African American Studies 

Articles chop up your topic into little, narrow questions. If you find 5 articles, each presenting a narrow study, it's often hard to see how they fit together and what question they are all trying to answer.

Encyclopedia articles and books can give you overviews of your topic and lead you to the important questions asked by researchers. Subject specific encyclopedias contain articles written by experts in their fields and should put your idea or question into a historical, research, or social context. They will also lead you to further references.

Oxford African American Studies Center includes "...all the material from Africana, which presents a powerful account of the African and African American experience in five volumes [and] the new Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895 [which] documents the full range of the African American experience from the arrival of the black explorer, Esteban, who arrived with the Spanish in 1527, to the death of Frederick Douglass. A forthcoming companion set, the Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present, offers the most extensive treatment of African American history into the twenty-first century and will be fully available online in 2009. Bringing the contribution of African American women to the fore is the fascinating three-volume Black Women in America, Second Edition, edited by Darlene Clark Hine. And finally, the much-anticipated African American National Biography African American history through the lives of its people, ultimately offering over 6,000 biographies."