Comparative Ethnic Studies

Access the digital collections at the Library of Congress.

This website is a collective project, one which emerged from an honors undergraduate seminar in American Studies at UC-Berkeley, “The Bay Area in the Seventies,” taught by Scott Saul in the spring of 2017. The eleven students in that seminar shaped their own research projects, burrowing into archives official and unofficial so as to recover the stories missing from, or hidden within, standard accounts of Berkeley’s history. This curated archive—with 300 documents organized across their six main projects—is the result.

The Documented Border: An Open Access Digital Archive is an interdisciplinary effort whose goal is to advance understanding and awareness about the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and its peoples during a period of unprecedented societal change. The innovative archive focuses on untold and silenced stories and events about this transnational region.

FoundSF is a wiki that invites history buffs, community leaders, and San Francisco citizens of all kinds to share their unique stories, images, and videos from past and present. There are over 1,800 articles here presenting primary sources, essays, and images from history.

I See My Light Shining: Baldwin-Emerson Elders Project was conceived by celebrated author and 2020 MacArthur Fellow, Jacqueline Woodson. A partnership between the Columbia Center for Oral History Research, the Emerson Collective and Woodson’s nonprofit, Baldwin For The Arts, I See My Light Shining offers a unique foray into the lived experiences of Black, Asian, Caribbean, Indigenous, Hispanic/Latino/a/x, dual-heritage backgrounds, and queer individuals across the United States.

Mapping Prejudice identifies and maps racial covenants, clauses that were inserted into property deeds to keep people who were not White from buying or occupying homes. From our base in the University of Minnesota Libraries, our interdisciplinary team collaborates with community members to expose the history of structural racism and support the work of reparations.

The Occupy Archive is a collection of digitized Occupy Movement materials and ephemera collected from 2011-2018.

PrisonPandemic is a digital archive of stories from people incarcerated, their family members and loved ones, and the staff who work in California prisons and jails about the impact and experience of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Revolutionary Papers is an international, transdisciplinary research and teaching initiative on anticolonial, anti-imperial and related left periodicals of the Global South. It includes over forty university-based researchers, as well as editors, archivists, and movement organizers from around the world. The initiative looks at the way that periodicals—including newspapers, magazines, cultural journals, and newsletters—played a key role in establishing new counter publics, social and cultural movements, institutions, political vocabularies and art practises. Operating as forums for critique and debate under conditions of intense repression, periodicals facilitated processes of decolonization during colonialism and after the formal end of empire, into the neo-colonial era. Revolutionary Papers traces the ways that periodicals supported social, political and cultural reconstruction amidst colonial destruction, building alternative networks that circulated new political ideas and dared to imagine worlds after empire.

This multi-media web site brings the vital history of Seattle's civil rights movements to life with scores of video oral histories, hundreds of rare photographs, documents, movement histories, and personal biographies, more than 300 pages in all. Based at the University of Washington, the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project is a collaboration between community groups and UW faculty and students.

The Social Justice Portal Project, hosted by the Social Justice Initiative at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is a movement-centered collaborative think tank created in 2021 to bring together scholars, organizers, artists and activists to address the urgent questions of racial and social justice. In 2020–2021, the U.S. and the world experienced multiple crises and confrontations that have forced us to interrogate basic assumptions and answer difficult questions about our society and shared future.

The Stop LAPD Spying Coaltion Archive is an “anarchive” of documents and stories organized and made available to our communities in order to support the understanding and resisting of surveillance and the Stalker State in Los Angeles, today.