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African American Studies

African American Studies @ Collins Library

This guide is intended to serve as a starting point for Puget Sound students interested in African American Studies. It provides general information as well as links to selected print and electronic resources.

  • Getting Started leads you to suggested background sources for an overview of your topic.
  • Primary Sources include examples of orginal, uninterpreted sources relevant to African American Studies.  
  • Books & Media highlight current books, e-books, Primo, and films.
  • Articles on African American Studies topics may be found in the highlighted databases. 
  • Writing & Citing provide information about style manuals and citation management tools.
  • Get Help With Your Research by scheduling an appointment with a librarian

New Titles in African American Studies

Power Hungry

The story of two unsung women, Cleo Silvers and Aylene Quin, who used the power using food as a political weapon during the civil rights movement. These two women's tales, separated by a handful of years, tell the same story: how food was used by women as a potent and necessary ideological tool in both the rural south and urban north to create lasting social and political change.

Black Trans Feminism

In Black Trans Feminism Marquis Bey offers a meditation on blackness and gender nonnormativity in ways that recalibrate traditional understandings of each.

You Don't Know Us Negroes and Other Essays

You Don't Know Us Negroes is the quintessential gathering of provocative essays from one of the world's most celebrated writers, Zora Neale Hurston. Spanning more than three decades and penned during the backdrop of the birth of the Harlem Renaissance, Montgomery bus boycott, desegregation of the military, and school integration, Hurston's writing articulates the beauty and authenticity of Black life as only she could.

"Beyond This Narrow Now"

In "Beyond This Narrow Now" Nahum Dimitri Chandler shows that the premises of W. E. B. Du Bois's thinking at the turn of the twentieth century stand as fundamental references for the whole itinerary of his thought.

Highlighted Resources

Black Thought and Culture

Black Thought and Culture is a landmark electronic 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 a great deal of 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.

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