Readex to Launch African American Periodicals, 1825-1995
Fresh opportunities to explore crucial facets of the African American experience
African American Periodicals, 1825-1995, will be released by Readex, a division of NewsBank, in spring 2011. This newest Archive of Americana collection will feature more than 170 wide-ranging periodicals by and about African Americans. Published in 26 states, the publications will include academic and political journals, commercial magazines, institutional newsletters, organizations’ bulletins, annual reports and other genres. Soon to be fully searchable, these diverse periodicals—which have shaped, and in turn been shaped by, African American culture—will enable new discoveries on lives of African Americans as individuals, as an ethnic group and as Americans.
Like African American Newspapers, 1827-1998—its essential complement for American history and African American studies—this new collection is based upon James P. Danky’s monumental African-American Newspapers and Periodicals: A National Bibliography (Harvard, 1998). Drawn from matchless holdings of the Wisconsin Historical Society, African American Periodicals ranges over more than 150 years of American life, from slavery during the Antebellum Period to the struggles and triumphs of the modern era. Editorial views from the pages of these periodicals include opinions on the abolitionist movement; “Jim Crow” segregation; African American achievements in literature, music, sports and science; the integration of U.S. public schools in 1954; the beginning of the Freedom Movement; the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968; the Million Man March of 1995; and much more.
“The new Readex African American Periodicals collection makes widely available one of the most important archives for studying African American social, political, religious, military, literary, and business history,” says Phillip Luke Sinitiere, Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of History, Sam Houston State University. “This collection will allow students and scholars to understand black history not only in the American context, but investigate its transnational dimensions as well. Covering the nineteenth century to the present, the richness of this collection is unparalleled.”
Featuring news, commentary, advertisements, literature, drawings and photographs, the titles in this unique resource include African Repository, El Mulato, The Black Warrior, Pennsylvania Freedmen’s Bulletin, Colored Harvest, Voice of the Negro, Horizon: A Journal of the Color Line, The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races, Blue Helmet: A Magazine for the American Negro Soldier of All Wars, Harlem Pointer, Buckeye Briefs, Right On!, African World, Black Pride Newsletter, Black Panther, and more than 150 others from every region of the U.S.
“Because they were frequently denied a forum in white-owned publications, African-American writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found a market for their work in their neighborhood periodicals,” writes Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in his introduction to Danky’s bibliography. “It is as if we have rediscovered a hermetically sealed library of the African-American tradition after a century of neglect.”
African American Periodicals, 1825-1995, is the inaugural collection in Readex’s America’s Historical Periodicals series. For the broadest coverage available of African American history, culture and daily life, this new collection can be cross-searched with African American Newspapers and every other Archive of Americana series.
“Beyond offering opinions on issues and events of the day, the rare titles in African American Periodicals capture the voice of African American society and culture,” says Remmel Nunn, Readex Vice President of Product Development. “Forming the largest database of its kind, the publications brought together here—many short-lived and not collected by most libraries—brim with surprises and untold stories.”
These diverse periodicals—which have shaped, and in turn been shaped by, African American culture—will enable new discoveries about lives of African Americans as individuals, as an ethnic group and as Americans. Like African American Newspapers, 1827-1998, this new collection is based upon James P. Danky’s monumental African-American Newspapers and Periodicals: A National Bibliography.
Drawn from matchless holdings of the Wisconsin Historical Society, African American Periodicals ranges over more than 150 years of American life, from slavery during the Antebellum Period to the struggles and triumphs of the modern era. Beyond offering opinions on issues and events of the day, the rare titles in African American Periodicals capture the voices of African American social, political, religious, literary and business history. The publications brought together here—many short-lived and not collected by most libraries—brim with surprises and untold stories.
