Library Research Guides: HIST A394 Wenches Witches Welfare Queens: Sources for Historical Research

African American Newspapers
- This link opens in a new window
This collection of African American newspapers contains a wealth of information about cultural life and history, with first-hand reports of major events and issues of the day. Includes complete text of articles published in the United States.
African American Newspapers (1827-1998)
- This link opens in a new window
Provides searchable, online access to more than 350 U.S. newspapers chronicling a century and a half of the African-American experience. Includes newspapers from more than 35 states covering life in the Antebellum South, growth of the Black church, the Jim Crow Era, the Great Migration, Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights movement, political and economic empowerment, and more.
Some titles lasted a short time, or few extant issues have been found, so that the database may contain as little as a single issue from a source. Other newspapers had longer lives, and long runs of issues are available.
African American Newspapers, Series 1, 1827-1998:
Beginning with Freedom’s Journal (NY)—the first African American newspaper published in the United States—the titles in this resource include The Colored Citizen (KS), Arkansas State Press, Rights of All (NY), Wisconsin Afro-American, New York
Age, L’Union (LA), Northern Star and Freeman’s Advocate (NY), Richmond Planet, Cleveland Gazette, and The Appeal (MN).
African American Newspapers, Series 2, 1835-1956:
Key titles include Frederick Douglass’s New National Era (Washington, DC), Washington Tribune (Washington, DC), Chicago Bee (Chicago, IL), The Louisianian (New Orleans, LA), The Pine and Palm (Boston, MA), National Anti-Slavery Standard (New York, NY), New York Age (New York, NY), Harlem Liberator (New York, NY), North Carolina Republican and Civil Rights Advocate (Weldon, NC), and Southern News (Richmond, VA).
African American Periodicals, 1825-1995
- This link opens in a new window
African American Periodicals, 1825-1995, features more than 170 periodicals by and about African Americans. Published in 26 states, the publications include academic and political journals, commercial magazines, institutional newsletters, organizations' bulletins, annual reports and other genres.
America's Historical Newspapers
- This link opens in a new window
Digital archive of American newspapers published between 1690 and 1922, representing every state in the U.S.
Based on a collection of rare newspapers held by the American Antiquarian Society, with contributions from the Boston Athenaeum, the Connecticut Historical Society, the Connecticut State Library, the Library Company of Philadelphia; the Library of Congress, the libraries of universities such as Brown and Harvard, and private collections. Fully text-searchable; browseable by newspaper title.

Collections included: African American Newspapers, Series 1 ; African American Newspapers, Series 2 ; Caribbean Newspapers ; Ethnic American Newspapers from the Balch Collection ; Hispanic American Newspapers ; Early American Newspapers, Series 1-7, 11-12, and 17-19.
American Periodicals Series Online
- This link opens in a new window
Digital archive of the pages of American magazines and journals published from colonial days to the dawn of the 20th century.
Based on a very comprehensive microfilm collection of American magazines and journals, 1740-1940. Contains searchable full text of all extant issues of over 1000 titles, ranging from children's magazines to professional journals. Can be cross-searched with historical newspaper archives.
Black Life in America
- This link opens in a new window
Digital archive of news media covering the African American experience from the early 18th century to the present day. Includes access to series 1 and 2.
NewspaperARCHIVE
- This link opens in a new window
Digital access to more than 1000 historical newspapers from communities within Indiana.
Includes digitized copies and content of the follwing local Indiana Newspapers: Bloomington Evening World (1907-1923), Indiana Daily Student (1867-1923), Madison Herald, Indianapolis State Sentinel, Indianapolis Star, Fort Wayne Journal Gazette,Terre Haute Star and Indianapolis Sun.
Newspapers.com World Collection
- This link opens in a new window
Contains full runs and portions of runs of well-known, regional and state titles to small local newspapers in the United States and other countries.
Includes access to newspapers from the United States, Canada, United Kingdom & Ireland, Australia, and Panama.
Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers
- This link opens in a new window
A digital archive of American historical newspapers from the 19th century, including over 1.5 million full-text pages, many complete with images.
ProQuest Historical Newspapers
- This link opens in a new window
Digital archive of historical newspapers. Each issue of each title includes the complete paper, cover-to-cover, with full-page and article images.
Readers' Guide Retrospective: 1890-1982 (H.W. Wilson)
- This link opens in a new window
Provides indexing of general-interest periodicals published in the United States and reflects the history of 20th century America.
Provides indexing of general-interest periodicals published in the United States and reflects the history of 20th century America.
Time Magazine Archive
- This link opens in a new window
Full text issues of Time Magazine, 1923-2000.
Intended to be read in under an hour, each issue of Time contains reports of national and international current events, politics, sports, and entertainment. First published in 1923, Time attempts to collect the relevant news for a given week.
US Newsstream
- This link opens in a new window
Provides access to current and archived news content. Includes newspapers, newswires, blogs, and news sites in active full-text format.
Also includes a collections of local and regional newspapers, cross-searchable on the ProQuest platform.

