Research Guides: Africana Studies: Encyclopedias, etc

Reference Sources In Africana Studies

Here is a sample of some of the print and online reference books available at the Healey Library.

New Encyclopedia of Africa
Addresses the entire history of African cultures from the pharaohs and the ancient civilizations of the south through the colonial era to the emergence of 53 independent countries.
Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History
African-American experience from 1619 to the present day. It addresses a wide array of subjects in over 2,300 articles to define the cultural roots, participation in American life, and current condition of the African-American community.

Encyclopedias, Dictionaries, etc

Britannica Library This link opens in a new window
A general encyclopedia covering all subjects. It also includes current events journal articles, selected and reviewed web links, a dictionary, a thesaurus, and timelines with images and links.
Cambridge Companions Online This link opens in a new window
Cambridge Companion series covers the fields of literature, classics, philosophy, religion, and cultural studies. Each Companion includes essays devoted to a particular person or subject such as Freud, Hemingway, modern Latin American culture, and the African American novel.
Credo Reference This link opens in a new window
Credo Reference provides access to a broad variety of reference sources from dictionaries to encyclopedias covering topics from the arts to the sciences. It has an image collection, maps, customizable data, and audio pronunciation files. You can search the whole collection or a specific subject area.
Gale Virtual Reference Library This link opens in a new window
The Gale Virtual Reference collection includes general reference resources as well as titles in the arts, biography, business, education, the environment, history, information and publishing, law, literature, medicine, multicultural studies, religion, science, and the social sciences. You can search the whole collection or a specific subject area.
Oxford English Dictionary (OED) This link opens in a new window
The Oxford English Dictionary is the accepted authority on the evolution of the English language over the last millennium. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over half a million words, both present and past.