“The U.S. and Africa,” a wood engraving by Tom Killion, © 1991.

Please note when the library recently updated our online catalogs, the links in our subject guides broke. We are working actively to fix this problem. In the meantime, you can search for materials referenced by consulting the library catalog and our catalog of archives and manuscript materials.

Scholarly resources for Africana studies mainly are represented in the Library’s online catalog. These include printed works (newspapers, books, pamphlets, magazines, and broadsides), collections of unpublished materials such as letters, diaries, photographs, and business files, and the archival record of Bowdoin College.

More detailed descriptions of pertinent research resources, especially for manuscripts, are also available online, as is a comprehensive research guide for Africana Studies that summarizes the indexes, databases, edited versions of primary sources, and reference books available through the library’s collections and services.

The left-hand menu above leads to summaries of resources in Special Collections that are especially rich in documenting the enslavement of Africans, their passage to the Americas, and the subsequent African American experience, particularly in Jamaica and the United States.