Links
Listed below are various Internet sites I’ve found interesting or informative.
African plants and vegetation
Photos and other information on African plants, both herbaceous and woody, are available from CIRAD, PlantZAfrica.com, the website for the Flora of Zimbabwe, University of Catania’s botany department, and the Virtual Field Herbarium
For guides to botanical nomenclature, try the African Flowering Plants Database, or the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Tropicos database for global coverage
The Botanicus Digital Library offers digital copies of numerous original sources for African and global botany
Photos © Chris Duvall, 2007
West African land crab (Cardisoma sp.). Small crabs occur in forest patches in landlocked, semi-arid Mali. I was rather surprised the first time I encountered one, as I did not know there are such creatures away from the sea!
Food and agriculture
The World Food Habits bibliography is an excellent listing of literature on relationships between food and culture
The Food Museum offers a fascinating array of images and information about the history of many types of food and many different foodways
For an eclectic mix of information on food, primarily from a culinary perspective, try Foodreference.com
Some places it’s really easy to eat local... the webzine Edible Sacramento offers great information and perspectives on food and farming in California’s Sacramento Valley, where much of the produce we eat throughout the U.S. is grown
MSU professor Phil Howard has a resource-rich website—make sure to consult his database of books and movies
The New World Fruits Database compiles a wealth of information on hundreds of species, from botanical and horticultural to genetic and phytochemical
The subscription magazine Gastronomica, on food and culture, is worth browsing (MSU students can read it free through the MSU Library website!)
Historic media collections
Looking for old pictures? Try old-pictures.com or Shorpy.com for general assortments, or for more specific topics search the Library of Congress’s enormous American Memory collection
The Western History and Genealogy collection at Denver Public Library is a rich source of images and information on Colorado the Rocky Mountain West
Dedicated to mid-1900s advertising, especially for automobiles, is Plan59.com
The Internet Archive has hundreds of thousands of downloadable audio (voice and music), video (including cartoons), and text files
Digital document archives and collections
The Making of America project at Columbia University and at the University of Michigan is a rich source for original, 19th-century American periodicals
The American Philosophical Society has a rich collection of original documents, images, and audio files related to the history of the United States
Project Gutenberg is an important source of fully digitized books, mostly old and hard to locate, including many early modern works
If you are searching for recent works on tropical ecology and/or research management, try CIRAD’s database of publications by its researchers
The Persée website, operated by the French Ministry of Education, offers digital copies of many French academic journals
The CETE website offers digital versions of many unpublished and out-of-print French books, including several 19th-century European accounts of Africa
African culture and history
The University of Wisconsin’s Africa Focus website offers an array of video, audio, and text resources
The Mande Studies Association brings together researchers with interests in Mande cultures, such as Bambara/Bamanan, Malinké/Maninka, and Dioula/Jula
Khoisanpeoples.org provides a wealth of information on the several ethnolinguistic groups that consider themselves the “first people” of central and southern Africa
jamtan.com is an English-language Internet home for Fulani culture, while pulaagu.com is a French- and Fulbe-language home
Noirs d’Amérique Latine provides a wide range of information on Africans and African-Americans in Central America
The Africa page of the Smithsonian’s Migrations in History site focuses on cultural links between Central America and Africa
The African Diaspora Studies website is an outstanding source for information on current research and understanding of the World’s African heritages
