Black Women Writers
Black Women Writers brings together more than 100,000 pages of literature and essays written by black women from Africa and the African Diaspora in electronic format for the first time. Facing sexism and racism at the same time, black women have needed to create their own identities and movements. This collection documents that effort from its earliest beginnings. With this landmark collection, Alexander Street makes accessing these resources easy at last, bringing scholars the voices of Africana women along with a tool for understanding the feminine perspective on the diversity and development of black people in the Diaspora.

African American Music
With jazz, blues, gospel, and other forms of African American musical expression represented, African American Music brings 50,000 tracks of music to the ears of library patrons and music scholars. It’s the first online resource to document the history of African American music in the form of an online music listening service. Users search using a powerful interface, identify the music and performances they want to hear, and click to listen through speakers or headphones.

African American Music Reference
From early slave spirituals to 20th century movements revolving around jazz, blues, and gospel, African American music has played an integral role in the development of music worldwide. African American Music Reference is the first comprehensive reference database to chronicle this rich history of African American music through 1970. It brings together for the first time the most important reference texts in this subject area, including discographies, and bibliographies—together with songsheets, images, and other print resources.

 Black Thought and Culture
More than 100,000 pages of monographs, speeches, essays articles, and interviews written by leaders within the black community from earliest times to 1975, illustrate the evolution of what it means to "be black." Includes the only full run of The Black Panther - the party's newspaper - and 2,500 pages of oral history interviews recorded by the former Black Panther, David Hilliard. Teachers, artists, politicians, religious leaders, athletes, veterans, entertainers, and others are represented. Find influences, read history in their words, discover a wealth of fugitive material.

 Black Short Fiction and Folklore
Black Short Fiction and Folklore brings together 8,000 works by writers from Africa and the African Diaspora, from the earliest times to the present. Drawn from early literary magazines, archives, and the personal collections of the authors, much of the collection is fugitive, ephemeral, or previously unpublished. It presents a variety of traditions ranging from early African oral traditions to today’s hip-hop and covers fables, parables, ballads, folktales, short stories, trickster tales, story cycles, and novellas. For scholars of history, sociology, anthropology, and literature.

Black Drama
The project brings together 1,200 plays, almost a quarter of which are previously unpublished. Nowhere else will researchers see these works! They have been carefully selected by well-known experts such as James V. Hatch, a board of scholars, and the writers themselves. The collection includes the complete works of more than 300 playwrights from North America, Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, Australia, and other locations. Starting with Victorian plays and working up to the present, this indispensable collection presents the writings together with biographies, playbills, images, production notes, performance information, and much more.

© Copyright 2006 Alexander Street Press. All rights reserved.     Last Updated: 07-Aug-2008