This association founded Black History Month driven by Carter Woodson. Still active today, it publishes the Journal of African American History and The Black History Bulletin.
The Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum join in paying tribute to the generations of African Americans who struggled with adversity to achieve full citizenship in American society.
An online reference center featuring primary documents, bibliographies, timelines, and links to digital archives, research centers, African American museums, and more.
The Supreme Court's opinion in the Brown v. Board of Education case of 1954 legally ended decades of racial segregation in America's public schools. Explore primary documents and additional resources from the National Archives.
Our research seeks to answer a host of systemic policy challenges with equally expansive solutions, from our Racial Data Lab, a national online database of racial inequality, to our narrative effort to collect videos, photos, and essays from people of color.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended segregation in public places and banned employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. Explore primary documents and additional resources from the National Archives.
Historic chronicles from manuscripts, newspapers, documents and recordings, the story of African American art told by the works themselves, photographic archives portraying the lives of celebrated African Americans and those we no longer know. Discover great art works, official records, iconic portraits, ephemera and memorabilia.
This Stanford University archive includes speeches, timelines, publications, recommended readings, primary and secondary resources for educators and students, and more.
"The NAACP: A Century in the Fight for Freedom online exhibition presents a collection of images on the major personalities, events, and achievements that shaped the NAACP’s history during its first 100 years."
"The National Register of Historic Places lists many properties significant for African American History. We take the opportunity of African American History Month to highlight just some of the properties that exemplify the contributions of African American culture and achievement."
What is a Primary Source?
Primary Sources include first-hand eyewitness accounts, original records, objects and evidence from the time period you are researching. They are immediate accounts from people who were directly involved and had a direct connection to it.
Primary sources can include:
Speeches, laws and court documents
Newspaper reports by reporters who witnessed the events or quote people who did
Diaries, memoirs, autobiographies, letters
Works of art, novels, poetry, plays
Original research
Statistics, census records, datasets
Photographs, video or audio that captured the event
Objects and ephemera (e.g. postcards, buttons, posters)
Secondary Sources are one step removed from primary sources. Theycome into play when they cover the same topic, but add a layer ofinterpretation or analysis to the event.
Secondary sources can include:
Most books about the topic
Analysis of event or data which interprets it
Scholarly or other articles about the event or topic, written by individuals who were not directly involved
When St. Louis Public Radio published thousands of pages of grand jury testimony, forensic reports and other documents related to the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., they served their audience by identifying passages containing key eyewitness accounts.
More than 228,000 hours of video (just about everything that has ever aired on C-SPAN), updated on a daily basis. Historical content includes debates, speeches, rallies, and more.
Fake news, biased reporting, and untruths are part of our information landscape. Sometimes it is easy to spot something that is untrue, but other times it's hard to tell the difference between what is real and what is fake. Some websites confuse even the most expert researchers like historians or college professors, but there is one group of researchers called fact checkers that rarely get fooled. These are the folks that make sure that what gets published is true and accurate. So what do fact checkers do to check the credibility of what they see online? Well, they have a few tricks up their sleeve. One thing they don't do is spend a lot of time closely reading the resource they are evaluating.
That's right! They don't spend all that much time reading an article from a website without knowing if the site can be trusted. They don't spend time looking at the "About Us" section, or looking for a list of references, or even checking the author's credentials. Instead they research what others have written about the site, the organization, or the author. They know that what others say about an organization is often more reliable than what the organization says about itself. When they do this research, they may use several different websites to find information about a publication. This is called "lateral reading". But how does the fact checker know if what others are saying about a site is credible? They consider three important criteria: process, expertise, and motivation.
Let's look first at process. Fact checkers know that reliable sources have a process for checking facts. Well-respected newspapers like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal employ fact checkers who ensure that reporters get their facts right prior to publishing and correct any mistakes in previous issues. Scholarly journals don't have fact checkers, but they do have a group of scholars that read, evaluate, and decide if something should be published. So if you come across something from a respected newspaper or a well-known academic journal, you can be fairly certain that what you are reading is accurate.
Second, fact checkers check for expertise. They know that who is deemed an expert depends on the context. A medical doctor is an expert on medical treatments, while an English professor is likely an expert on Shakespeare, and someone with many years of experience as a welder is an expert on the topic of welding. Fact checkers know that not all experts are PhDs or M.D.s. A football coach could be an expert on sports injuries or a food blogger could be an expert on the best restaurants in a particular city.
Lastly, fact checkers know that all publications have specific motivations and these can vary greatly from one publication to another. For example, a tabloid like the National Enquirer aims to entertain and make money. The more salacious news they publish, the more money they make. Contrast this to a website like Politico. Yes, they have a business model, but their main aim is to report American politics. So when you come across a website, consider its motivation and how it relates to their reliability. For example, if you come across an article on drug addiction, consider the source and their aim. Is the article published by a recovery center that is aimed at enrolling patients in their recovery program? Or is the article published by a medical journal reporting on a new experimental treatment for addiction?
So next time you come across an article and you're not sure whether or not it's credible, don't spend a lot of time looking at that website. Instead find out what others are saying about the organization that published the article and when looking at any resource, think about the process that that resource uses to check for facts. Also, evaluate the expertise of the author for that particular topic and, lastly, analyze the motivation of the resource. Is it trying to sell you something? Inform you? Or maybe entertain you?
This video is based on the work of the Stanford Education Group and the book Web Literacy for Student Fact Checkers by Mike Caulfield. The content of this video was adapted from a similar video created by Arizona State University Library.
