October 22, 2021, by Sarah

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. To borrow this year’s Black History Month theme, the Library is ‘proud to be’ working towards 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: 

• Black Britons
• Black History Month
• Black power
• Racism 

Reading lists 

Last October, we purchased additional ebooks for titles on our Black History Month reading list, many of which were originally suggested by University of Nottingham staff and students. During Black History Month 2021, we’d welcome suggestions from staff and students for more titles which you think we should include. 

Some of your suggestions during this year’s Black History Month. 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 has just been updated to include our range of anti-racist books, suggested by Lucy Jones (Director of EDI for the Faculty of Arts) and her colleagues.  

Current awareness 

Using a mobile device to browse journals in the African-American/Black/Africana Studies category in Browzine

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. For example, you can browse and set up table of contents alerts for academic journals grouped by these subjects: 

• African-American/Black/Africana Studies
• African History
• Race and Ethnicity 

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. 
• 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. This allows you to follow the historical development of a topic over the years or see how events were reported in newspapers with different political and social perspectives. 

A visualization topic tile from The Times Digital Archive

Additional temporary resources 

Until 31 July 2023, Gale have given us extended access to Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive. The Archive consists of more than five million cross-searchable pages sourced from books, pamphlets, newspapers, periodicals, legal documents, court records, monographs, manuscripts, and maps from many different countries covering slave trade history, making it a valuable resource not only to researchers in African history, but also to the wider scope of African studies and African-American studies. 

• Slavery and Anti-Slavery: Part I: Debates over Slavery and Abolition 
• Slavery and Anti-Slavery, Part II: Slave Trade in the Atlantic World 
• Slavery and Anti-Slavery, Part III: The Institution of Slavery 
• Slavery and Anti-Slavery, Part IV: The Age of Emancipation 

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