Resource Highlights
Provides biographical profiles of important and influential persons of African American and/or black heritage. Covers persons of various nationalities in a wide variety of fields.
Explores the implications of the Fugitive Slave Law and the impact of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe, after the U.S. revived the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850.
Credo Reference Online
Credo Reference Online provides background information for the foundation of research in all disciplines.
JSTOR
JSTOR provides full-text scholarly journal articles from many disciplines. Current access is now available to the Arts & Sciences Collections I, II, III, IV, and VII.
Opposing Viewpoints in Context
Opposing Viewpoints in Context is the premier online resource covering today's hottest social issues, with results shown by resource type.
Primary Sources
Read the words of Frederick Douglass (E-Book Format and Physical Books)
Primary Sources
The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass was an ex-slave and a great orator in early 19th century. His autobiography details his experiences as a slave and is considered the most famous such work, though many similar were written by his contemporaries. This work also influenced and fueled the abolitionist movement, in which Douglass was an important figure.
Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings
Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings presents the most significant, insightful, and elegant short works of Douglass's massive corpus.
My Bondage and My Freedom
The autobiographies My Bondage and My Freedom picks up where Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass left off. This volume recounts more gripping details of Douglass' transformation from illiterate slave to leading light of the abolitionist movement and offers an extended philosophical meditation on the meaning of slavery.
In the Words of Frederick Douglass
The editors have compiled nearly seven hundred quotations by Douglass that demonstrate the breadth and strength of his intellect as well as the eloquence with which he expressed his political and ethical principles.
Academic Search Complete
Academic Search Complete is a multidisciplinary database with scholarly journals. It can be a good starting point for research when topics are connected with many disciplines. Sign in using the A-Z Database: A section, where you'll find it listed.
History Databases
America: History and Life database covers the history and culture of the United States and Canada, from prehistory to the present.
Archives Unbound has primary source documents related to the Civil Rights Movement. Browse subject collections by following the browse link for "Your Collections." Subjects include the Freedom Riders, the FBI surveillance of SNCC, and the papers of Fanny Lou Hamer.
History Vault: Civil Rights and the Black Freedom Struggle and Women's Studies provides access to primary source documents, and History Vault provides access to all six collections of the NAACP papers.
Historical Newspapers from ProQuest include the following titles:
- The HistoryMakers Oral History DataThe HistoryMakers, established in 1999, is a non-profit institution whose purpose is to record, preserve and disseminate the content of video oral history interviews highlighting the accomplishments of individual African Americans and African-American-led groups and movements. Its aim is to provide a unique scholarly and educational resource for exploring African American history and culture. It is unique among collections of African American heritage because of its large and varied scope, with interviewees from across the United States, from a variety of fields, and with memories stretching from the 1890s to the present. Rather than focus on one particular part of a person’s life or a single subject, such as a career or participation in the civil rights movement, the interviews are life oral histories covering the person’s entire span of memories as well as his or her own family’s oral history.
Interviews were first conducted in 1993, and continue to the present. The archive continues to grow, so that queries saved today may have new results tomorrow based on new interviews added into the archive. Some people in the collection may be interviewed again, so that content for a particular person may grow as well. All of the appropriate metadata for the interviews is shown when you drill down to a particular person or a particular story.
The HistoryMakers retains high-quality versions of all interviews. See The HistoryMakers main website for more information.
Video Resources
American History in Video (through Alexander Street) provides the largest and richest collection of video available online for the study of American history, with 2,000 hours and more than 5,000 titles on completion.
Kanopy is a video streaming collection with over 26,000 films ranging from documentaries, indie, foreign, classic and blockbuster movies in several subjects and sub-subject areas. PBS, New Day Films, Kino Lorber, and California NewsReel are just a few of the content providers.
JoVE: Video Journal & Science Education is the world's first peer reviewed scientific video journal. All JoVE articles are indexed in subject-relevant indexing sites, including PubMed/MEDLINE, SciFinder and Scopus.
Slavery and Anti-Slavery Historical Documents
Types of Assignments
This part of the guide will be updated with assignments that some ENG 101 classes may be assigned. This page is specifically about researching Frederick Douglass.