UWM Libraries Research and Course Guides: African and African Diaspora Studies: Primary Sources

Data and Statistics

Social Explorer
Interactive tool that combines modern and historical US census and demographic data with an intuitive map interface, 1790 to present.

UWM Archives

The UWM Archives, located on the second floor of the UWM Libraries, contains a number of collections that may be of use to African and African Diaspora Studies. The following two course guides serve as a good starting point:

March on Milwaukee: Civil Rights History Project
This digital collection presents primary sources from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries and the Wisconsin Historical Society that provide a window onto Milwaukee's civil rights history.

African-American Alumni Oral History Project

Digital Collections

Umbra Search
Umbra Search African American History brings together more than 400,000 digitized materials from over 1,000 libraries and archives across the country.
The Black Past: An Online Reference Guide to African American History
3,000 page reference center is dedicated to providing information to the general public on African American history in the United States and on the history of the more than one billion people of African ancestry around the world. It includes an online encyclopedia of hundreds of famous and lesser known figures in African American history, Global African history and specifically the history of African Americans in the West.
NMAAHC Open Access
The digital collections of the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). Explore and reuse thousands of digital items from the NMAAHC's collections.
African Activist Archive
The African Activist Archive is preserving and making available online the records of activism in the United States to support the struggles of African peoples against colonialism, apartheid, and social injustice from the 1950s through the 1990s.
Say it Plain, Say it Loud: A Century of Great African American Speeches
Public speech making has played a powerful role in the long struggle by African Americans for equal rights. This collection, for the ear and the eye, highlights speeches by an eclectic mix of black leaders. Their impassioned, eloquent words continue to affect the ideas of a nation and the direction of history.

UWM Special Collections

Special Collections at the UWM Libraries is the premier public collection of rare books and special printed materials in southeastern Wisconsin. For more information about the materials below or other sources email libspecial@uwm.edu or call (414) 229-4345.

Lectures on liberation by Angela Davis.
Attractive pamphlet reproducing Davis's initial lectures for "Recurring Philosophical Themes in Black Literature," which she delivered during her first course at UCLA (Fall, 1969).
Black Panther by Black Panther Party, Ministry of Information
Newsletter of the San Francisco Black Panther Party.
Twelve years a slave : narrative of Solomon Northup
Twelve years a slave : narrative of Solomon Northup, a citizen of New-York, kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and rescued in 1853, from a cotton plantation near the Red River in Louisiana.
Thirty years a slave. From bondage to freedom. The institution of slavery as seen on the plantation and in the home of the planter
Autobiography of Louis Hughes.

Special Collections also has artist's books by Black artists like Amos Paul Kennedy Jr., Evelyn Terry, and Clarissa Sligh, and more whose work speaks to issues of Blackness and the diaspora

American Geographical Society Library

The American Geographical Society Library (AGSL) at UW-Milwaukee is a part of the UWM Libraries containing 1.5 million items, ranging from maps, atlases, books, photographs, and digital spatial data. The collection contains anything related to geography, history, and other subjects.For

For geographic data contact gisdata@uwm.edu

For help finding maps, documents, and other primary sources contact agsl@uwm.edu