Slavery: Primary Sources

Also available as a print book E 444.B18 1971 or an ebook.

Also available as a print book (E 444.B58 2005)

Includes the narratives of Olaudah Equiano, James Pennington, and William and Ellen Craft.

Also available as a print book (E 450 .B873 2002)

Also multiple copies available in print or as ebook.

All kinds of documents are available here: photographs and other visual images, newspaper articles, abolitionist speeches. Each has an annotation. This site was created to be a companion to the PBS series "Africans in America."

Selections from the WPA interviews with former slaves from the American South done from 1936-1938.

Divided into sections: History and Literature, Federal Statutes, State Statutes, Treaties and Agreements, Documents.

The source for the WPA slave narratives. All 2,300 narratives are searchable by keyword.

Search America's historic newspaper pages from 1789-1963 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present.

"Learn more about enslaved Africans and their descendants living in the Chesapeake, Carolinas, and Caribbean during the Colonial and Ante-Bellum Periods. Analyze and compare archaeological assemblages and architectural plans from different sites at unprecedented levels of detail. DAACS is a community resource, conceived and maintained in the Department of Archaeology at Monticello, in collaboration with the research institutions and archaeologists working throughout the Atlantic World."

Documenting the American South (DocSouth) is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes ten thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs. (From website).

'Search over numerous datasets and reconstruct the lives of people involved in the historical slave trade. Browse interconnected data, generate visualizations, and explore short biographies of enslaved and freed peoples.'

"Throughout the 250-year history of slavery in North America, enslaved people tried to escape. Once newspapers were common, enslavers posted “runaway ads” to try to locate these fugitives. Such ads provide significant quantities of individual and collective information about the economic, demographic, social, and cultural history of slavery, but they have never been systematically collected. We are designing and beginning data collection for a database that will compile all North American slave runaway ads and make them available for statistical, geographical, textual, and other forms of analysis. Some elements of data collection will be crowdsourced, engendering a public sense of co-participation in the process of recording history, and producing a living pedagogical tool for instructors at all levels, in multiple disciplines."

A collection of documents from Yale University's Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.

"The “Louisiana Runaway Slave Advertisements, 1836-1865” collection is a comprehensive digital collection of advertisements and notices harvested from the newspapers digitized as part of the Digitizing Louisiana Newspapers Project. In these advertisements people from Louisiana and the Lower Mississippi Valley demonstrate their agency and resistance against the institutions of slavery and indentured servitude."

This is actually a book that has been digitized on Google. It is incomplete, but enough is available to be useful.

"Search more than 35,000 records
of slavery within the State of New York
from 1525 through the Civil War."

A large collection of slave narratives.

"The North Carolina Runaway Slave Advertisements project provides online access to all known runaway slave advertisements (more than 2300 items) published in North Carolina newspapers from 1751 to 1840. These brief ads provide a glimpse into the social, economic, and cultural world of the American slave system and the specific experience within North Carolina. Working from microfilmed copies of these rare publications, the project team scanned the ads to provide digital images, create full-text transcripts and descriptive metadata, and develop a searchable database. The NCRSA website includes digital scans of the ads, contextual essays to address their historical research value, full text transcripts, an annotated bibliography to aid researchers, and a searchable database."

"These case files consist of 301 legal petitions for freedom by people of color originally filed in St. Louis courts between 1814 and 1860. They make up the largest corpus of freedom suits currently available to researchers in the United States."

"The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database has
information on more than 35,000 slave voyages
that forcibly embarked over 12 million Africans for transport to the
Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. It offers
researchers, students and the general public a chance to rediscover the
reality of one of the largest forced movements of peoples in world history."

Searchable texts and images of runaway slave advertisements in Virginia newspapers from the 1730's to the 1770's.