African American Communities
- This link opens in a new window
This resource presents multiple aspects of the African American community through pamphlets, newspapers and periodicals, correspondence, official records, reports and in-depth oral histories, revealing the prevalent challenges of racism, discrimination and integration, and a unique African American culture and identity.
Focuses predominantly on Atlanta, Chicago, St. Louis, New York, and towns and cities in North Carolina.
African American Police League Records (1961-1988)
- This link opens in a new window
Digital access to annual and general reports, court files, fundraising items, historical information, minutes, correspondence, clippings, topical files, newsletters, police brutality files, and publications and flyers relative to the ongoing work of the African American Police League (AAPL) and its education and action arm, the League to Improve the Community (LIC).
The collection also contains items on numerous law enforcement and civil rights organizations across the country; materials on the suspension of AAPL executive director Renault Robinson from the Chicago Police Department and related lawsuits; and materials pertaining to the National Black Police Association (NBPA).
Black Authors, Imprints from the Library Company of Philadelphia (1556-1922)
- This link opens in a new window
Contains more than 550 works by black authors from the Americas, Europe and Africa, expertly compiled by the curators of Afro-Americana Imprints collection. Genres include personal narratives, autobiographies, histories, expedition reports, military reports, novels, essays, poems, and musical compositions.
Created from the holdings of the Library Company of Philadelphia, Black Authors, 1556-1922. Major subject areas addressed in Black Authors include Literature, Ethnic History, Colonialism, Gender Studies, Slavery, and Diaspora Studies. Authors included are Leo Africanus, Ignatius Sancho, Benjamin Banneker, Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, David Ruggles, William Wells Brown, Solomon Northrup, Harriet Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, Alexander Crummell, Martin Delany, Edward Wilmot Blyden, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Josiah Henson, Frederick Douglass, Bethany Veney, Paul Laurence Dunbar, W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles W. Chestnutt, Booker T. Washington, James Weldon Johnson, and hundreds of others.
Black Economic Empowerment: the National Negro Business League
- This link opens in a new window
Primary source documents from the National Negro Business League, a business organization founded in 1900 by Booker T. Washington. The League included small African American business owners, doctors, farmers, craftsmen, and other professionals. Its goal was to allow business to put economic development at the forefront of getting African-American equality in America.
Booker T. Washington believed that solutions to the problem of racial discrimination were primarily economic, and that bringing African Americans into the middle class was the key. He established the League "to promote the commercial and financial development of the Negro," and headed it until his death. The League promoted the commercial endeavors and economic advancement of African Americans mainly, but not solely in the South, via a network of state and local Negro Business Leagues, and affiliated professional and trade organizations.
Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century
- This link opens in a new window
The Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century consists of four modules: two modules of Federal Government Records, and two modules of Organizational Records and Personal Papers, offering documentation and a variety of perspectives on the 20th-century fight for freedom.
Major collections include Civil Rights records from the Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush presidencies; the Martin Luther King FBI File and FBI Files on locations of major civil rights demonstrations like Montgomery and Selma, Alabama or St. Augustine, Florida; and the records of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (NACWC), Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).
These collections contain documentation from the founding of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs in the last decade of the 19th century to the riots that followed the verdict in the Rodney King police brutality case in the last decade of the 20th century. In the intervening 100 years, researchers will encounter documentation on subjects like the Great Migration, the East St. Louis Riot of 1917, the activities of members of the Federal Council on Negro Affairs during the New Deal, the March on Washington Movement during World War II, the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the 1963 March on Washington, the protests in Selma, Alabama, that inspired the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, and the National Black Political Convention in 1972.
Black Liberation Army and the Program of Armed Struggle
- This link opens in a new window
Primary source documents related to the Black Liberation Army (BLA), an underground, black nationalist-Marxist organization that operated from 1970 to 1981.
The BLA arose in reaction to the political, social, and economic oppression of African American people. Composed largely of former Black Panthers, the organization’s program was one of "armed struggle" and its stated goal was to "take up arms for the liberation and self-determination of Black people in the United States."
Black Short Fiction and Folklore
- This link opens in a new window
Black Short Fiction and Folklore brings together 82,000 pages and more than 11,000 works of short fiction produced by writers from Africa and the African Diaspora from the earliest times to the present. The materials have been compiled from early literary magazines, archives, and the personal collections of the authors. Some 30 percent of the collection is fugitive or ephemeral, or has never been published before.
In addition to fiction, the database includes complete runs of selected literary magazines, such as Kyk-Over-Al and The Beacon.
Black Thought and Culture
- This link opens in a new window
Collection of approximately 100,000 pages of non-fiction writings by major American black leaders—teachers, artists, politicians, religious leaders, athletes, war veterans, entertainers, and other figures—covering 250 years of history. In addition to the most familiar works, Black Thought and Culture presents previously inaccessible material, including letters, speeches, prefatory essays, political leaflets, interviews, periodicals, and trial transcripts. The ideas of over 1,000 authors present an evolving and complex view of what it is to be black in America.
The collection includes the words of Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, Alain Locke, Paul Robeson, Booker T. Washington, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, Sammy Davis, Jr., Ida B. Wells, Nikki Giovanni, Mary McLeod Bethune, Carl Rowan, Roy Wilkens, James Weldon Johnson, Audre Lorde, Thurgood Marshall, A. Philip Randolph, Constance Baker Motley, Walter F. White, Amiri Baraka, Ralph Ellison, Martin Luther King, Jr., Angela Davis, Jesse Jackson, Bobby Seale, Gwendolyn Brooks, Huey P. Newton, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Randall Kennedy, Cornel West, Nelson George, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Bayard Rustin, and hundreds of other notable people.
Black Women Writers
- This link opens in a new window
Black Women Writers presents 100,000 pages of literature and essays on feminist issues, written by authors from Africa and the African diaspora. Facing both sexism and racism, Black women needed to create their own identities and movements. The collection documents that effort, presenting the woman’s perspective on the diversity and development of Black people generally, and in particular the works document the evolution of Black feminism.
Black Women Writers includes fiction, poetry, and essays. Among the authors are Nikki Giovanni, Maryse Condé, Barbara Ransby, Angela Davis, Rhoda Reddock, Margaret Walker, Ama Ata Aidoo, Rosa Guy, Sonia Sanchez, Olive Senior, and Barbara Ransby. Works are in their original languages, although an English translation executed by the original author may be available. Works are reproduced in their entirety and when possible, an image of the original page accompanies the text. The dates of the material range from the 1700s to contemporary pieces.
Fannie Lou Hamer: Papers of a Civil Rights Activist, Political Activist, and Woman
- This link opens in a new window
Primary source documents related to voting rights activist and civil rights leader, Fannie Lou Hamer.
Fannie Lou Hamer was instrumental in organizing Mississippi Freedom Summer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and later became the Vice-Chair of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. The collection includes correspondence, financial records, programs, photographs, newspaper articles, invitations, and other printed items. The papers are arranged in the following series: Personal, Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, Freedom Farms Corporation, Delta Ministry, Mississippians United to Elect Negro Candidates, Delta Opportunities Corporation, and Collected Materials.
Federal Surveillance of African Americans, 1920-1984
- This link opens in a new window
Contains reproductions of hundreds of FBI files documenting the federal scrutiny, harassment, and prosecution to which Black Americans of all political persuasions were subjected.
Many of the documents originated with Black "confidential special informants" enlisted by the FBI to infiltrate a variety of organizations. In addition to infiltration, the FBI contributed to the infringement of First Amendment freedoms by making its agents a constant visible presence at radical rallies and meetings. This archive is based on original microfilm.

