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Givens Collection of African American Literature | University of Minnesota Libraries

️Mon Mar 03 2025

Welcome

The Givens Collection includes novels, poetry, plays, short stories, essays, literary criticism, periodicals, and biographies that span nearly 250 years of American culture. It has particular strength in the areas of the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement.

The collection also holds a significant number of books that relate to African American art, education, social sciences, sports, and entertainment, as well as works by or about continental Africans and Africans in diaspora.

With tens of thousands of archival and manuscript materials that document the history of black literature and culture—correspondence, pamphlets, screenplays, newspaper clippings, photographs, sheet music, ephemera, including the Penumbra Theatre Company Archives—the Givens Collection is an invaluable community and scholarly resource.

Detailed finding aids are available online and in 213 Andersen Library.

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Finding aids

Finding aids, also known as collection guides, help you navigate materials in the Givens Collection, describing what is in each box to support your research. The finding aid may be a brief summary or a detailed description and inventory.

Digital collections

Search our digital collections of images, maps, films and videos, audio tapes, rare volumes and publications, and select items from archival collections.

Libraries catalog

Explore the University of Minnesota Libraries catalog for information about rare and special books, periodicals, and other publications held in the Givens Collection.

Explore the Givens Collection of African American Literature

List of archival collections

Explore a list of all of the archival collections within Givens

History of the collection

Learn more about the history of the Givens Collection

Collection highlights

Learn about the strengths of the collection

Other resources

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Umbra Sear ch African American History

Umbra Search African American History (umbrasearch.org) is a freely available search tool for hundreds of thousands of digitized African American materials across University of Minnesota collections as well as over a thousand other libraries and archives across the country.

Color drawing depicting Harriet Tubman holding a weapon in the woods

Annotated Bibliophilia

This digitized version of the Givens Collection's Bibliophilia: Collecting Black Books exhibit celebrates the beauty, romance, and workmanship of African American material culture, and demonstrates how the act of collecting African American literature is is tied to placing African American history at the center of America's history and culture.