding of the National Women's Political Caucus. Until now, dozens of Hamer's speeches have been buried in archival collections and in the basements of movement veterans. After years of combing library archives, government documents, and private collections across the country, Maegan Parker Brooks and Davis W. Houck have selected twenty-one of Hamer's most important speeches and testimonies.
Women and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1965 by Publication Date: 2009Historians have long agreed that women--black and white--were instrumental in shaping the civil rights movement. Until recently, though, such claims have not been supported by easily accessed texts of speeches and addresses. With this first-of-its-kind anthology, Davis W. Houck and David E. Dixon present thirty-nine full-text addresses by women who spoke out while the struggle was at its most intense. Beginning with the Brown decision in 1954 and extending through the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the editors chronicle the unique and important rhetorical contributions made by such well-known activists as Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Daisy Bates, Lillian Smith, Mamie Till-Mobley, Lorraine Hansberry, Dorothy Height, and Rosa Parks. They also include speeches from lesser-known but influential leaders such as Della Sullins, Marie Foster, Johnnie Carr, Jane Schutt, and Barbara Posey.
Documents of American prejudice : an anthology of writings on race from Thomas Jefferson to David Duke by Call Number: 305.800973 D637OPublication Date: 1999
Human and civil rights : essential primary sources by Publication Date: 2007These volumes of primary source documents focus on leading social issues of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. International in scope, each title is devoted to one topic.
Immigration and multiculturalism : essential primary sources by Publication Date: 2006These volumes of primary source documents focus on leading social issues of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. International in scope, each title is devoted to one topic.
Voices of the African American Experience [3 Volumes] by Publication Date: 2009From early accounts of free blacks in the Colonies to slave narratives recorded by Works Progress Administration employees in the 1930s to a recent speech by Senator Barack Obama, this collection offers a treasure trove of carefully selected primary documents from and concerning African Americans. It is among the largest and widest-ranging collection of documents on the entire African American experience in print. Voices of the African American Experience provides access to fresh voices from history until today in more than 130 documents. Examples include speeches, articles, mission statements, ephemera, testimony, letters, sermons, prayers, spirituals/songs, slave narratives, memoirs, essays, interviews, and more. Key official documents and important communications from noted African Americans are of course present, while making the words of ordinary African Americans from the past easily accessible to the general public. Each document is introduced and contextualized, making this set especially valuable and helpful in student research.