Contents: COINTELPRO: Black Nationalist "Hate" Groups -- FBI file on A. Philip Randolph -- FBI File on Adam Clayton Powell -- FBI file on the Atlanta child murders (ATKID) -- FBI file on the Black Panther Party, North Carolina -- FBI file on the Committee for Public Justice -- FBI file on Elijah Muhammed -- FBI file on the Highlander Folk School -- FBI file on the Ku Klux Klan murder of Viola Liuzzo -- FBI file on Malcolm X -- FBI file : MIBURN (Mississippi Burning) -- FBI file on the Moorish Science Temple of America -- FBI File on the Murder of Lemuel Penn -- FBI file on Muslim Mosque, Inc. -- FBI file on the NAACP -- FBI file on the National Negro Congress -- FBI file on the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) -- FBI file on Paul Robeson -- FBI file on the Reverend Jesse Jackson -- FBI file on Roy Wilkins -- FBI file on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee -- FBI file on Thurgood Marshall -- FBI file on W. E. B. Du Bois -- FBI investigation file on Communist infiltration of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference -- FBI surveillance file: Malcolm X -- FBI investigation file on Marcus Garvey. (OCLC)
HistoryMakers Digital Archive
- This link opens in a new window
African American oral history video collection.
Includes 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.
NAACP Papers
- This link opens in a new window
Digital access to the NAACP archive. Includes internal memos, legal briefings, and direct action summaries from national, legal, and branch offices throughout the country. The NAACP Papers document the realities of segregation in the early 20th century to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and beyond.
Includes access to the following modules:

