Juneteeth Resources

June 19th, or "Juneteenth," is the largest celebration of the end of slavery in the United States. However, it is not nearly as well known or widely celebrated as other holidays. If you would like to  learn more about the history of the holiday, and about African American history in general, the Terrebonne Parish Library has a plethora of free resources available at your fingertips, 24/7.

A great place to begin is with the Gale Virtual Reference Library (GVRL). To access GVRL from our website, select "Research" then "Databases by Name" and scroll down to the "G's." Withing GVRL, you will find titles such as the American Civil War Reference Library, a collection featuring five volumes of Civil War history. 

Also in GVRL, The Encyclopedia of Food and Culture has a fantastic article on African American food traditions that features a sidebar on Juneteenth, explaining its cultural significance in the African American community:

Works such as The Encyclopedia of Race and Racism, Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History, and Gale Encyclopedia of Multi-Cultural America, all available in full online through Gale Virtual Reference Library, feature significant information on African American culture, history, and traditions from various sources. 

Gale Virtual Reference Library is available for free, 24/7, to anyone with an active Terrebonne Parish Library Card. No check outs are required; simply log on from MyTPL.org and enjoy unlimited access to these titles and dozens more. 

Twayne's Author Series

Do you have a favorite author? Would you like to know more about them? Have you tried reading classics, but you just can't seem to get at the meaning behind all those symbols and metaphors? 

Twayne's Author Series, a database by Gale, is a great place to do your research and help crack the code of all those amazing, but hard to understand, works of fine literature. 

Authors such as Edith Wharton, Anthony Trollope, Anton Chekov, and even Aristotle are analyzed in these full text ebooks detailing the lives of the authors as well as the literary analysis of their most important and lasting works. A full, clickable table of context, index, list of illustrations, and more are available. Citation tools make using these texts for school assignments a breeze. 

Other tools such as highlighting, adding notes, saving to Google Drive and saving to "my folder" make this a time saving resource over traditional print books, often only available in print in our reference section, where it can't be removed for extensive note taking at home.