Maps
Guinea propia, nec non Nigritiae vel Terrae Nigrorum maxima pars . . . .
Nuremberg: Homann Hereditors, 1743.
Hand-colored, engraved map. This came from this online exhibit.
Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division
Be sure to search for maps at the Library of Congress and David Rumsey's Historical Map Collection
Images from Harper's Weekly
Access Harper's Weekly
Tips for Evaluating Primary Sources
When evaluating primary or secondary sources, ask the following questions:
- How does the author know these details (names, dates, times)? Was the author present at the event or soon on the scene?
- Where does this information come from - personal experience, eyewitness accounts, or reports written by others?
- Are the author's conclusions based on a single piece of evidence, or have many sources been taken into account (e.g., diary entries, along with third-party eyewitness accounts, impressions of contemporaries, newspaper accounts)?
- New York University | Bobst Library: Guidelines for Evaluating Primary DocumentsThere is also a section for evaluating sources you find on the Web.
- Primary Sources on the Web: Finding, Evaluating, UsingThis brief guide is designed to help students and researchers find and evaluate primary sources available online.
Oral History Resources
- HistoryMakers Digital ArchiveThe HistoryMakers is a video oral history archive dedicated to preserving African American history as the missing link in American history. Focused on American history, oral history and education in general and more specifically on African American history, education, music, law, the arts, science, technology, media, medicine, entertainment, fashion & beauty, business, the military, politics and sports, The History Makers is a combination archive, library, museum, stock footage collection, on-line educator and educational PBS/TV programming. Its topics include but are not limited to African American organizations and associations, slavery, reconstruction, the labor movement, the civil rights movement and black authors.
African-American Newspapers, Pamphlets & Periodicals
- American Periodicals1740 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). - Hispanic American Newspapers1808-1980.
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. - African American Newspapers: The 19th CenturyThis 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..."
- African American Newspapers1827-1998
- African American Periodicals, 1825-1995More than 170 periodicals by and about African-Americans: academic and political journals, commercial magazines,
institutional newsletters, bulletins of organizations, annual reports, and other genres. - Historical African American Newspapers Available OnlineA guide by Elizabeth Clarke from Marist College, James A. Cannavino Library
- Afro-Americana Imprints 1535-1922Twelve 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!
- The Liberator FilesBoston-based Abolitionist newspaper, published by William Lloyd Garrison, 1831-1865. From the Boston Public Library. Be sure to go to the home section for more.
- The Southern CourierCovering Civil Rights in the South 1965-68. "From the start, The Southern Courier recruited and maintained a bi-racial staff committed to reporting and disseminating the news in a professional and objective manner."
- New York Times Historical NewspapersThis database offers full-page images and article images from the New York Times dating back to 1851 (called New York daily times, 1851-1857). Digital reproductions of every page from every issue, cover to cover, in downloadable PDF files. It provides genealogists, researchers and scholars with online, easily-searchable first-hand accounts and coverage of the politics, society and events of the time.
- The Nation. July 1865- .The Nation Digital Archive provides full access to the complete backfile of the oldest continuously published weekly journal in America; it includes every article, editorial, poem, puzzle, and review since publication began on July 6th, 1865.
Print Antebellum & Civil War Resources
Primary sources--such as original documents, letters, diaries, interviews, and oral histories, can often be found collected in print volumes. Tisch Library has a wide array of print primary sources in its collection. Below is a sample of some of the resources that you can find but remember, this is only a sample, so use JumboSearch to find more or Ask a Librarian for help!
The American Slave: A Composite AutobiographyCall Number: Book Stacks E441 .A58Transcriptions of narratives prepared by the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-38, and deposited in the Library of Congress, where they were assembled under title: Slave narratives, a folk history of slavery in the United States from interviews with former slaves.The Negro in the Continental Congress
Call Number: Book Stacks E185 .B47Extracts from the 34 volumes of the Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774-1789.Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies
Call Number: Book Stacks E444 .S57The largest collection of annotated and authenticated accounts of slaves ever published in one volume.Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virgina Ex-Slaves
Call Number: Book Stacks E444 .W45A collection of interviews of former slaves, conducted by the Virginia Federal Writers' Project in 1936 and 1937.
Documents of upheaval; selections from William Lloyd Garrison's the Liberator, 1831-1865Call Number: Book Stacks E449 .L68Selections from a key abolitionist publication that do not shrink from portraying William Lloyd Garrison as the revolutionary he was.
Online Antebellum & Civil War Resources
Many primary sources--such as original documents, letters, diaries, interviews, and oral histories, have been digitized and are available online. Below is a sample of some of the resources available in digital format, but remember, this is only a sample, so if you don't find what you need here, Ask a Librarian for help!
- Oxford African American Studies CenterThe Oxford African American Studies Center is a comprehensive collection of scholarship available online to focus on the lives and events that have shaped African American and African history and culture. Includes extensive primary sources.
- A History of Racial Injustice: TimelineCreated by the Equal Justice Initiative, the timeline traces African American history from 1619 to the present, including background information, primary source photos and documents, and much more.
- Documenting the American South (DocSouth)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.
- Library of Congress, American Memory Project -- African American HistoryThere are many relevant collections in this section, including slave narratives.
- North American Slave Narratives"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.
- The Mind of the Negro as Reflected in Letters Written During the Crisis, 1800-1860A collection of letters written by free blacks prior to the Civil War. Also available in print. Call Number: Book Stacks E185 .W8877 1969
- American Slave Narratives: An Online AnthologyFrom the University of Virginia, this website 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 above for information about the print volumes in this set.
- Slave Culture: A Documentary Collection of the Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' ProjectThis work stands apart from previous Slave Narrative collections in that it organizes the narratives thematically, bringing the rich tapestry of slave culture to life in a fresh way. Within each thematic area, multiple excerpts span time, gender, and geography.
- Slavery & Antislavery: A Transnational ArchiveDigital 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.
- Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade DatabasesSearch the Voyages Database, examine estimates of the slave trade, explore African-Origins, use maps and the timeline and chronology
- Slave VoyagesPart of The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture's In Motion series
- The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual RecordFrom 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.
- New-York Historical Society: Manuscript Collections Relating to SlaveryThe 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!
- Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave SocietiesThe 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.
- Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery CollectionThe 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: Virginia Runaways, Slave Advertisements, Runaway AdvertisementsThe 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.
- Freedmen and Southern Society ProjectFrom 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.
- Encyclopedia VirginiaFrom the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities
- Maps of Liberia, 1830 to 1870From the Library of Congress: This collection of Liberia maps includes twenty examples from the American Colonization Society (ACS), organized in 1817 to resettle free black Americans in West Africa. These maps show early settlements in Liberia, indigenous political subdivisions, and some of the building lots that were assigned to settlers.
- My Life in the SouthJacob Stroyer (ca. 1846 - February 7, 1908) was an African-American former slave who became a preacher in Massachusetts. He is best known for his autobiography, My Life in the South. Stroyer was born on the Kensington Plantation in Eastover, South Carolina in either 1846 or 1849.
- The Negro in the Congressional RecordExtracts from the Congressional Record from 1789-1829.
- Mirror of Race"We invite you to explore The Mirror of Race Project, a place for reflection on the meaning of race in America — its past, as well as its present and future. Here you will find both a main exhibition of early American photographs as well as exhibitions on specific topics. You will also find critical commentary in various forms, such as essays and film."