LibGuides: WMST 3138: Affect and Activism: Archives

Archives: Introductions

What are archives?

Archives are records created or received by a person, family, or organization and preserved because of their continuing value. An archival repository is a place where people can go to gather and evidence from letters, reports, notes, memos, photographs, and other primary sources. The Barnard Archives are repository of records of the life of Barnard College and broader feminist histories, as well as a space for critical, interdisciplinary inquiry into the past as well as the imagination of possible futures. We collect records documenting college history and the lives of students, alums, faculty, and staff from founding to present day, as well as special collections that document feminist histories. Our work is informed by reparative frameworks, to actively confront histories of exclusion of people with marginalized identities within our collections.

Selected Digital Archives for Affect & Activism

There are many methods for finding digitized/digital archival materials, including:

Use a portal that searches over many archives' digital holdings, such as the Digital Public Library of America, Europeana, Umbra Search, or Calisphere
Go directly to the archives that holds a collection you're interested in, and see if they have made all or part of it available online. Some will share digitized materials through their collection guides (also known as finding aids), like NYU. Others have more standalone search interfaces, like NYPL.
Use a paywalled specialized or general primary source database that Columbia/Barnard provides access to. Some suggestions are below, and here's a sample search that reveals many hundreds more: https://clio.columbia.edu/databases?q=sources+OR+archiv*&search_field=subject&commit=Search

Library of Congress, Digital Collections
The Library of Congress Digital Collections database offers a wide variety of public domain media materials created on behalf of, or collected by, the federal government. Items include historic maps, photographs, musical scores, oral histories, full text documents, and much more.
Barnard Digital Collections
Digitized historical materials from the Barnard Archives and Special Collections
Calisphere
A project of the University of California, Calisphere provides a searchable and browseable gateway to digitized materials from all ten campuses of the University of California, as well as archives, libraries, and museums throughout the state. You can search items by keyword or browse through a range of collections by title. Features photographs, letters, oral histories, art, and more.

Exhibitions (https://calisphere.org/exhibitions/) provide another way into the collections.
Digital materials from the Tamiment Library & Wagner Labor Archives
The Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives collects material in all formats documenting the history of labor, the Left, political radicalism, and social movements in the United States, with particular strengths in communism, anarchism, and socialism.
NYPL Digital Collections
Digitized materials from New York Public Library's archival collections.
African Activist Archive
The African Activist Archive is preserving and making available online the records of activism in the United States to support the struggles of African peoples against colonialism, apartheid, and social injustice from the 1950s through the 1990s.

American Indian Movement and Native American Radicalism
This collection includes the extensive FBI documentation on the evolution of the American Indian Movement (AIM) as an organization of social protest. In addition, there is documentation on the 1973 Wounded Knee Stand-off. Informant reports and materials collected by the Extremist Intelligence Section of the FBI provide unparalleled insight into the motives, actions, and leadership of AIM and the development of Native American radicalism.
Black Abolitionist Papers
Black Abolitionist Papers gathers and makes accessible primary sources created African Americans actively involved in the movement to end slavery in the United States between 1830 and 1865. Content includes letters, speeches, editorials, articles, sermons, and essays.
Gale Primary Sources
Provides an interactive research environment that allows researchers to cross-search multiple Gale collections, including Archives Unbound, Archives of Sexuality & Gender, Associated Press Collections Online, Brazilian and Portuguese History and Culture, British Library Newspapers, the Indigenous Peoples: North America database, Nineteenth Century Collections Online, The Making of Modern Law, U.S. Declassified Documents Online, U.S. Supreme Court Records and Briefs, 1832-1978, and the Women's Studies Archive.
North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral Histories
North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries and Oral Histories provides a unique and personal view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada between 1800 and 1950. Composed of contemporaneous letters and diaries, oral histories, interviews, and other personal narratives, the series provides a rich source for scholars in a wide range of disciplines. In selected cases, users will be able to hear the actual audio voices of the immigrants.
Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000
A resource for students and scholars of U.S. history and U.S. women's history. Organized around the history of women in social movements in the U.S. between 1600 and 2000, this collection seeks to advance scholarly debates and understanding about U.S. women’s history generally. The collection currently includes 124 document projects and archives with more than 5,100 documents and 175,000 pages of additional full-text documents, written by 2,800 primary authors.
Women and Social Movements in Modern Empires since 1820
"Women and social movements in modern empires since 1820 explores prominent themes in world history since 1820: conquest, colonization, settlement, resistance, and post-coloniality, as told through women's voices. With a clear focus on bringing the voices of the colonized to the forefront, this highly-curated archive and database includes documents related to the Habsburg Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the British, French, Italian, Dutch, Russian, Japanese, and United States Empires, and settler societies in the United States, New Zealand and Australia.
Proquest Black Studies
ProQuest Black studies combines newspapers, archival collections and journals in a single, browsable destination. Includes records from the archives of key civil rights organizations of the 1950s and 1960s: Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), as well as popular magazines and scholarly journals.
Student activism
The collection captures the voices of students across the great range of protest, political actions, and equal-rights advocacy from the 20th and early 21st century United States. The primary sources intended for inclusion will be broad-based across time, geography, and political viewpoint -- from the conservative to the anarchist. In the interest of sensitivity toward the privacy of activists on the streets and in organizing communities today, the collection does not depict contemporary protests.
Struggles for Freedom: Southern Africa
"The liberation of Southern Africa was one of the major political developments of the 20th century. The demise of Portuguese colonial rule, the end of white settler domination, and the dismantling of the apartheid regime had far-reaching consequences not only for the people in the region but for the global community. The Struggles for Freedom content area, launched in June 2007, focuses on the complex and varied liberation struggles in the region, with an initial concentration on six nations: Angola, Botswana, Mozambique, South Africa, Namibia, and Zimbabwe."

