Related Research Guides
On the Web
- African American Mosaic: A Library of Congress Resource Guide for the Study of Black History & CultureCovering the nearly 500 years of the black experience in the Western hemisphere, the Mosaic surveys the full range size, and variety of the Library's collections, including books, periodicals, prints, photographs, music, film, and recorded sound.
- American Memory: African American HistorySeveral collections on African American History from the Library of Congress, include pamphlets, exhibitions and interviews.
- Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow SouthA selection of 410 recorded oral history interviews from Duke University chronicling African-American life during the age of legal segregation in the American South, from the 1890s to the 1950s.
- Black History CollectionFold 3 presents military records of African Americans in the USA from pre Civil War to the Vietnam War.
Popular Media
- Ebony MagazineMonthly entertainment and news magazine
- Jet MagazineWeekly news magazine
- The Black Agenda ReportSelf described journal of Black political thought and action is a good resource for alternative outside of mainstream media views.
- Black Public MediaFounded in 1979, the National Black Programming Consortium (NBPC) develops, produces and funds media content about the Black experience for public media outlets, including television, digital radio and online.
- The RootAfrican American perspective on current events from the publishers of Slate.
Criteria For Evaluating Websites
While evaluating the information you find in books and periodicals is important, evaluating web-based materials is absolutely crucial. Unlike books and journal and magazine articles, there is no editing process online, many websites that appear legitimate lack depth, authority, and accuracy. The following five evaluating criteria should be met before you include content from a website in your assignment. You must apply each criteria to a website to determine its worth. When deciding whether you should include a website as a resource for your paper, you must not only determine if a website is trustworthy and legitimate, but also if it is relevant to your topic and supports your thesis.
- Purpose - the reason or reasons the source was written
- Authority - the qualifications of the writer or creator
- Currency - the time when the source was written
- Accuracy - the absence of errors and use of reliable information
- Content - the information provided by the source
(These criteria based on checklist in the book The College Student's Research Companion by Arlene Quaratiello and Jane Devine)