Black History Month

“A Century of Black Life, History, and Culture,” is the 2015 theme for Black History Month. This theme commemorates the founding of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) by Carter G. Woodson in 1915.

To  celebrate:

Read or browse an eBook.

These books can be read online or downloaded to your device. Austin Community College Library Services has many resources related to Black history. Here are titles from several eBook collections that relate to the 2015 BHM theme.

  

African American History Day by Day: A Reference Guide to Events 

E185 .C34 2012 ebk – eBooks on EBSCOhost 

 

  

Voices of the African American Experience.  E184.6 .V65 2009 ebk - Gale Virtual Reference Library

This work includes speeches, articles, mission statements, testimonies, letters, sermons, prayers, spirituals/songs, slave narratives, memoirs, essays, interviews, and more.

Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century.  E185 .E545 2009 ebk - Oxford Reference Online

From the Reconstruction Era to the Civil Rights Movement the encyclopedia covers events and the influence of African American culture on American and global cultures.

Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History: The Black Experience in the Americas.   E185 .E54 2006 ebk - Gale Virtual Reference Library

This work includes the African diaspora: French Guiana, Haiti, Martinique and Guadeloupe, Suriname, the English-speaking Caribbean, the Netherlands Antilles, and more are covered, as well as North America and the United States.

Encyclopedia of African American Music.  ML101.U6 E53 2011 ebk - eBooks on EBSCOhost

Folk, religious, concert, and popular styles are featured, along with essays on a range of topics, genres, groups, individuals, and historical topics.

African Americans in the Visual Arts. N6538.N5 O86 2010 ebk - Gale Virtual Reference Library

This work provides entries not only on fine artists and film makers, but also includes comic strip artists and quilters.

Historical Dictionary of African American Cinema.  PN1995.9.N4 B433 2007 ebk - Gale Virtual Reference Library

These alphabetically arranged entries describe a wide variety of films portraying African Americans, with brief biographies of actors, producers, directors, and others who created the films.

 

Encyclopedia of African American Writing: Five Centuries of Contribution.... PS153.N5 A3444 2009 ebk - Gale Virtual Reference LibraryThis biographical work focuses on novelists, essayists, scholars, activists, critics, teachers, poets, playwrights, and songwriters.

Icons of African American Literature: The Black literary World. PS153.N5 I35 2011 ebk - Gale Virtual Reference LibraryTwenty-four popular and culturally significant writers are examined, as well as a range of cultural topics, such as the black arts movement, the Harlem Renaissance, and the jazz aesthetic.

African-American Art. N6538.N5 P38 1998 ebk - eBooks on EBSCOhostThe author examines works of the New Negro Movement of the 1920s, the Civil Rights and Black Nationalism era of the 1960s and 70s, and the emergence of new black artists and theorists in the 1980s and 90s.
 

Search the library catalog for books and for Films On Demand streaming videos.

 

Two representative films for the period from 1915 – 2013 are

Making a Way Out of No Way (1897-1940) and A More Perfect Union (1968-2013)  from the series The African Americans--Many Rivers to Cross.

You can search for additional videos in Films On Demand.  Use the search box to find titles or segments.

Find an article in a newspaper, magazine, or journal.  Find a hero.

 You can search a periodical database like Academic Search Complete or MasterFILE Premier to find relevant Black History Month articles in magazines and journals.  

Explore government and other websites.

These popular websites appear on many Black History Month lists of information sources.

Archives Library Information Center (ALIC)
National Archives

The African-American Mosaic
A Library of Congress Resource Guide for the Study of Black History & Culture

National Civil Rights Museum

National Museum of African American History and Culture
(Smithsonian; opens March 1, 2015)

Black History Teaching Resources
Smithsonian Education

National Park Service

African American Odyssey
Library of Congress.  American Memory

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library

Digital Schomburg

Black History Month - Infoplease

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute
King Papers Project at Stanford University

The Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History

PBS African American World

History.com: Black History Month

New 'Faculty Teaching Toolbox" offers essential resources in one place

ACC’s Library Services has applied their talent for organization and their commitment to supporting classroom instruction to create the “Faculty Teaching Toolbox,” a collection of teaching and learning resources assembled into one easy-to-navigate online repository.

Learn more about the Faculty Teaching Toolbox from the Q&A below.

Q. How does the Faculty Teaching Toolbox differ from the instructional and research resources already offered by Library Services?

A. It’s not that the resources are new – it’s that they are in one place, easily accessible, and easily adopted for classroom instruction in support of student success, rather than being

located on various ACC webpages and in educational resources across the Internet.

The Toolbox not only provides access to these resources, but answers questions like “How do I use it?” and ‘What do I tell my students about it?’ The Toolbox takes the guessing out of whether we have a particular resource for a student’s needs.

