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Here is the final post in our Black History Month series.

Biographical reference sources have evolved over the years. When the Dictionary of American Biography was first published between 1926 and 1937, history was focused on the lives of famous white men, and women and minorities were largely ignored. American National Biography, published by Oxford in 1999, sought to redress the imbalance. Even so, many African Americans didn’t make the cut. In 2008, Oxford published an eight-volume supplement, African American National Biography. Covering 4,100 individuals and edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr . and Evelyn Brooks Higginbothom, the encyclopedia was (and still is, since the work is ongoing) a joint project of Oxford and the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. It’s regularly updated online as part of the Oxford African American Studies Center; the February 2011 Black History Month update added new 100 online-only biographies.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 17th, 2011 at 12:01 pm and is filed under Reference Sources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.