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<hcquilts@cox.net> For a college-level research paper, I would recommend against using movies as a source of information. I cannot imagine that any professor would find them acceptable except in a paper concerning how AA inventors are portrayed in film. If you go to www.worldcat.org and type in "African-American inventor" you will find a list of about a hundred published works on the subject - which conveniently are identified as so that you can avoid the pop-culture books, films and juvenile literature. You have a somewhat better chance of getting reliable information from a book published by a university press rather than a leaflet printed by a local community organization, but this is not always true. A good place to start might be Donald and Jane Wilson's _The Pride of African American History: Inventors, Scientists, Physicians, Engineers : Featuring Many Outstanding African Americans and More Than 1,000 African American Inventions Verified by U.S. Patent Numbers_ (Birmingham, Mich: DCW Pub. Co, 2003). Two other volumes you may find helpful: Davis, Julia, and Henry E. Baker. Research on Afro-American Inventors: An Experiment with Henry E. Baker's "List of Colored Inventors in the United States As Furnished for the Paris Exposition, 1900". St. Louis, Mo: Public Library, 1980. Afro-Amerucan Historical and Cultural Museum. A Collection of Black Scientists and Inventors Since 1856: An Exhibit at the Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum. [Philadelphia, Pa: The Museum, 19uu], 1900s. Verify that whatever works you use are well-footnoted and that those footnotes refer to actual research or primary resources, not just other sources whose own information is second- or third-hand. (It is truly amazing how many "history" books cite questionable secondary sources or even children's books.) From there, you can search for works on individual inventors. . Don't forget that the Rutgers library has access to www.jstor.org, which is a search engine for articles published in scholarly journals. (A caveat again: check the writer's footnotes, and avoid e.g. "arts" and "culture" journals for historical information.)
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