History 083: History of Slavery and Race in the United States

A digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes sixteen thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs.

There are many relevant collections in this section, including slave narratives.

Part of the Documenting the American South.
"North American Slave Narratives" collects books and articles that document the individual and collective story of African Americans struggling for freedom and human rights in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. This collection includes all the existing autobiographical narratives of fugitive and former slaves published as broadsides, pamphlets, or books in English up to 1920. Also included are many of the biographies of fugitive and former slaves and some significant fictionalized slave narratives published in English before 1920.

This website displays research into the lives of 431 enslaved people in seven multi-generational families at Mesopotamia plantation in Jamaica and Mount Airy plantation in Virginia.

Print: Tisch Book Stacks E 185 .W8877 1969

From the University of Virginia.
This web site provides an opportunity to read a sample of these narratives, and to see some of the photographs taken at the time of the interviews. The entire collection of narratives can be found in George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972-79). See below for complete print set and supplements.

Print: 17 vols. Tisch Book Stacks E 441 .A58
Entire collection of narratives from above site.

Print: 10 vols. Tisch Book Stacks E 444 .A45 SUPPL.1

Print: 10 vols. Tisch Book Stacks E 444 .A45 SUPPL.2

Digital primary source collection made up of four parts, Part I: Debates over Slavery and Abolition; Part II: Slave Trade in the Atlantic World; Part III: Institution of Slavery; Part IV: Age of Emancipation. Includes digitized books, pamphlets, newspapers, periodicals, manuscripts, private papers, and letters touching on all aspects of historical slavery.
All records are also in the online catalog. Includes Caribbean Documents collection, 1699–1959!

Search the Voyages Database, examine estimates of the slave trade, explore African-Origins, use maps and the timeline and chronology

Part of The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture's In Motion series

From the University of Virginia, the 1,280 images in this collection have been selected from a wide range of sources, most of them dating from the period of slavery.

The library of the New-York Historical Society holds among its many resources a substantial collection of manuscript materials documenting American slavery and the slave trade in the Atlantic world. What you can find online, you could easily visit!

The ESSSS preserves and digitalizes endangered ecclesiastical and secular documents related to slavery in the Americas. This website provides information about the project and its history and tools that allow researchers to search the ESSSS database containing nearly 300,000 documents from three countries and several archives. While most of the documents contained here belong to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there are also some Cuban documents from the sixteenth century and Brazilian documents from the seventeenth.

The Cornell University Library owns one of the richest collections of anti-slavery and Civil War materials in the world, thanks in large part to Cornell's first President, Andrew Dickson White, who developed an early interest in both fostering, and documenting the abolitionist movement and the Civil War.

The Geography of Slavery in Virginia is a digital collection of advertisements for runaway and captured slaves and servants in 18th- and 19th-century Virginia newspapers. Building on the rich descriptions of individual slaves and servants in the ads, the project offers a personal, geographical and documentary context for the study of slavery in Virginia, from colonial times to the Civil War.

From the University of Maryland, this collection contains online versions of primary sources such as proclamations, letters from slaves, court testimony, and other documents from the National Archives as well as essays on the period 1861-1867.

Records of the American Colonization Society.
Volume 1, 1825 to volume 68, 1892.

Volume 1, 1818 to volume 91, 1910

Selection of U.S. newspapers from 1690-1922 that contains hundreds of historic newspapers listed in Clarence Brigham's authoritative bibliography and in additional subsequent bibliographies with an emphasis on newspapers that began publication before 1820.

1740 to 1900
American Periodicals contains the full text of a wide variety of early American periodicals such as The American Apollo (1792-1792), The Boston Weekly - Magazine (1743-1743), and The Philadelphia Minerva (1795-1798).

1808-1980.
Hispanic American Newspapers, 1808-1980 represents the single largest compilation of Spanish-language newspapers printed in the U.S. during the 19th and 20th centuries. The distinctive collection features hundreds of Hispanic American newspapers, including many long scattered and forgotten titles published in the 19th century.

This collection of newspapers "contains a wealth of information about cultural life and history during the 1800s and is rich with first-hand reports of the major events and issues of the day..."

1827-1998

More than 170 periodicals by and about African-Americans: academic and political journals, commercial magazines,
institutional newsletters, bulletins of organizations, annual reports, and other genres.

Twelve thousand works from the Library Company of Philadelphia’s renowned Afro-Americana Collection. Includes books, pamphlets, anti-abolition literature, anti-slave-trade literature, slave narratives, sermons, and much more!