October 11, 2024, by Jo
Discover our collections: Black History Month
October is Black History Month in the UK, an event that has been celebrated nationwide for more than 30 years. This year’s Black History Month theme is ‘reclaiming narratives’ – a call to action for Black communities across the UK to step into the role of storytellers, historians, and custodians of black heritage.
UoN Libraries continues the work of improving the diversity of our collections to support Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) for our academic community. This blog offers an introduction to just some of the related resources that can be found in our collections.
Books and journals
In our physical and online collections, staff, students and researchers can access a wide range of books and journals related to the history, achievements, contributions and lived experiences of black people. Look up your topic in NUsearch or click on these search results to explore further:
Reading lists
Since 2020, we have been purchasing additional material to add to our Black History Month reading list. Continuing this work to diversify our collections and to support the Black History Month theme this year of reclaiming narratives, we again invite the University of Nottingham community to suggest new titles to add to the BHM collection.
Some of your suggestions pictured above. You can find many other related titles in NUSearch
In recent years, the University created the Black Lives Matter resources list to inform and educate those of us who do not belong to black communities. This list, along with others in our themed reading list series are available from the Discover our collections pages of the Libraries website.
Current Awareness
To browse, read and keep up-to-date with scholarly journal content, we recommend using the Browzine tool, available on mobile devices, laptops and desktop PCs. Navigate to the Ethnic, Race and Gender Studies category from the Social Science and Behavioral Science subject heading.
Add your favourite journals to your bookshelf to build your own personal library and receive alerts when a new issue is published. You will need to login/create an account for this service.
Using a mobile device to browse journals in the African-American/Black/Africana Studies category in Browzine
Databases
To take your research further, you can explore a range of cross-disciplinary databases in NUsearch. Here are just a selection.
- African American newspapers – Almost 350 African American newspapers published in the 19th and 20th centuries.
- Archives of Sexuality and Gender – Illuminates the experiences not just of the LGBTQ community as a whole, but of individuals of different races and ethnicities.
- Black Freedom Struggle in the United States: Challenges and Triumphs in the Pursuit of Equality – Primary source documents related to critical people and events in African American history.
- Caribbean colonial statistics from the British Empire, 1824-1950 – Brief introduction to each colony, population returns, land grants, imports and exports, prison records and living conditions.
- Colonial Africa in official statistics, 1821-1953 : African blue books, 1821-1953. – Digitised copies of some standardised annual Blue Books submitted by British colonial administrators in Africa to the British Colonial Office.
- Empire Online – Explore colonial history, politics, culture and society, charting stories of the rise and fall of empires, through to decolonisation in the second half of the twentieth century. Some content authored by individuals from colonised populations, both male and female.
- International bibliography of the social sciences – cross-disciplinary coverage across the social sciences with a focus on anthropology and sociology.
- Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research – Includes several EDI data projects and resources.
- ProQuest historical newspapers. Chicago defender and ProQuest historical newspapers. Pittsburgh courier – Provide first-hand accounts and coverage of politics, society and events from an African-American perspective.
The above newspapers allow you to read how events were reported at the time. You can take this further by searching across the archives of newspapers such as those found on the Gale Primary Sources platform. Gale allows you to follow the historical development of a topic over the years. It also enables you to see how events were reported in newspapers with different political and social perspectives.
A visualization topic tile from The Times Digital Archive
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