History

The HistoryMakers Digital Archive: An Essential Resource for African-American History

Looking for a primary source for an essay or digital project? Do you want to know more about, say, the Montgomery Bus Boycott from someone who lived through it? Or are you just bored and looking for something educational to watch? Well, dear reader, have I got the archive for you.

I’d like to present to you the HistoryMakers Digital Archive, a video collection of oral history interviews that is available to all Northeastern students, faculty, and staff. With a focus on African-American history, the Digital Archive is a resource that can be both useful and fascinating to everyone in academia, even if they’re not studying history.

A collage of notable African Americans surrounding the HistoryMakers logo

So, what is oral history? It’s certainly not the history of public speaking or how humans dealt with cavities, nor is it simply anecdotes passed by word of mouth. The Oral History Association defines it as “a field of study and a method of gathering, preserving and interpreting the voices and memories of people, communities, and participants in past events.” Besides being the oldest form of history-gathering, oral history holds special significance to African Americans and other groups of the African diaspora: Not only do many African peoples have long, storied traditions—perhaps most famously, that of the West African griot—that venerate the keepers of oral history as professionals who are just as vital to the community as the soldier or the healer. Further, due to historical laws that either made it illegal or difficult for African Americans to be taught how to read and write, oral history has been one of the crucial ways that we can learn about certain events and periods. For example, during the Great Depression, the U.S. government commissioned a collection of oral history interviews from formerly enslaved people across 17 states. The collection of transcribed interviews, which is available online, is an incredibly valuable resource in broadening your understanding of the experiences of Black people during slavery.

The HistoryMakers Digital Archive follows in this honorable tradition. It compiles oral history interviews with nearly 2,700 historically significant Americans of African descent, designated as “HistoryMakers.” They’re significant for a variety of reasons, but all have made some notable contribution to the fields of medicine, art, music, politics, technology, science, literature, journalism, and more.

The archive includes interviews that provide insight into the lives and deeds of some of the most well-known people in the world—John Lewis, Whoopi Goldberg, Angela Davis, Harry Belafonte, Barack Obama—as well as many other fascinating folks worth learning about who you might not have known about. For instance, there’s Elma Lewis, a Roxbury native who founded her own art school here in Boston. There’s Ed Bullins, a noted playwright and former professor at Northeastern. And then there’s Sylvester Monroe, a journalist who recounts the perils he faced while covering the desegregation of schools in Boston. Heck, I even found an interview from William Ward, the former mayor of my hometown of Chesapeake, Virginia. And that’s just scratching the surface. You can watch interviews from literally thousands of HistoryMakers, each of which offer their own take on their fields, their lives, and the historical events that shaped them.

Part of the beauty of the Digital Archive is how simple it is to use: after spending just a handful of minutes on the website, you’ll more than likely get the hang of it. But if you’d like a step-by-step guide on how to access, navigate, and utilize it, I’ve created a LibGuide that will hopefully be helpful.

In addition, HistoryMakers is hosting a contest in honor of Black History Month. Learn more and sign up here.

Have any further questions about the Digital Archive? You can contact me directly at moyler.h@northeastern.edu or send a note attached to a carrier pigeon to [redacted] Street in Mission Hill.

New: African Newspapers, 1800-1922

Northeastern University Libraries now provides access to over 40 historical newspapers from throughout Africa. Key titles include the East African Standard, Baira Post, and Cape Town Gazette. Newspaper languages include English, French, German, Sotho, and others. This online, fully searchable collection supports the World History Program, as well as other key programs at the university. Additional resources can be found on the History Subject Guide.

History Through Biography

Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn  The award winning American National Biography Online and Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (for British history) are now available through NU Libraries. Within these resources, you are able to search by person, subject, date, or location. For example, you can find major artists who lived in Massachusetts in the late 1800s. Results include lengthy biographical entries and links to related people and themes. The American National Biography Online includes the Oxford Companion to United States History so that you can quickly link from a noted figure to article on topics related to that figure. For more on the Library’s resources in History, please see the Subject Guide.

On This Day: January 21

On this day in history, the great author George Orwell died in London. Perhaps best known for his dystopian novel 1984, George Orwell was a proponent of social justice in his time. Today we read his books and take from them the lessons of equality, freedom, and justice that were being expressed in the 1940s. The library has a great collection of books, videos, e-books, and more that you can find here, or by searching for George Orwell on NUCat. Take some time out to read or re-read some of the 20th century’s finest literary works!

Going Global

On Sunday, a few friends and I decided that the Christian Science Center was worth investigating after 2+ years of walking curiously in its shadow. Inside, we found this (above). This enormous glowing globe – house is called the Mapparium. Its a three story painted glass globe that you walk inside. It’s inside the Mary Baker Eddy Library on Mass. Avenue, and it’s preeeetttty awesome. There is a fee to enter the Mapparium, which is bogus, but hey, its a measly four dollars for a unique, thought-provoking experience — more than you’d get out of a Big Mac (also four dollars) from the McDonald’s next door. You enter on a bridge suspended in the earth’s core (super cool). Then a brief light show begins (super cool) during which you examine the foreign cartography of this three-dimensional map made in 1935 (super cool). Like, what is French Indo-China? Oh, and this happens to be super cool: the acoustics of the perfect sphere are quite unique. From the center, your voice is very loud. I happened to be standing in the center. I’ve never felt so powerful, or so entertained. Not to mention somewhat rude. From the edge of the bridge, your voice can be heard very clearly by the person on the other side of the bridge, but not by others in the center, so two can have a secret conversation in plain globe-light. Everything about this place is… well, I think you know how I feel about it. I vote we get one of these at Snell instead of an Alumni Reading Room. No offense, Mom (class of ’82).