Africana Studies
Researching the National Black Political Convention
Welcome to the Seton Hall Model Gary Convention research guide! This page was created to assist high school students and faculty advisors begin their research for their Model Gary Convention presentations. This is by no means an exhaustive list of resources, but hopefully these materials will be of some help.
Help with Research Topics
The following links may be helpful for browsing topics and gathering background information. Faculty advisors can help students refine their topics and develop keywords and search terminology that they can use to find books and articles.
- BlackPastBlackPast is dedicated to providing a global audience with reliable and accurate information on the history of African America and of people of African ancestry around the world. We aim to promote greater understanding through this knowledge to generate constructive change in our society.
- The New York Times 1619 Project"The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are."
The following videos were developed by Seton Hall Librarians to help students take a broad research topic and explore it to create a more focused topic. The concepts within these may be helpful for faculty advisors to review with students. Unfortunately, our database Credo is not licensed for use with non-SHU affiliates, but a Google search and even a Wikipedia search for background information can be really helpful for mindmapping and brainstorming research topics, in addition to the other websites listed in this box. Students should understand that Wikipedia is not a citable, final source but can be useful for thinking critically about a topic. Also, the reference lists at the end of Wikipedia articles often lead to useful sources.
Getting Books
- Directory of Open Access Books: DOAB This link opens in a new windowContains 29,000+ open access ebooks.
- Cornell Open eBooks This link opens in a new windowCornell Open is a global open access portal for both new and classic out-of-print titles from the distinguished catalog of Cornell University Press. Funded by the Humanities Open Book Program, a collaborative effort between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Cornell Open offers open access to key titles in the fields of anthropology, classics, political science, literary criticism and theory, German studies, and Slavic studies.
- Open Textbook Library This link opens in a new windowOpen textbooks are licensed by authors and publishers to be freely used and adapted. Download, edit and distribute them at no cost. The Open Textbook Library is supported by the Open Education Network.
- Project Gutenberg This link opens in a new windowProject Gutenberg offers over 49,000 free ebooks. Contains classic books from the start of this century and previous centuries, from authors like Shakespeare, Poe, Dante, as well as well-loved favorites like the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Tarzan and Mars books of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Alice's adventures in Wonderland as told by Lewis Carroll, and thousands of others.
To Access More Books:
Tip: You can also help students find books if their school's have libraries. You can also help them locate the website for their local public library and find information on how to obtain a library card if they do not already have one. Many local libraries instituted policies during the pandemic for registering for a free temporary electronic library card. Examples of this: Maplewood and Irvington. Beyond that, students would need to go to a library in person, usually, to register for a library card and to bring various proofs of residency to obtain a library card. They can call their local library for details on that, or you can assist them with that! A library card is a life-long friend, so it would help them beyond the scope of this project.
Getting Articles
Get Free JSTOR Articles by Registering
Because of COVID-19, JSTOR’s usual policy of allowing 6 free journal articles a month has expanded to 100 free articles a month. If students don’t have access to JSTOR through their school they can register here to get that access.
Access News Sources
Do a Google search and then select the "news" tab to see recent news publications on a topic, for example John Lewis Voting Act. Just be aware to investigate the publisher of the news and read critically!
- JSTOR Open Access and Free eBooks and ArticlesTitle list of free journals and free ebooks.
- DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals This link opens in a new windowOnline directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.
- Open Access Theses and Dissertations This link opens in a new windowOATD.org aims to be the best possible resource for finding open access graduate theses and dissertations published around the world. Metadata (information about the theses) comes from over 1100 colleges, universities, and research institutions. OATD currently indexes 3,256,024 theses and dissertations.
- ERIC (ED.gov) This link opens in a new windowERIC is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education and provides coverage of journal articles, conferences, meetings, government documents, theses, dissertations, technical reports, audiovisual media, bibliographies, directories, books and monographs.
Open Access, Freely Available Historical African American Newspapers