Primary Resources for African American Studies (HIS 221, 222, 223)

Dates covered: 1818-1907 (The bulk were published between 1875-1900)
The Daniel A. P. Murray Pamphlet Collection (Library of Congress) presents a panoramic and eclectic review of African-American history and culture, spanning almost one hundred years from the early 19th through the early 20th centuries. Among the authors represented are Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Benjamin W. Arnett, Alexander Crummel, and Emanuel Love.

The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery is taking part in the commemorations for the 150th anniversary of the Civil War and the presidency of Abraham Lincoln with a series of seven related exhibitions. Accompanying these exhibitions are weekly blog entries, podcasts and videos written and produced by experts on Civil War topics.

The United States Sanitary Commission (USSC), 1861-1879, was a civilian organization authorized by the United States government to provide medical and sanitary assistance to the Union volunteer forces during the United States Civil War (1861-1865). This New York Public Library collection contains photographs from the United States Sanitary Commission Collection, 1861-1872.

The Civil War and Reconstruction eras are another collecting strength of the Rubenstein Library. The manuscripts and archives from this period offer a range of obersavations on the lives of African American women during the transition from slavery to freedom. As with the Colonial and Antebellum eras, most collections are authored by white men and women. Some of the themes found throughout these collections period include: locating family members after slavery, relationships between former slaves and masters, the impact of the Freedmen's Bureau in the south, and African American labor.

LibGuide providing access to variety of manuscript collections from women serving in Civil War.

This site offers sample documents from the Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867 project developed at the University of Maryland.

Last Seen is recovering the stories of families separated in the domestic slave trade. You can search thousands of Information Wanted Ads taken out by former slaves to look for your ancestors; help us transcribe these ads; and find out how educators are using these family stories.

Civil War images in the North Carolina Collection include woodcuts, engravings, lithographs, and photographs. The vast majority of these are the products of people who either accompanied Union forces firsthand or received sketches and other information they provided. Many of the images appeared in Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper.

Visualizing Emancipation is a map of slavery’s end during the American Civil War. It finds patterns in the collapse of southern slavery, mapping the interactions between federal policies, armies in the field, and the actions of enslaved men and women on countless farms and city blocks. It encourages scholars, students, and the public to examine the wartime end of slavery in place, allowing a rigorously geographic perspective on emancipation in the United States.

This Pacifica Radio/UC-Berkeley collaboration seeks to gather, catalog, and make accessible primary source media resources related to social activism and activist movements in California in the 1960's and 1970's; it provides links to key resources and sites with primary sources on the Black Panther Party and more

(product of Internet Archive) In August of 2014, the Archive-It team put out a call for URLs related to the August 9th shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO. Soon after we were joined by Archive-It partner Washington University in St. Louis, MO who contributed lists of URLs and solicited URLs from communities in and around Ferguson. Today the #blacklivesmatter Web Archive contains news articles, blogs, social media, and other websites related to Ferguson, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, protests and demonstrations around the country, and seeks to document the movement as it grows and evolves.

This archive, developed by the University of Michigan Library, contains documents and images concerning Supreme Court cases; busing and school integration efforts in northern urban areas; school integration in the Ann Arbor Public School District; and recent re-segregation trends in American schools.

The struggle for racial equality in the 1950s and 1960s is among the most far-reaching social movements in the nation's history, and it represents a crucial step in the evolution of American democracy. The Civil Rights Digital Library promotes an enhanced understanding of the Movement by helping users discover primary sources and other educational materials from libraries, archives, museums, public broadcasters, and others on a national scale.

A non-profit educational archive located in San Francisco dedicated to the preservation and dissemination of historical audio, video, and print materials documenting progressive movements and culture from the 1960s to the 1990s.

Thurgood Marshall Law Library, University of Maryland.
Since its inception in 1957, the United States Commission on Civil Rights has been at the forefront of efforts by the Federal Government and state governments to examine and resolve issues related to race, ethnicity, religion and, more recently, sexual orientation.

Digital Library of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

This University of Virginia archive contains films from the nightly news from two local television stations in Virginia--WDBJ (CBS) Roanoke and WSLS (NBC) Roanoke. In this initial installment we have digitized over 230 films.

11 collections from Library of Congress

An online reference center that makes available materials on African American history. These materials include an online encyclopedia of over 4,000 entries, the complete transcript of more than 300 speeches by African Americans, other people of African ancestry, and those concerned about race, given between 1789 and 2016, over 140 full text primary documents, bibliographies, timelines and six gateway pages with links to digital archive collections, African and African American museums and research centers, genealogical research websites, and more than 200 other website resources on African American and global African history.

This digital initiative, by the University Library at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, provides access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture.

The commission works across the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources to achieve the mission of preserving, protecting, and promoting North Carolina’s African American history, art, and culture, for all people.

History Study Center is an online resource providing a vast collection of digitized primary and secondary sources for the study of history. It is suitable for a wide range of users, from high school students looking for quick and reliable facts on a historical topic, to researchers examining hard-to-find primary source texts.

Digital collections of images, audio files, news articles, interviews, and other first-hand accounts of African American history from 1830 to present day.

Public speech making has played a powerful role in the long struggle by African Americans for equal rights. This collection, for the ear and the eye, highlights speeches by an eclectic mix of Black leaders. Their impassioned, eloquent words continue to affect the ideas of a nation and the direction of history.

Key site from the New York Public Library's digital and research collections on African American culture.

