Trout Library Blog

February is Black History Month, a time when we bring to light the central role that African Americans have played in our history and highlight the achievements of the Black community as well as prominent figures within the community. Trout Library has many resources to help you learn about Black history.

We have created a Black History Month Research Guide. This guide contains links to many useful websites, including some to African American history museums, one to the 1619 project from the New York Times, one to the Rosa Parks Collection from the Library of Congress, and more. The guide features many relevant videos from the Kanopy database.

Trout Library also has an Anti-Racism Resources Research Guide. In this guide, find many useful websites, Kanopy videos, and TED talks on the topic, as well as books in the collection, eBooks, and articles. A special tab contains links to articles that will help you teach anti-racism. Links to these guides and others can be found on our Research Guides page.

On the slatwall just inside the Library entrance, we have displayed 12 books in the print collection, both old and new, that are relevant to Black history. We encourage everyone to peruse this display, as you might find something rewarding to read! The following are some of the books on display:

A Pictorial History of Black Americans by Langston Hughes; Milton Meltzer; C. Eric Lincoln

Call Number: 973.0496 .H893

African American Voices: A Documentary Reader from Emancipation to the Present by Leslie Brown

Call Number: 973.0496073 .AF834 2014

A collection of primary source documents that allows twenty-first century students to 'direct dial' key figures in African-American history. Includes concise and perceptive commentary along with engaging suggestions for discussion and project work.

 

 

 

Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 by Ibram X. Kendi (Editor); Keisha N. Blain (Editor)

Call Number: 973.0496073 .K33 2021

A chorus of extraordinary voices tells the epic story of the four-hundred-year journey of African Americans from 1619 to the present.

 

 

 

 

How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith

Call Number: 973.0496073 .S644 2021

Examines the legacy of slavery in America and how both history and memory continue to shape our everyday lives. Beginning in the author's hometown of New Orleans, he leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks --those that are honest about the past and those that are not -- to offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation's collective history and ourselves.

 

 

Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All by Martha S. Jones

Call Number: 323.34092396073 .J76 2020

The epic history of African American women's pursuit of political power and how it transformed America. Recounts how they defied both racism and sexism to fight for the ballot, and how they wielded political power to secure the equality and dignity of all persons.

 

 

 

There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America by Vincent Harding

 

Call Number: 323.1196 .H263 1992

From an unflinchingly Black perspective, the author writes of the struggle of heroic African Americans to achieve freedom from slavery.

 

 

We also have a database from NewsBank called Black Life in America, which provides full-text articles about the Black experience that can be found in news sources from as far back as the 18th century. A PDF is provided for many of the older articles. The database allows you to do a general keyword search, or you may perform a more refined search using menus. The first menu allows you to select a time frame, including the following: Arrival in America (Beginning to 1783), Antebellum (1784-1860), Civil War (1861-1865), Reconstruction (1866-1877), Jim Crow (1878-1922), Great Migration (1923-1944), Civil Rights Movement (1945-1975), Late 20th Century (1976-2000), and Early 21st Century (2001-present). Within each time period, you can narrow your search further by selecting categories such as Notable People and Laws and Legislation, which are located in the second menu.

Find a link to the Black Life in America database in the A-Z Databases list as well as under the Databases tab of some of our research guides. Off-campus access to Black Life in America requires the username and password for NewsBank that can be found in the Library Database Password List under Quicklinks in Harcum Hatch.

Remember that if you have questions about these resources or any others, please don’t hesitate to ask us. You may visit the Library during the hours posted on the Library's homepage, email us at library@harcum.edu, use our chat service, or call us at 610-526-6085.

Everyone in the Harcum community has access to library resources. Whether you are a resident or working at a partnership site, you can access library resources to help you with your research. These are powerful tools that give you access to hundreds of thousands of full-text, peer-reviewed journals, and ebooks from your laptop or mobile device, anywhere.

How do you access these resources? Start at the library website at harcum.libguides.com/troutlibrary.

If you are off campus, you will need to know the passwords. Passwords are located in your Harcum Hatch. Log into Harcum Hatch and look for the "Library Database Passwords" icon. Click on the link to open a page with all of the passwords. I recommend saving the page as a bookmark in your browser so that you can quickly return to the password list.

If you are on a mobile device, look for Library Database Passwords in the list of apps in Harcum Hatch. 

Now you have passwords in hand, let's start searching.

If you want to run a quick search of the databases, let’s say you just want to see what’s out there on a topic or see if the library has a specific book, go to the library homepage and type your search words into the search bar. If you are off campus this is where you need those passwords we talked about. This is EBSCO Discovery search. It searches all EBSCO databases and the print catalog at once. It's great for quick searches on general subjects.

For more specialized research you'll want to go one step further.

Let’s say you are searching for a very specific allied health topic, searching in Discovery might not get you the specialized results you need.  In this case, you might want to search a subject-specific database. Go to our full A-Z list of all 60 databases or look at the topic guide for your program to see which resources we recommend for your subject area.

If you cannot find what you needed, let us know by filling out an inter-library loan request. We can borrow material from another library for you.

If you run into any difficulty at any point you can always reach out to library staff for help. Our contact information is on the library homepage. Little known fact, the primary source of nutrition for librarians is questions!