Library Research Guides: AFR 303: Understanding American Slavery through Film: Home

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This guide provides some useful starting places and strategies for doing research and creating video essays for this course. We're happy to help!

Consult with Karen Storz, your research librarian, on any aspect of your research, from developing a research question to finding, evaluating, and citing sources. Email Karen or make an appointment!
Consult with Allegra Dufresne, your instructional technologist, on any aspect of video production and editing. Email Allegra.

Because SuperSearch contains so much content from so many different kinds of sources, the results can sometimes be overwhelming and hard to focus. At the same time, SuperSearch is also not comprehensive and can miss key sources. To search with more focus, precision, and depth, be sure to try the databases recommended on this guide, as well as the library catalog for books and films.

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Find Background & Context

Oxford African American Studies Center This link opens in a new window
Search across thousands of articles from a variety of scholarly encyclopedias in this database. Also includes primary source documents, maps, and images.

The A to Z of African American Cinema by S. Torriano Berry; Venise T. Berry
Publication Date: 2009
Includes hundreds of cross-referenced entries on actors, movies, producers, organizations, awards, film credits, and terminology.
A Dictionary of Film Studies by Annette Kuhn; Guy Westwell
Publication Date: 2020
Covers terms, concepts, debates, and movements in film theory and criticism; national, international, and transnational cinemas; film history, movements, and genres; film industry organizations and practices; and key technical terms and concepts.
The Routledge Companion to Film History by William Guynn (Editor)
Publication Date: 2010
Thematic essays (including "Making History through Media" and "Inscribing the Historical: Film Texts in Context") are followed by a critical dictionary of concepts, debates in film studies, technical terms, major periods and movements, and the film industry.
Enslaved Women in America: An Encyclopedia by Deleso A. Alford (Editor); Daina Ramey Berry (Editor)
Publication Date: 2012
Through essays, photos, and primary source documents, enslaved women are depicted as central, rather than marginal, figures in history. Contains 100 entries written by a range of experts and covering all aspects of daily life.

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Find Scholarly Analysis

Although SuperSearch can be a great starting place, it can be challenging to find the most relevant material in a flood of results. More specialized databases, like the ones below, can provide a "less is more" experience, by helping to focus your search on articles and books in your area of interest, with an emphasis on scholarly sources. Some individual databases will also turn up results that SuperSearch misses. It always helps to search a few databases for the best coverage. Even when there's considerable overlap in content, the different search capabilities and features of each database can help you find different sources.

Cinema & Media Studies Databases

FIAF International Index to Film Periodicals Database This link opens in a new window
Find articles on film and TV from 300 academic and popular film journals. Includes Black Camera, an international journal of Black film studies
Film & Television Literature Index with Full Text This link opens in a new window
Find articles and book chapters on all aspects of film and television history and theory.
MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new window
Find scholarly articles, books, and book chapters on film and literature.

History & Multidisciplinary Databases

America: History & Life with Full Text This link opens in a new window
Use this database to find scholarly articles on U.S. and Canadian history and culture.
Ethnic NewsWatch This link opens in a new window
Find articles from scholarly journals, newspapers, and magazines from ethnic, minority, and native presses, including key journals in Africana Studies.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
Find scholarly articles and books in the humanities, social sciences, & natural sciences, but be aware that the most recent 3-5 years of many journals are not included.
Project MUSE This link opens in a new window
Find scholarly journal articles and books in the humanities and social sciences. Often has the most recent issues of journals that JSTOR is missing.

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Find Film Reviews & News

SuperSearch
To find news & reviews from the time a film was released and learn about its reception, search for your film by title and limit the publication dates to the years immediately surrounding its release. For more focused searching, try the same strategies in the databases below.
more...less...
If your film has a name that could bring up many unrelated results, add the director's last name to your search.

Global Newsstream This link opens in a new window
Find news & reviews from major U.S. and international news sources from the 1980s on. Use the "Document type" filter to limit to Review.
Historical Newspapers (ProQuest) This link opens in a new window
Search for historical reviews and news in a variety of major American and British newspapers. The database includes the following titles, which can also be searched individually: Boston Globe, 1872-1989; Chicago Defender, 1909-1975; Chicago Tribune, 1849-1997; Guardian and the Observer (UK), 1791-2003; Los Angeles Times, 1881-1996; New York Amsterdam News, 1922-1993; New York Times, 1851-2016; and Washington Post, 1877-2003
African American Newspapers, 1827-1998 This link opens in a new window
Search 270 newspapers published in 36 states
African American Periodicals, 1825-1995 This link opens in a new window
Full text of more than 170 wide-ranging publications by and about African Americans, including academic journals, magazines, newsletters, reports, and other genres.
Dates: 1825-1997 CE

The film databases FIAF International Index to Film Periodicals and Film & Television Literature Index with Full Text also both have film reviews from film magazines in addition to scholarly criticism. Use the filtering options to choose the document type review or film review.

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Search the Library Catalog

Catalog Search Tips

Start with a keyword search. Once you find a book that's relevant to your topic, click on the title and look for the Subjects listed for that book to help you find "more like this" and explore related aspects of a broader topic.

Example: Keyword search: hollywood AND "african americans"

Subject terms for the books that come up in this keyword search lead you to many more books on aspects of the topic, for example:

African Americans in Motion Pictures

African Americans in the motion picture industry

Race in Motion Pictures

Motion pictures -- Social aspects -- United States

Slavery in Motion Pictures

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Find Primary Sources

For historical newspapers, see under Find Film Reviews and News above.

African American Film Materials
This digital collection provides a sample of photographs and pressbooks from films featuring African American actors, spanning nearly 40 years. From SMU's DeGolyer Library.
Media History Digital Library
Digitized collections of classic media periodicals (including fan magazines and industry publications) and film publicity materials. Browse the collections or use the Lantern search platform to search some or all of the collections.
CineFiles
Scanned images of reviews, press kits, film festival and repertory theater program notes, newspaper articles, and other ephemera, from 1900-present (UC Berkeley)

Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice, 1490-2007 This link opens in a new window
Documents and collections from libraries and archives across the Atlantic world, with close attention given to the varieties of slavery, the legacy of slavery, the social-justice perspective and the continued existence of slavery today. Wellesley login required

North American Slave Narratives
Autobiographies of former enslaved people, from the Documenting the American South collection (UNC-Chapel Hill)
Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 to 1938
This digitized collection contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former enslaved people. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) of the Works Progress Administration.
Digital Library on American Slavery
Collections include petitions, runaway advertisements, deeds, and other materials that provide personal information and data about enslaved people, slaveholders, and free people of color.
Slave Voyages
Searchable and sortable databases of the Trans-Atlantic and Intra-American slave trades as well as the names of African people taken into captivity. Users can sort data on point of departure, gender, slave ship captain, and many many more variables. Site includes image galleries that contextualize data with historical maps, ship manifests, drawings, and more.

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AFR 303: Understanding American Slavery through Film

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Your Research Librarian

Your Instructional Technologist

Welcome!

Find Background & Context

Find Scholarly Analysis

Find Film Reviews & News

Search the Library Catalog

Catalog Search Tips

Find Primary Sources