MSU Libraries - Special Collections Focus on Arts and Culture

Students listen to a brainstorming session at a community meeting.

Ethnic Studies Collection

The Ethnic Studies Collection focuses on African American and Latino issues, including the Civil Rights movement, the Black Panthers, the United Farm Workers, and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Small press poetry titles by Chicana and Chicano authors, early works on slavery and the abolitionist movement, and a collection of African American cookbooks round out the collection.

Radicalism Collection

The Radicalism Collection includes books, pamphlets, periodicals, posters, and ephemera covering a wide range of viewpoints on political, social, economic, and cultural issues and movements in the United States and throughout the world.

Russel B. Nye Popular Culture Collection

With over 300,000 items, the Nye Collection is a major scholarly resource for the study of popular culture from the nineteenth century to the present. Categories include comic art, science fiction, juvenile literature, mysteries, popular information, romances, textbooks, Westerns, Sunday School books, and performing arts.

Africana

The Africana Collection is one of the largest in the United States, supporting broad faculty involvement in research and development projects. The MSU African Studies program consistently rates among the top two in the country, in number of faculty involved and dissertations produced.

Fine Arts Library

The Fine Arts Library houses the collections of art (visual, architecture, and photography) and music (scores, recordings, and books).