New York Area Archives and Special Collections

This is a very short list of archival repositories that are close to Barnard's campus. For more help locating archival collections, navigating finding aids and scheduling research appointments with other archivists, or for an introduction to archival research, schedule a consultation with archives staff. You can also use the ArchiveGrid to search across finding aids and catalog records for archival collections in over 1,000 archival repositories, with some coverage outside of the United States. For non-U.S. archives in the Americas, I recommend the resources gathered by Archivistas en Espanglish (Latin America) and ArchivesCanada.ca (Canada).

Barnard Archives and digitalcollections.barnard.edu - We collect the history of Barnard College and special collections relating to Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Our Digital Collections feature a small fraction of our collections, including the yearbook, the Barnard Bulletin, student publications, and some photographs, with more added daily.
Archives at the Columbia Libraries - search over archives at seven Columbia repositories, including oral histories and the Columbia University Archives.
Center for Brooklyn History - The Center for Brooklyn History (CBH) was formed in 2020 by uniting Brooklyn Historical Society (BHS) and the Brooklyn Public Library, combining materials collected over the past 157 years by BHS with BPL's Brooklyn Collection and becoming the most expansive catalogue of Brooklyn history in the world.
Interference Archive - An archives in Brooklyn that explores the relationship between cultural production and social movements.
Lesbian Herstory Archives - An Archives in Brooklyn that is home to the world's largest collection of materials by and about lesbians and their communities.
NYPL Archives & Manuscripts - Search over the NYPL's many different repositories, including the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the general Manuscripts and Archives Division.
NYU Archival Collections - Search across the finding aids of the various special collections at NYU (including the Fales Library and its Downtown Collection and the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives).

Selected Newspaper, Magazine, and Other News Media Databases

Alt-PressWatch
Full text database of selected newspapers, magazines, journals of the alternative and independent press. Includes titles such as Anarcho-Syndicalist Review, Chicago Reader, Dissent, Off Our Backs, Poverty and Race.
American Indian Newspapers
Presents the publications of a range of communities, with an extensive list of periodicals produced in the United States and British Columbia, including Alaska, Arizona, California, Nevada and Oklahoma, from 1828 to 2016.
American Prison Newspapers, 1800-2020: Voices from the Inside
.American Prison Newspapers bring together hundreds of prison periodicals from across the country into one collection that will represent penal institutions of all kinds, with special attention paid to women's-only institutions.
Black Newspapers
Full text and full-image articles from African American newspapers: Atlanta daily world, Los Angeles sentinel, New York Amsterdam news, Pittsburgh courier, The Chicago defender and more..
Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers
Search America's historic newspaper pages from 1789-1963 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present.
Communist historical newspaper collection
Contains the full text of various communist American and British newspapers. The collection includes digital reproductions providing access to every page from every available issue. "Workers' rights, social issues, national and international politics, culture and Party activity are just some of the topics to be explored on the pages of these Communist Party newspapers, featuring such notable contributors as writer Richard Wright, folk singer Woody Guthrie and political cartoonist Robert Minor. ... While much of the content in these newspapers focuses on workers' rights and organized labor (a boon to scholars in these fields), other articles and ads reveal a glimpse of the people who made up the Communist Party. Reviews of books and performances, invitations to social events, analysis of international news and events from a decidedly left-wing perspective make Communist Historical Newspapers a unique resource across the curriculum."--ProQuest promotional handout.
Ethnic NewsWatch
Full text articles from newspapers and periodicals published by the ethnic, minority and native press in the U.S. Coverage is from 1960 to date.
Independent Voices
A four-year project to digitize over 1 million pages from the magazines, journals, and newspapers of the alternative press archives of participating libraries. Starting with collections by feminists and the GI press, the collection will grow to include small literary magazines, underground newspapers, LGBT periodicals, the minority press (Latino, Black and Native American) and the extreme right-wing press.
ProQuest Historical Newspapers
Full-text and full-image articles from major American newspapers: Atlanta Constitution, Baltimore Sun (1837-1985), Boston Globe, Call and Post (1934-1991), Chicago Tribune, Christian Science Monitor (1908-1997), Irish Times (1859-2009), Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Norfolk Journal and Guide (1921-2003), Philadelphia Tribune (1912-2001), San Francisco Chronicle (1865-1922), Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Scotsman (1817-1950). Every page in PDF files.
Sowetan archive, 1981-today
"One of South Africa's most prominent newspapers, the Sowetan was launched as a response to apartheid conditions in Soweto and other segregated communities. Impassioned editorials, engaging political columns and firsthand reporting soon helped The Sowetan become the country's most widely circulated black paper"--Publisher's description (NewsBank). Includes digitized versions of the print Sowetan, as well as content from the online version SowetanLIVE
Television News Archive
Searchable archive of abstracts of news broadcasts from 1968 to present (ABC, CBS, NBC), 1995 to present (CNN), selected content from PBS and FOX News. Descriptive summaries of the Vanderbilt University collection of network television news programs and other news-related programming collected in its archive since August 5, 1968.