
100 Greatest African Americans is a biographical dictionary of one hundred historically great Black Americans, as assessed by Temple University professor Molefi Kete Asante in 2002.

Afro-American Press and Its Editors is a book published in 1891 written by Irvine Garland Penn. Penn covers African-American newspapers and magazines published between 1827 and 1891. The book covers many aspects of journalism, and devotes a chapter to black female journalists. Penn believed that the black press played a crucial role in presenting the case to the broader American population that black people were fit for the full benefits of citizenship.

Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography is a six-volume collection of biographies of notable people involved in the history of the New World. Published between 1887 and 1889, its unsigned articles were widely accepted as authoritative for several decades. Later the encyclopedia became notorious for including dozens of biographies of people who had never existed. In nearly all articles about the Cyclopædia various authors have erroneously spelled the title as 'Appleton's Cyclopædia of American Biography', placing the apostrophe in the wrong place.

The Biographical Dictionary of America was an American biographical dictionary first published in 1906 by American Biographical Society.

The Iowa Official Register, also called the Redbook or Red Book, is a publication of the State of Iowa. It contains mini-biographies and photos of Iowa's elected and appointed officials, records of elections, essays on selected topics in Iowa history, and general statistics of the state, among other topics. It was first authorized by law by Iowa's 24th General Assembly in 1892, with an official mandate to include "historical, political, and other statistics of general value, but nothing of a partisan character," though earlier editions had been published, primarily by Iowa Secretaries of State. The book's origins can be traced to the 7-page 1860 booklet entitled "Eighth General Assembly," and the name "Iowa Official Register" was first used in a 19-page 1873 booklet, though it appeared under other titles during the following years. It eventually gained the nickname "Redbook" from the fact that since 1907, it has been published with a red cover. Today, the Register has a fairly-standardized format, including a biannual publication scheme, and runs 450 to 600 pages in length.

Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive and Rising (1887) is an anthology of 177 short biographies of African-American men written by Rev. William J. Simmons, a Baptist minister and college administrator. The book has been called the "single most authoritative work on nineteenth-century African Americans". Henry McNeal Turner, a noted African Methodist Episcopal minister and leader, wrote the introduction.

Music and Some Highly Musical People is a history of African-American music by James Monroe Trotter first published in 1878. It represents perhaps the first attempt to assess American music across multiple genres in a single volume.

Noted Negro Women: Their Triumphs and Activities is an anthology of biographies of African-American women edited by Monroe Alpheus Majors published in 1893 in Chicago. Majors sketched the lives of nearly 300 women, including Edmonia Lewis, Amanda Smith, Ida B. Wells, and Sojourner Truth. Majors began to compile the book in Waco, Texas, in 1890. He hoped to show the worth of black women for themselves and as an expression of the value of all African Americans. A significant omission from the book was Harriet Tubman. The book sought to shape contemporary attitudes and historian Milton C. Sernett hypothesizes that including Tubman would invoke memories of the pain of slavery.

A Woman of the Century: Fourteen Hundred Seventy Biographical Sketches, Accompanied by Portraits of Leading American Women, in all Walks of Life is a compendium of biographical sketches of American women. It was published in 1893 by Charles Wells Moulton. The editors, Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore, were assisted by a group of contributors.