LibGuides: COM 414: Famous Speeches: African-American Speakers (VanderHaagen)

Biographical Resources

Biography (Gale In Context)
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Images, brief biographies, and links to magazine articles and websites about notable people.

Biography Resource Center provides biographical information on more than 185,000 people from throughout history, around the world, and across all disciplines and subject areas. Contains approximately 250,000 biographies and complete articles from nearly 250 periodicals. Search for people based on one or more personal facts such as birth and death years and places, nationality, ethnicity, occupation, or gender, or combine criteria.
Biography Reference Bank
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1981-
Access is limited to 4 simultaneous users.
Biographical information on approximately half a million people from antiquity to present, with some images.

Update frequency: annual
Contains biographical information on more than 400,000 people from antiquity to the present including more than 110,000 biographies. Biography Reference Bank brings together Biography Index, Current Biography Illustrated, the World Author Series, Nobel Prize Winners, World Artists, World Film Directors, American Reformers, and more into one database.
Credo General Reference
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Dictionaries, specialized encyclopedias, quotations, thesauri, and bilingual dictionaries.

BlackPast.org Online Encyclopedia--People
Biographical articles from the online encyclopedia at BlackPast.org.
The Black Renaissance in Washington, D.C: 1920-1930s--Biographies
Includes biographies of key figures and a timeline of events. Also includes a lengthy bibliography of other sources on the topic.
Biography.com
Includes over 7,000 biographies focusing on history & culture and other areas (such as crime, celebrity, nostalgia, etc.).
African-Americans: Biography, Autobiography and History

African-Americans: Biography, Autobiography and History
Part of the Yale Law School's Avalon Project; provides access to key documents by Martin Luther King, Jr., Frederick Douglass, WEB Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington, along with the Narrative of Sojourner Truth .

Some General Starting Points for Your Research

When was your speech first presented? One of the best places to get a sense of the time period is through newspapers. UNLV Libraries has a wide selection of newspaper databases going back centuries through today, including some specific African American historic newspapers.

You will be able to find a wide variety of rhetorical analyses & criticisms, along with a wide variety of resources about the speaker on the Library's QuickSearch (on the home page), in the library catalog, and in UNLV Libraries databases such as Communication & Mass Media Complete, Communication Studies, ComAbstracts, and JSTOR.

You may also want to try Google Scholar to expand your search to a wider variety of disciplines at once.

UNLV Libraries Newspaper & Journal Databases

UNLV Libraries Quick Search
Quick Search is an innovative Google-like research discovery engine that provides instant search access to a high proportion of the University Libraries’ resources, including journal and newspaper articles, dissertations and theses, electronic books, the locations of relevant print books, and much more. Users type keywords into a single search box to begin finding resources. Quick Search results can be filtered on the fly so researchers can zero in on the precise type of source, date range or subject they need.

African American Archives
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1792-1941
Primary source documents from the National Archives about the lives of African Americans in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
African American Historical Serials Collection, 1816-1922
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1816-1922
Newspapers and magazines published by African American churches, educational and service institutions.
African American Newspapers: The 19th Century
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1827-1902
African-American newspapers including The Colored American, all of Frederick Douglass’ newspapers, The Freedmen’s Record, and more.
Black Studies Center African American Newspapers
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1893-2005
African American newspapers from Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, New York, Norfolk VA., Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh.
America's Historical Newspapers
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1690-1923
Historical newspapers from every state in the U.S.
America: History & Life with Full Text
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Journal articles and books about the history of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present.

Scope: U.S. and Canada only
Languages: Abstracts of articles in 40 different languages
This index includes almost 400,000 bibliographic entries from over 2,000 journals published worldwide. Books, media reviews, and dissertations are also covered, and approximately 16,000 entries are added each year. The Get Text button links to online full text when available and offers access to UNLV print collections and document delivery options for books and articles not available online.
Communication & Mass Media Complete
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1900-
Journal articles in the fields of communication and mass media studies .

Update frequency: weekly
Communication & Mass Media Complete contains journal articles in the fields of communication and mass media studies. It merges CommSearch (formerly produced by the NCA, National Communication Association) and the Mass Media Articles Index (formerly produced by Pennsylvania State University). Communication & Mass Media Complete provides current issues and backfiles of in the fields of communication and mass media.
Communication and Media Studies
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1950-
Full text of 16 communications journals published by Sage.