In addition — and this is very powerful — faculty can look at their syllabus and assignments and predict, based on past experience, where students tend to ask the most questions or flounder. Then they can explore the Faculty Teaching Toolbox to identify a resource — librarians and instructional design specialists can help — that addresses that point at which the student’s momentum may stall.

There also are some new resources we’re excited about. Library Services has created a

series of short, engaging, discipline-neutral,online tutorials. The topics of these tutorials were chosen based on extensive faculty surveys, a competency analysis profile, and by culling frequently occurring learning outcomes from syllabi and accreditation reports across the college.

For example, several tutorials address critical information literacy skills — outcomes that are a part of every discipline. A few are Choosing a Topic, Academic Honesty/Plagiarism and Evaluating Information, but there are several more, and we will be adding to them.

The tutorials are assessment embedded. Faculty can assign these tutorials and require their students to submit their quiz results for proof of completion.

The Toolbox also has resources for classroom management. Remember when you were new to ACC and had a few questions of your own, like, “I heard someone mention Lighthouse — where do I find it?” The Toolbox also includes information on the various technology tools instructors can use to communicate with students more easily.

The Toolbox also includes information on the various technology tools instructors can use to communicate with students.

Q. How did you determine what to include in the Toolbox?

A. We’ve worked closely with faculty across many disciplines, and their passion for teaching is apparent.

Our project team often hears colleagues share concerns about students who may be underprepared for the rigors of their curriculum. We’ve also heard from faculty colleagues who sometimes have difficulty locating resources to support struggling students in a timely manner.

To solve the issue, we looked first in our own backyard – at the many successful interventions and support materials already available to our students. We already had identified resources that our research showed to be essential and we recognized that faculty must be able to find these disparately located resources quickly and share them easily. That is where the concept of the Faculty Teaching Toolbox came from.

We put the resources in one place, and added answers to basic questions faculty often have. We cross-referenced these supports with books and streaming media in our library collection to see if additional resources were available in a “just-in-time” approach for an underprepared student.

Q. How do instructors access the Toolbox?

A. The Faculty Teaching Toolbox is online. We also plan to offer workshops in conjunction with ACC's Instructional Designers to demonstrate how instructors can take advantage of the various Toolbox resources.

Q. Can faculty offer suggestions for other resources that could be added to the Toolbox?

A. We are very interested in hearing from faculty and staff about what we might have overlooked and/or what they would like added to the Toolbox. Faculty can give us their comments and suggestions by submitting the form on the Faculty Toolbox homepage. The Toolbox is meant to be dynamic. Let us hear from you!

Q. What about the students? Shouldn’t we make it easier for them to find these resources, too?

A. Yes! The Faculty Teaching Toolbox has a companion site for students. The “Student Learning Success Toolbox” makes it convenient for faculty to refer a student to a particular resource for their specific need.

View the Faculty Teaching Toolbox webpage or contact an IL Team Member for more information.

Adapted from this ACC Faculty Staff Digest Article

Mark Twain’s birthday

November 30th is Mark Twain’s birthday!

Celebrate Mark Twain's birthday by reading about his life and work.

Biographical Information

Library Services has many resources to help you find biographical information about Mark Twain, such as that his real name is Samuel Langhorn Clemens and that he adopted the pen name Mark Twain after being a steamboat captain on the Mississippi. Mark Twain is "a term from his riverboat days that means 'two fathoms deep' or 'safe water'" (Bloom).

For more biographical information, try Bloom’s Literature,  Dictionary of Literary Biography Online, or  Literary Reference Center

You can also dive into the details of his life by reading his autobiography. The most recent is a 2 volume set that Twain insisted not be published for 100 years after his death.  

Autobiography of Mark Twain. Volume 1

Harriet Elinor Smith, ed.
University of California Press, 2010
Call Number: PS1331 .A2 2010
Available at RRC, RVS

 

Autobiography of Mark Twain. Volume 2

Benjamin Griffin and Harriet Elinor Smith, eds.
University of California Press, 2013
Call Number: PS1331 .A2 2013
Available at HLC, RVS

Literary Criticism

To read literary criticism about Twain’s work, sources like Bloom’s Literature or Literature Criticism Online will have a number of articles about Mark Twain, his characters, and the themes found in his works.

There are many other biography and literary criticism e-Resources, so be sure to visit the Literature and Literary Criticism databases-by-subject page.

Works by Twain

If you prefer to celebrate by curling up with some Twain classics, Library Services has many copies of his work in both print and electronic.  Use this Titles by Mark Twain link to view titles available through Library Services.

Works Cited

Bloom, Harold, ed. Mark Twain. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishing, 1999.

Bloom's Major Novelists. Bloom's Literature. Web. 17 Nov. 2014.