The African American National Biography Project is a joint project of the

Hutchins Center for African & African American Research The Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, also known as the Hutchins Center, is affiliated with Harvard University. The Center supports scholarly research on the history and culture of people of African descent around the world, ...

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

and

Oxford University Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print books ...

. The object of the project is to publish and maintain a database of

African American African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of ens ...

s similar in scope to the ''

American National Biography The ''American National Biography'' (ANB) is a 24-volume biographical encyclopedia set that contains about 17,400 entries and 20 million words, first published in 1999 by Oxford University Press under the auspices of the American Council of Le ...

''. The ''African American National Biography'' (AANB) was published in print in 2008, with a supplement published in 2013. The database, which is continually updated, includes many entries by noted scholars, among them Sojourner Truth by

Nell Irvin Painter Nell Irvin Painter (born Nell Elizabeth Irvin; August 2, 1942) is an American historian notable for her works on United States Southern history of the nineteenth century. She is retired from Princeton University as the Edwards Professor of Ameri ...

; W. E. B. Du Bois by Thomas Holt;

Rosa Parks Rosa Louise McCauley Parks (February 4, 1913 – October 24, 2005) was an American activist in the civil rights movement best known for her pivotal role in the Montgomery bus boycott. The United States Congress has honored her as "th ...

Darlene Clark Hine Darlene Clark Hine (born February 7, 1947) is an American author and professor in the field of African-American history. She is a recipient of the 2014 National Humanities Medal. Early life and education Darlene Clark was born in Morley, Missouri ...

;

Miles Davis Miles Dewey Davis III (May 26, 1926September 28, 1991) was an American trumpeter, bandleader, and composer. He is among the most influential and acclaimed figures in the history of jazz and 20th-century music. Davis adopted a variety of musi ...

John Szwed John F. Szwed (born 1936) is the John M. Musser Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, African American Studies and Film Studies at Yale University and an Adjunct Senior Research Scholar in the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University, where he ...

; Muhammad Ali by

Gerald Early Gerald Lyn Early (born April 21, 1952) is an American essayist and American culture critic. He is currently the Merle Kling Professor of Modern letters, of English, African studies, African-American studies, American culture studies, and Directo ...

; and President

Barack Obama Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the ...

Randall Kennedy Randall LeRoy Kennedy (born September 10, 1954) is an American law professor at Harvard University and author. He is the Michael R. Klein Professor of Law and his research focuses on the intersection of racial conflict and legal institutions in ...

. In 2008 the AANB was selected as a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, was named a ''Library Journal'' Best Reference work, and awarded Booklist Editors’ Choice — Top of the List. The general editors of the project are Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (born 1945) is a professor of Afro-American Studies, African American Religion and the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and African American Studies at Harvard University. Higginbotham wrote ''Righteous Discontent: ...

, while the executive editor is Steven J. Niven of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute.

References

External links

* ''Adapted from the

Wikinfo The history of wikis began in 1994, when Ward Cunningham gave the name "WikiWikiWeb" to the knowledge base, which ran on his company's website at c2.com, and the wiki software that powered it. The wiki went public in March 1995, the date used ...

articl
African American National Biography Project
licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.'' African-American cultural history Black studies Oxford University Press United States biographical dictionaries Research projects {{bio-dict-stub