Digital Research Process, (Spencer Weigand

My research process started by going back and rereading some of Nikhil Pal Singh's book Black is a Country, as well as some of Jill Lepore's A New Americanism: Why a Nation Needs a National Story, in order to refresh my memory of what cornerstones of what each of their arguments were.  Upon doing so, a constant idea the two seemed to disagree on was nationalism and what it represented to the black community. In order to get a better idea of this, I used nationalism as the keyword in my first search. I decided to use "African American Newspapers (series 1 and 2)" as my initial search engine as I wanted to look at how blacks view nationalism at this time. Over time, a very clear identity appeared. Black nationalism was consistantly being referenced as a form of counter-culture. However, deeper into these readings there were a few surprises, as well as some familiar names. W.E.B. Du Bois made multiple appearances in the articles I read, illustrating just how active he was at this time. Furthermore, the was a Suprisingly strong and consistent reference to South African apartheid. This was my biggest surprise.

Inadvertently, I discovered that the time period I chose to focus on, the late 1950s, and early 1960s, was heavily influenced by the goings-on in South Africa. While Vietnam was the focus of main stream american culture, a suprisingly large number of black newspapers focoused on this issue. Due to the suprising prevelence of this topic both of my sources make reference to it. Ultimately I choose the sources I did due to them being a direct example of Singh's idea on an international identity for blacks. The first of which is a news article talking about how Apartheid had helped launch the All African Peoples Conference, in which numerous nations were represented. Meanwhile, the second source is a photo of black Americans protesting a bank who was giving loans to a segregated South Africa 

South African Apartheid's Impact on Black Culture