This communication collection includes the full text of journals published by Sage and participating societies. It covers such subjects as journalism, public opinion, political communication, mass communication, interpersonal communication, cultural studies, intercultural communication, television & film studies, media studies, business communication, organizational & management communication, written communication, rhetoric, and literacy studies.
New York Times, 1851-2014
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1851-2014
Historical New York newspaper.
Chicago Defender, 1909-1975
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1909-1975
African American newspaper from Chicago, Illinois.
Chicago Tribune, 1849-1992
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1849-1992
Cover to cover digital reproductions of the Chicago Tribune with searchable full text.
Black Studies Center African American Newspapers
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1893-2005
African American newspapers from Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, New York, Norfolk VA., Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh.
Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers (Gale Primary Sources)
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1800-1900
American newspapers including the New York Herald, Lynchburg Virginian, The Hawaiian Gazette, Rocky Mountain News, Southern Illustrated News (VA), Daily Inter Ocean (Chicago), the Milwaukee Sentinel, and many more.
Hathi Trust
Access to nearly any public domain (pre-1924) book owned and scanned by a library. UNLV users can login with their ACE accounts and download entire "full view" books/documents.

Speech Websites & African American-Related Digital Collections

BlackPast.org Major Speeches
Say It Plain Say It Loud
Audio of African American speeches covering decades.
Voices of Democracy

African American Digital Initiatives
Digital archives containing text, images, and audio of a wide range of topics and from a wide range of sources; developed by Howard University.
African American Odyssey From the Library of Congress American Memory
Collection of rare books, government documents, manuscripts, maps, musical scores, plays, photos, films, and recordings documenting the African American experience.
African American Perspectives: Pamphlets from the Daniel A.P. Murray
Collection From the Library of Congress American Memory site; primary documents in African American history and culture. Includes pamphlets from authors such as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Ida B. Wells.
Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in America: A Visual Record
Of interest to anyone studying the experiences of Africans who were enslaved and transported to the Americas and the lives of their descendants in the slave societies of the New World.
American Slave Narratives
An Online Anthology This University of Virginia site provides access to oral histories provided by over 2300 former slaves to interviewers from the Works Progress Administration between 1936 and 1938.
Antislavery Collection, 1725-1911
Pamphlets and books pertaining to slavery and antislavery in New England, 1725-1911, including speeches, sermons, proceedings and other publications of organizations such as the American Anti-Slavery Society and the American Colonization Society, and a small number of pro-slavery tracts. From Special Collections & Archives of the University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.
Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition
Click the Scholars tab for links to the Document Library, which contains over 200 individual items, including speeches, letters, cartoons and graphics, interviews, and articles, and to an annotated list of online resource.
The HistoryMakers
5,000 interviews of both well-known and unsung African American HistoryMakers;stories of individual African Americans along with those of African American organizations, events, movements and periods of time that are significant to the African American community.
Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture
Provides access to trusted information, interpretation, and scholarship on the global black experience. Includes exhibitions, books, articles, photographs, prints, audio and video streams, and selected external links for research in the history and cultures of the peoples of Africa and the African Diaspora.
Social Activism Sound Recording Project: The Black Panther Party
Primary source media resources related to social activism and activist movements in California in the 1960s and 1970s. The site also provides a chronology of the Black Panther Party; developed by the University of California-Berkely Library in partnership with the Pacifica Foundation and other sources.
The Sonja Haynes Stone Center Library for Black Culture and History Guide to the Web
Searchable guide to over 600 websites; also browsable by 30 subject categories; it is from the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hilll and is managed by the center's library, part of the UNC library system.

Speaker Resources

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change
This is the official web site of the King Center in Atlanta, Georgia.
The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute
This site provides sermons, speeches, writings, and other documents by Martin Luther King, Jr. from the Stanford University project.
The King Collection: Morehouse College
Martin Luther King's alma mater Morehouse College in Atlanta, GA. has complied over 10,000 documents of handwritten notes, and unpublished sermons of King.
Martin Luther King, National Historic Site
Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birth home, church, and grave site comprise this National Historic Site and Preservation District.
Martin Luther King, Jr.: Who Speaks for the Negro?: This site contains a 1964 audio interview with King about the civil rights movement. There are also links to related primary material.

Frederick Douglass Papers - Library of Congress
The Frederick Douglass Papers at the Library of Congress presents the papers of the nineteenth-century African American abolitionist who escaped from slavery and then risked his freedom by becoming an outspoken antislavery lecturer, writer, and publisher.
PBS--Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass Resources on TeachingAmericanHistory.org
Frederick Douglass--Natl Park Service--Virtual Museum Exhibit
Sojourner Truth--Online Resources, Library of Congress
On the Trail of Sojourner Truth in Ulster County, New York
Sojourner Truth Institute
The Narrative of Sojourner Truth

W.E.B Du Bois Papers
Includes over 100,000 items of correspondence (more than three quarters of the papers), speeches, articles, newspaper columns, nonfiction books, research materials, etc.