NAACP Papers: Board of Directors, Annual Conferences, Major Speeches, and National Staff Files

NAACP Papers: Branch Department, Branch Files, and Youth Department Files

NAACP Papers: Special Subjects

NAACP Papers: The NAACP's Major Campaigns--Education, Voting, Housing, Employment, Armed Forces

NAACP Papers: The NAACP's Major Campaigns--Legal Department Files

NAACP Papers: The NAACP's Major Campaigns--Scottsboro, Anti-Lynching, Criminal Justice, Peonage, Labor, and Segregation and Discrimination
Sixties: Primary Sources and Personal Narratives 1960-1974
- This link opens in a new window
Primary resources related to the history, culture, and politics of the American 1960s.
Includes diaries, letters, autobiographies and other memoirs, written and oral histories, manifestos, government documents, memorabilia, and scholarly commentary covering the history, culture, and politics of the 1960s. Themes include: arts, music, and leisure ; civil rights ; counter-culture ; law and government ; mass media ; new left and emerging neo-conservative movement ; student activism ; Vietnam War ; women's movement.
Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000
- This link opens in a new window
This database brings together books, images, documents, scholarly essays, commentaries, and bibliographies, documenting the multiplicity of women's activism in public life.
Includes 130 document projects that interpret and present documents, a dictionary of social movements and organizations, and a chronology of U.S. Women's History. Also includes access to teaching tools with lesson ideas and document-based questions related to the website's document projects. Includes access to all new content updates through 2023.

Freely-available collections of primary sources:

Library of Congress Digital Collections
Extensive digital access to Library of Congress materials.
Umbra Search
Umbra Search provides access to 730,561 items from more than 1,000 U.S. archives, libraries, and museums.
HathiTrust Digital Library
Shared digital library created and designed by partnership of major research libraries.
Library of Congress Maps
David Rumsey Map Collection
The David Rumsey Map Collection was started over 30 years ago and contains more than 150,000 maps. The collection focuses on rare 16th through 21st century maps of North and South America, as well as maps of the World, Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania. The collection includes atlases, wall maps, globes, school geographies, pocket maps, books of exploration, maritime charts, and a variety of cartographic materials including pocket, wall, children's, and manuscript maps. Items range in date from about 1550 to the present.

