Los Angeles Valley College Library: OER: Open Educational Resources: African American Studies

Textbooks

Slavery to Liberation: The African American Experience by Joshua Farrington, Norman W. Powell, Gwendolyn
Graham, Lisa Day & Ogechi E. Anyanwu (2019): Encompass Digital Archive.

Gives instructors, students, and general readers a comprehensive and up-to-date account of African Americans’ cultural and political history, economic development, artistic expressiveness, and religious and philosophical worldviews in a critical framework. It offers sound interdisciplinary analysis of selected historical and contemporary issues surrounding the origins and manifestations of White supremacy in the United States. By placing race at the center of the work, the book offers significant lessons for understanding the institutional marginalization of Blacks in contemporary America and their historical resistance and perseverance.

Courses

African American History and Culture (FSCJ/Lumen)
This course follows African American origins, beginning with an overview of West African culture and history dating back to 1300. The material focuses on the era of enslavement through the Civil War and Reconstruction.
African American Studies (Bridget Cooks, UC Irvine)
This course is an interdisciplinary introduction to important historical, cultural, literary, and political issues concerning African Americans. Through critical readings of literary, artistic, and filmic texts, this course provides an overview of African American experiences from the 17th through mid-20th centuries. Emphasis will be placed on developing an understanding of the historical and cultural experiences of African Americans from the beginning of the Transatlantic Slave Trade through the Civil Rights Movement.
African American Studies: From Emancipation to the Present (Open Yale)
The purpose of this course is to examine the African American experience in the United States from 1863 to the present. Prominent themes include the end of the Civil War and the beginning of Reconstruction; African Americans’ urbanization experiences; the development of the modern civil rights movement and its aftermath; and the thought and leadership of Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X.
Black Matters: Introduction to Black Studies (MIT OpenCourseWare)
Interdisciplinary survey of people of African descent that draws on the overlapping approaches of history, literature, anthropology, legal studies, media studies, performance, linguistics, and creative writing. This course connects the experiences of African-Americans and of other American minorities, focusing on social, political, and cultural histories, and on linguistic patterns.