Research Guides: A Guide to African and African-American Studies Resources: Primary Sources for AFAS

Primary Sources for African American Studies

Sounding Spirit Digital Library: where sacred songbooks meet digital innovation
"This Sounding Spirit pilot digital library features songbooks and hymnals published across the southern United States from 1850 to 1925. Spanning holdings from four partner archives, the digital library’s twenty-two books include words-only hymnals, gospel songbooks, spiritual collections, and shape-note tunebooks, demonstrating the wide variety of form, content, and presentation in southern vernacular sacred songbooks. These songbooks employ competing notation systems and vary in musical style from dispersed harmony fuging tunes and plain tunes of the shape-note repertoire, to antiphonal gospel, to classically inspired arrangements of African American spirituals, to words-only hymns in Muskokee sung in unison, to tunes in oral tradition shared among southern black and white congregations."

Primary Sources in Washington University Archive

Find African and African American Studies primary source material in these special collections!

The Hampton Collection consists primarily of material collected in connection with the various documentary films made by the late Henry Hampton, a 1961 graduate of Washington University, and his production company Blackside, Inc.

William Miles Collection

Includes all PBS series and other television programs from 1979-1998. Topics include WWI, WWII, blacks in the military, black athletes, history of Harlem, and black cowboys. The Miles Collection consists of all the outtakes, rough cuts, stock footage, interviews, photos, music, and research created during production.

Black Film Promotional Material

The collection contains ca. 2,700 promotional items including photographic stills, programs, advertising materials, lobby cards, pressbooks, and posters, representing approximately 400 films, ranging in date from 1915 to 1980.

Publications (African and African-American Studies)

Publications from the 1990s regarding African and African-American Studies.

Urban League of St. Louis Records

The collection includes material from the 1920s to 1969 including files of Executive Directors, annual reports, and files on various programs of the League.