Africana Studies

General listing of Data Bases centered on Africana Studies via Brown University resource guides

This site includes the two major research archives at the University, namely the Historical Papers Research Archive (HPRA), and the South African History Archive (SAHA).

This digital library contains archival and research materials that explore Islamic practices in the West African countries of Senegal and Ghana.

This guide provides links to the most relevant UN documents (resolutions, reports, declarations, treaties) on people of African descent, a group of specific interest to the United Nations because of the discrimination it continues to suffer even after the end of the historic slave trade.

Information and data on countries in the form of country profiles, the country profiles that follow offer a synopsis of the Summary statistics, Trade profile, Economic, Social, and Environmental indicators of each African country.

Excellent Oxford Bibliographies overview with citations

A collection of academic journals with a focus on the African continent.

Delve into the earliest voyages of Vasco da Gama, the opening of trade with the Spice Islands, the colonisation of the Americas and Australasia, the search for the Northwest and Northeast Passages, and finally the race for the Poles with this robust primary source collection.

Contains information on more than 35,000 slave voyages involving the forcible transport of more than 12 million Africans to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Offers researchers, students and the general public a chance to rediscover the reality of one of the largest forced movements of peoples in world history.

The settling of vast areas of the world by Europeans from the 17th to 20th century and the dynamics of the frontier areas that arose from this has left a particular and lasting influence on history. This map situates events in time and space in order to contextualise the frontier between European, European-American and European-Australasian people and the indigenous inhabitants of North America, Africa and Australasia.

27 reels. Brown holds only Part 1 of this massive microfilm collection, covering West Africa (Sierra Leone) from 1803 to 1880. A printed guide to the entire collection is available.

Interactive map documenting the spread of chattel slavery in the US

Printed propaganda from the Black Panthers and 26 other radical Black nationalist groups included in this sub-category as part of the massive Hall Hoag Collection of Extremist and Dissenting Printed Propaganda, documenting political activity by radical groups in the post WWII United States. Includes many issues of the Black Panther newspaper.

This collection is a grouping of approximately 1,400 items dating from the 1830s to the 1920s. The contents of the collection depict representations of Black diasporic people and cultures through close to a century of illustrations and musical and lyrical compositions found in sheet music publications. The collection depicts representations of Blackness during an era dominated by the sheet music publishing industry and prior to the recording industry’s eventual domination over the commercial market which began in the 1920s.

51 reels. A 2-volume printed guide to the film reels is available.

A graduate of the Class of 1905, Watson followed in the footsteps of John Hope (1897) and had a long career in education. He served as the founding President of Leland College in Baker, Louisiana, and later as President of Arkansas AM&N (now the Pine Bluff campus of the University of Arkansas).

Records of a Civil War veteran and his correspondence about slavery and emancipation with Victor Chambers, an African American man born on the battlefield at Gettysburg in July 1863

The voyage of the Sally was an example of "the triangle trade." Rum-laden Rhode Island ships sailed to Africa and acquired cargoes of Africans, who were carried to the plantation colonies of the Caribbean and sold. The ships returned home with holds filled with sugar and molasses, which was distilled into rum and shipped to Africa to produce more slaves, more sugar, and more rum. In the century before 1807, roughly 100,000 Africans were carried into New World slavery on Rhode Island ships, most to the Caribbean. The Sally's voyage stands out for several reasons. It the best-documented Rhode Island slaving venture, but it was also one of the deadliest. The timing of the voyage was significant: 1764 marked the beginning of the imperial crisis between Great Britain and its thirteen mainland North American colonies. Drawn from holdings of the John Carter Brown Library and the Rhode Island Historical Society.

The Race & in America series amplifies the impact and extends the reach of these penetrating discussions through expanded content and resources presented over thirteen volumes.

This installation—presented in the cafe and on the courtyard wall just outside the museum’s entrance—features portraits of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) women and femmes, or people who adopt a feminine appearance, manner, or persona. Metaferia, an Ethiopian American artist based in New York City, photographed these and other local people in a 2021 workshop with the museum’s Education Department. She then conducted research at libraries and archives at RISD and Brown University to source historical images.