Umbra is a freely available digital discovery tool designed for the research and study of African American history and culture. It includes a growing collection of digital materials—images, videos, books, and more—provided by libraries, museums, and other repositories around the country.

Mounted by the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in collaboration with the Race and Slavery Petitions Project, this database provides a searchable index to the "Race, Slavery and Free Blacks" microform set, which is available at the Brown University Library. PLEASE SEE the "Microforms" tab of this guide for further details.

This digital initiative, by the University Library at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, provides access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture.

The records displayed in this exhibit document the Scotts' early struggle to gain their freedom through litigation and are the only extant records of this significant case as it was heard in the St. Louis Circuit Court. This collection was expanded from 85 - 111 documents, over 400 pages of text.

The first digital bilingual platform devoted to disseminating the history of the early inhabitants of Black-African ancestry of today's Dominican Republic, then a Spanish colony named La Española (Hispaniola, in English) that occupied the entire island of the same name, shared today by the Dominican Republic and the Republic of Haiti.

This site offers sample documents from the Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867 project developed at the University of Maryland.

The goal is to compile all North American slave runaway ads and make them available for statistical, geographical, textual, and other forms of analysis.

This collection of 25,000 digitized items are from the Historical Center at the Louisiana State Museum in New Orleans, the Louisiana Division of the New Orleans Public Library, The Historic New Orleans Collection, and Tulane University’s Louisiana Research Collection.

Dates covered: 1818-1907 (The bulk were published between 1875-1900)
The Daniel A. P. Murray Pamphlet Collection (Library of Congress) presents a panoramic and eclectic review of African-American history and culture, spanning almost one hundred years from the early 19th through the early 20th centuries. Among the authors represented are Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Benjamin W. Arnett, Alexander Crummel, and Emanuel Love.

Comprises fourteen significant collections from the NYHS's extensive manuscript holdings on slavery. They consist of diaries, account books, letter books, ships’ logs, indentures, bills of sale, personal papers, and records of institutions. Some of the highlights are the records of the New York Manumission Society and the African Free School, the diaries and correspondence of English abolitionists Granville Sharp and John Clarkson, the papers of the Boston anti-slavery activist Lysander Spooner, the records of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, the draft of Charles Sumner’s famous speech The Anti-Slavery Enterprise, and an account book kept by the slave trading firm Bolton, Dickens & Co.

This site provides access to the raw data and documentation which contains information on slave ship movement between Africa and the Americas from 1817-1843. Specifically, the data file contains information on the ship's port of arrival, date of arrival, type of vessel, tonnage, master's name, number of guns, number of crew, national flag, number of slaves, port of departure, number of days of voyage, and mortality.

The sources for this project are advertisements placed in eighteenth-century English and Scottish. newspapers by slave-owners. The project will also locate and make available related newspaper, legal and other materials.

Numbering over 10,000 titles, May's pamphlets document the anti-slavery struggle at the local, regional, and national levels.

This site provides access to the raw data and documentation which contains information on the following slave trade topics from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: records of slave ship movement between Africa and the Americas, slave ships of eighteenth century France, slave trade to Rio de Janeiro, Virginia slave trade in the eighteenth century, English slave trade (House of Lords Survey), Angola slave trade in the eighteenth century, internal slave trade to Rio de Janeiro, slave trade to Havana, Cuba, Nantes slave trade in the eighteenth century, and slave trade to Jamaica. For information about the data sets, read the study descriptions for each data set.

Part of Washington State University's Brief Timeline of American Literature and Events site, this collection features informational resources as well as primary source material

Contains over a hundred pamphlets and books (published between 1772 and 1889) concerning the experiences of African and African-American slaves in the American colonies and the United States. The documents, most from the Law Library and the Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress, comprise an assortment of trials and cases, reports, arguments, accounts, examinations of cases and decisions, proceedings, journals, a letter, and other works of historical importance.

Examines the expansion of slavery in the borderlands between the United States and Mexico in the years between 1837 and 1845. Based at the Virginia Center for Digital History, the project provides dynamic maps that plot the flows of slavery throughout Texas and a population search engine. Also includes primary sources such as personal letters, newspaper articles, constitutions and legal documents.

This database, sponsored by a number of research institutions, provides information on around 35,000 slaving voyages that forcibly embarked over 10 million Africans to the Americas between the 16th and 19th centuries.

A national learning project which supports the teaching and learning of transatlantic slavery and its legacies using museum and heritage collections. Six museums across the UK have worked in partnership to share expertise, develop resources, training opportunities and school sessions.

The voyage of the Sally was an example of "the triangle trade." Rum-laden Rhode Island ships sailed to Africa and acquired cargoes of Africans, who were carried to the plantation colonies of the Caribbean and sold. The ships returned home with holds filled with sugar and molasses, which was distilled into rum and shipped to Africa to produce more slaves, more sugar, and more rum. In the century before 1807, roughly 100,000 Africans were carried into New World slavery on Rhode Island ships, most to the Caribbean. The Sally's voyage stands out for several reasons. It the best-documented Rhode Island slaving venture, but it was also one of the deadliest. The timing of the voyage was significant: 1764 marked the beginning of the imperial crisis between Great Britain and its thirteen mainland North American colonies. Drawn from holdings of the John Carter Brown Library and the Rhode Island Historical Society.

Requires headphones/speakers/captions. From the Library of Congress, American Memory Project. Almost 7 hours of recorded interviews took place between 1932 and 1975 in nine Southern states. 23 interviewees, born between 1823 and the early 1860s, discuss how they felt about slavery, slaveholders, coercion of slaves, their families, and freedom.