The African-American Experience in Ohio, 1850-1920

Related Resources

From the Ohio Historical Society

George A. Myers Papers: Finding Aid
One of the manuscript collections digitized as part of The African-American Experience in Ohio, 1850-1920 comprises the papers of George A. Myers, a African-American businessman who played an active role in Republican Party politics at the turn of the century. The Ohio Historical Society prepared a finding aid to this collection: The George A. Myers Papers, 1890-1929. Originally an inventory for the microfilm edition of the papers, the online version provides direct links to the digital reproductions of individual letters and documents. The collection is arranged chronologically.

The George A. Myers papers consist primarily of correspondence, approximately 4,000 items in all. The major portion of the correspondence is incoming. There are also pencil and typewritten copies of a portion of Myers's outgoing personal correspondence. The political correspondence portrays Myers's activity at the national, state and local levels. Myers served on the Ohio Republican Central Executive Committee from 1897 to 1903 and was particularly concerned with promoting a strong black Republican vote, a fair share of party patronage and representation in policy matters affecting the black vote. The personal correspondence contains the opinions and viewpoints of many black middle-class men as they confronted life in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Research Tools at the Ohio Historical Society Archives/Library
The Ohio Historical Society provides online access to many other resources relating to the history of Ohio, including the full text of Fundamental Documents relating to the state of Ohio. These include the ordinance establishing the Territory of the United States northwest of the river Ohio (1787), the first constitution of the State of Ohio (1802), documents about the War of 1812, and biographies of state governors.

In American Memory

Other Collections Illustrating the African-American Experience

African American Perspectives: Pamphlets from the Daniel A. P. Murray Collection, 1818-1907
Daniel A. P. Murray (1852-1925) was an employee of the Library of Congress from 1871 to 1923. Volumes he collected for the Exhibit of Negro Authors at the 1900 Paris Exposition formed the nucleus of the Library's Collection of Books by Colored Authors. In 1926 the Library received a bequest of books and pamphlets that Murray had privately assembled, including the 386 pamphlets in this online collection. Daniel Murray and individual authors represented in African American Perspectives, including Booker T. Washington, Robert Terrell, and Benjamin Arnett, corresponded with George Myers, whose papers form part of The African-American Experience in Ohio.

African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship
This online presentation of a Library of Congress exhibition showcases the Library's incomparable African American collections, which include a wide array of important and rare books, government documents, manuscripts, maps, musical scores, plays, films, and recordings.

African-American Sheet Music, 1850-1920
This collection of sheet music dating from 1850 through 1920 reflects the African-American experience of that period. The collection includes many songs from the heyday of antebellum black face minstrelsy in the 1850s and from the abolitionist movement of the same period. An illustrated presentation describes The Development of an African-American Musical Theatre 1865-1910.

Collections of Narratives Describing Life in America during the Same Period

First-Person Narratives of the American South, 1860-1920
This compilation of printed texts from the libraries at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill documents the culture of the nineteenth-century American South from the viewpoint of Southerners. It includes the diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, travel accounts, and ex-slave narratives of not only prominent individuals, but also of relatively inaccessible populations: women, African Americans, enlisted men, laborers, and Native Americans.

American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1940
Based on interviews by staff of the Folklore Project of the Federal Writers' Project, this collection includes almost 3,000 drafts and revisions. The histories describe the family education, income, occupation, political views, religion and mores, medical needs, diet and miscellaneous observations of interviewees from twenty-four states. Included in The African-American Experience in Ohio are twenty-seven narratives from another project within the Federal Writers' Project. The second project gathered narratives from ex-slaves, with an emphasis on representing the speech patterns of the interviewees. Over 2,000 ex-slave narratives from the Library of Congress collections, accompanied by 500 photographs of interviewees, will be made available online in the future.

"California as I Saw It:" First-Person Narratives of California's Early Years, 1849-1900
Full texts and illustrations of 190 works documenting the formative era of California's history through eyewitness accounts covering the decades between the Gold Rush and the turn of the twentieth century.

Pioneering the Upper Midwest: Books from Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, ca. 1820-1910
A portrait of Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century through first-person accounts, biographies, promotional literature, local histories, ethnographic and antiquarian texts, colonial archival documents, and other works drawn from the Library of Congress's collections.


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