IU Bloomington is home to many collections of primary sources. The types of material include personal papers, institutional records, physical artifacts, audio and visual materials, and archaeological collections. See the slides below for some of the places that hold these materials or look at this longer list. Note that many of the books, magazines, etc. in IUCAT also contain primary sources.

Academic Search (EBSCO)
- This link opens in a new window
Provides full-text coverage of magazine, newspaper, and scholarly journal articles for most academic disciplines.
This multi-disciplinary database provides full-text for more than 4,500 journals, including full text for more than 3,700 peer-reviewed titles. PDF backfiles to 1975 or further are available for well over one hundred journals, and searchable cited references are provided for more than 1,000 titles.
America: History & Life
- This link opens in a new window
Bibliographic database focusing on the history and life of the United States and Canada, indexing more than 1,800 journals published, dissertations and reviews.
In addition to the principle English language sources in the field, it includes some (about 10%) in other languages, as well as some state and local history journals. All aspects of historical inquiry are represented: diplomatic, ecclesiastical, agricultural, cultural, economic, political, military and others. The index also provides citations to book and media reviews from about 100 journals and references to abstracts of dissertations in the field. All abstracts are in English.
GenderWatch
- This link opens in a new window
Full text database with a focus on how gender impacts a variety of subject areas.
GenderWatch is a full text database of nearly 400 periodicals and other publications that focus on how gender impacts a variety of subject areas. Publications include academic and scholarly journals, magazines, newspapers, newsletters, regional publications, books, booklets and pamphlets, conference proceedings, and government, and special reports.
Google Scholar
- This link opens in a new window
Special version of Google's index to scholarly content on the web. Connects to full-text resources available to IU users.
oogle Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.

Connecting to Google Scholar from off-campus? The IUB Libraries already provide access to many of the journal articles indexed in Google Scholar. Look for IU-Link, which will lead you to information about full-text content you can access via the Libraries' subscriptions.
JSTOR
- This link opens in a new window
Provides searchable full-text of historical runs of important scholarly journals in the humanities, arts, sciences, ecology, and business.
JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization established with the assistance of The Mellon Foundation, provides complete runs of hundreds of important journal titles in more than 30 arts, humanities, and social science disciplines. These scholarly journals can be browsed online and searched, and the page images can be printed for those available in full-text. The IUB Libraries subscribe to current content for only some titles available through JSTOR.

All journals in JSTOR start with the first volume. Many include content up to a "moving wall" of 3-5 years ago, although some journals have a fixed ending date for their content in JSTOR. Please check individual journals for exact dates of coverage.

For information about access to this resource for IU alumni, contact the Indiana University Alumni Association.
OneSearch@IU
- This link opens in a new window
Project Muse
- This link opens in a new window
Provides full text access and indexing for e-journals and e-books from a variety of scholarly publishers. Covers the fields of literature and criticism, history, the visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, gender studies, economics, and many others.

Documenting White Supremacy and its Opponents in the 1920s
- This link opens in a new window
Digital access to papers promoting as well as those opposing white nationalism. Includes local, regional, and national newspapers published by Klan organizations and by sympathetic publishers from across the U.S. It also includes key anti-Klan voices from newspapers published by ethnic, Catholic, and Jewish organizations.
During the 1920s, The Washington Post estimated the Klan’s membership as high as 9,000,000 and in the Midwest, a particular strong point of Klan support, one in three white protestant males in the state of Indiana were dues-paying members of the Klan. The collection is currently available only to funding institutions, but will eventually be made open access.

Contemporary news:

HIST A394 Wenches Witches Welfare Queens

Featured Databases

IU Libraries

HIST A394 Wenches Witches Welfare Queens

Social media

Additional resources

Featured Databases

IU Libraries