A database is a collection of publications (if you want to know more about what databases are, please click here!).
The library databases that will help you find primary sources for this assignment contain articles, reports, photographs, laws, and other documents written in another time. As we'll discuss in the library workshop, a key skill for researchers using primary sources from another time is reading to infer the point of view of the author, which may include figuring out how everyday life, common assumptions about the world, and vocabulary were different in the author's time and place compared to our own.
In order to read these documents online, when prompted for a password please use the same username and password that you use to get into Blackboard and CUNY First.
You can find our "A-Z list" on the library's front page.
We have several databases that specialize in Black Studies.
Two especially good databases for finding primary sources for this assignment are: Black Thought and Culture and Black Freedom Struggle in the United States.
You can search Black Thought and Culture two ways:
(1) by typing in your keywords (remember to try different words and combinations) in the search box, or
(2) by browsing through subjects, people, historical events, publication title, and more. Note that you can scroll through these options with the arrows on the sides.
You can also search the Black Freedom Struggle database either by typing keywords into the search box or by browsing their subjects.
This one seems a little more challenging to find things by using the search box. If you browse, think about the time period most relevant to your topic, as their subjects are divided by years.
The Crisis was a magazine published by the NAACP. W.E.B. Du Bois was one of the publication's founders and its editor for over 20 years.
One of the library's databases has access to the years 1910-1922 here. To search within these years of The Crisis, use this advanced search page (be sure to select The Crisis as the journal you want.)
Google Books also has many scanned issues from more recent decades available to read - you can use the search box on this page to search within the issues, which appear on the Google page out of order.
For issues between 1997-2020, you can search in this library database called Ethnic Newswatch.