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SweetSearch Biographies offers profiles and outstanding search results for thousands of famous-or infamous-people from many walks of life, professions and countries, spanning many centuries. Our nifty filters help you choose the intriguing people you want to learn more about. Looking for female African American authors, for example? Choose Women from the categories on the left, then select African American and Author as your filters. The names in bold link to profiles on our sister site, findingDulcinea. The rest link to the search results for that person on SweetSearch, a Search Engine for Students, which searches only 35,000 Web sites that have been evaluated and approved by our research experts.

"What Makes a Great Teacher? Image credit: Veronika Lukasova Also in our Special Report: National: "How America Can Rise Again" Is the nation in terminal decline? Not necessarily. But securing the future will require fixing a system that has become a joke. Video: "One Nation, On Edge" James Fallows talks to Atlantic editor James Bennet about a uniquely American tradition-cycles of despair followed by triumphant rebirths. Interactive Graphic: "The State of the Union Is ..." ... thrifty, overextended, admired, twitchy, filthy, and clean: the nation in numbers. By Rachael Brown Chart: "The Happiness Index" Times were tough in 2009. But according to a cool Facebook app, people were happier. By Justin Miller On August 25, 2008, two little boys walked into public elementary schools in Southeast Washington, D.C. Both boys were African American fifth-graders. The previous spring, both had tested below grade level in math. One walked into Kimball Elementary School and climbed the stairs to Mr. William Taylor's math classroom, a tidy, powder-blue space in which neither the clocks nor most of the electrical outlets worked. The other walked into a very similar classroom a mile away at Plummer Elementary School. In both schools, more than 80 percent of the children received free or reduced-price lunches. At night, all the children went home to the same urban ecosystem, a zip code in which almost a quarter of the families lived below the poverty line and a police district in which somebody was murdered every week or so. Video: Four teachers in Four different classrooms demonstrate methods that work (Courtesy of Teach for America's video archive, available in February at teachingasleadership.org) At the end of the school year, both little boys took the same standardized test given at all D.C. public schools-not a perfect test of their learning, to be sure, but a relatively objective one (and, it's worth noting, not a very hard one). After a year in Mr. Taylo

The Mayme A. Clayton Library & Museum (MCLM) maintains the largest and most academically substantial, independently held collection of rare and out-of-print books, documents, films, music, photographs and memorabilia on African American history and culture in the United States.   MCLM's primary goal is to make the collection available to the public as a cultural compass to a more complete view of American history. 

The remarkable story of a group of six Sierra Leonean musicians who come together to form a band while living in a West African refugee camp.

The debate over slavery reparations ignores Africans' role in selling human beings.

"Welcome to the website of Bisharat! A language, technology, and development initiative. Bisharat* is an evolving idea based on the importance of maternal languages in sustainable development and the enormous potential of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) to benefit efforts in the area of language and development. Anticipating the gradual introduction of computers and the internet to rural communities in Africa, the current focus of Bisharat is on research, advocacy, and networking relating to use of African languages in software and web content. This website is always in development... Your comments and suggestions are welcome. To contact Bisharat, e-mail to: bisharat @ bisharat . net"

Did you know the Library provides podcasts of some of its presentations and online resources? Listen to book festival presentations, material on music and its impact on the brain and oral history interviews with African Americans who provide first-person accounts of the hardships of the slave plantations and of life during and after slavery. Download the audio recording and a transcript of the program to your iPod, other portable media player, or to your computer from the Library of Congress website. You may choose to automatically download this and subsequent episodes via a free subscription from the Library's podcast website or through Apple iTunes.

n his memoir Dreams from My Father, Obama describes an incident in which he, as a young boy, "came across the picture in Life magazine of the black man who had tried to peel off his skin" (51). Seeing the devastating effect negative messages about being African American had on this man, Obama "began to notice that [Bill] Cosby never got the girl on I Spy, that the black man on Mission Impossible spent all his time underground. [He] noticed that there was nobody like [him] in the Sears, Roebuck Christmas catalog ... and that Santa was a white man" (52).

Outstanding Black History Resource!

A large set of collections focussing mainly on US history, however also containing primary images from other regions of the world. Mainly photographs.