What is Ethnic Studies?
Ethnic Studies is the critical and interdisciplinary study of race, ethnicity, and indigeneity with a focus on the experiences and perspectives of Black, Indigenous, Pacific Islander, Latines, and Asian American communities within and beyond the United States. Since the creation of the field in the 1960s, scholars continue to analyze and explore the intersections of race, gender, class, status, identity, power, and resistance.
Students, led by the Black Student Union, staged a powerful sit-in at then college president Robert Wert's office resulting in Mills College being the first independent college to establish an Ethnic Studies program in 1969. It is this legacy, from the activism of students to the creation of the Ethnic Studies department to a former interdisciplinary department of Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, that undergirds anti-racism throughout the curriculum.
More on Ethnic Studies
Scholar OneSearch at Oakland
Search the catalog of the F.W. Olin LIbrary on the Oakland campus plus online articles, streaming media, and more.
Key Resources
- Academic Search Ultimate (EBSCOhost) This link opens in a new windowScholarly, peer-reviewed articles and professional association publications, Abstracts and links to full text, about half are peer reviewed, covering all academic subjects including STEM fields.
Use this link if you want to include video clips from the Associated Press in your search results. - Accessible Archives This link opens in a new windowAccessible Archives includes diverse primary source materials reflecting broad views of United States history and culture, especially African American history and women's history and historical newspapers. The date scope focuses on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
- BrowZine Web Edition This link opens in a new windowBrowZine is software that allows you to browse, read, and monitor many of the librarys scholarly journals in a format optimized for your iOS or Android device.
- Ethnic NewsWatch (Proquest) This link opens in a new windowInterdisciplinary, bilingual (English and Spanish) full text newspapers, magazines and journals of American ethnic, minority and indigenous communities. Offers additional viewpoints from those proffered by the mainstream press.
- SAGE Journals This link opens in a new windowJournals in full text published by Sage, emphasis on the social sciences.
Special Collections, Archives, and Newspapers
Mills College Special Collections and Archives is comprised of about 20,000 volumes, 10,000 manuscripts, archives, and photographs housed in the Elinor Raas Heller Rare Book Room. The collection includes printed books from the 15th century to the present, as well as the Mills College Collection. It is also the home to the Mills College Center for the Book, a forum for cultural, literary, and aesthetic heritage of the book.
- Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century This link opens in a new windowBrings perspective to the Black Freedom Struggle via the primary source records of major civil rights organizations and personal papers of leaders and observers of the 20th century Black freedom struggle.
- Early Caribbean Digital Archive (Northeastern University) This link opens in a new windowA digital archive of early colonial Caribbean texts, to uncover and make accessible a literary history of the Caribbean written or related by black, enslaved, Creole, indigenous, and/or colonized people.
- Historical Black Newspapers (ProQuest) This link opens in a new windowA rich collection important to a full understanding of Unites States history. Includes the Atlanta Daily World (1931-2003), Baltimore Afro-American (1893-1988), Chicago Defender (1910-1975),Los Angeles Sentinel (1934-2005), New York Amsterdam News (1922-1993), and the Pittsburgh Courier (1911-2002).
- Latin American Newspapers 1805-1922 (World Newspaper Archive) This link opens in a new windowOver 50 online and full text historic newspapers from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Guyana, Peru, and Venezuela.
- Rafu Shimpo Digital Archive This link opens in a new windowRafu Shimpo is the longest running Japanese American newspaper in the United States. Full text. In Japanese and English, 1914-2021.
- South Asia Newspapers (World Newspaper Archive) (Readex/Newsbank) This link opens in a new windowSearchable 19th and 20th century newspapers from South Asia, especially India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
The Black Panther Party (BPP) was founded in October 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale as an organization dedicated to protecting and uplifting the Black population of Oakland. As the organization grew this focus spread to the rest of the United States and even abroad. Linked below are archives about the BPP and the BPP newspaper.
- The Black Panther NewspaperThe Black Panther was the official newspaper of the Black Panther Party. It was the main publication of the party and was soon sold in several large cities across the United States, as well as having an international readership. The newspaper distributed information about the party's activities, and expressed through articles the ideology of the Black Panther Party.
- The Black Panther Party National ArchivesThe Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) was founded in October 1966 in Oakland, California by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, who met at Merritt College in Oakland. It was a revolutionary organization with an ideology of Black nationalism, socialism, and armed self-defense, particularly against police brutality. It was part of the Black Power movement, which broke from the integrationist goals and nonviolent protest tactics of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The BPP name was inspired by the use of the black panther as a symbol that had recently been used by the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, an independent Black political party in Alabama.
- Black Panther Party Community News ServiceThe Black Panther Intercommunal News Service was a weekly periodical with national and international distribution. It was published for 13 years, starting in 1967, and was sometimes called the Black Panther Black Community News Service. In its heyday, the Party sold several hundred thousand copies of the newspaper per week.