African American Resources at the University of Virginia
Electronic texts related to slavery used as part of the Rare Book School 1995, Introduction to Electronic Texts class
David Seaman
Africans in America
"America's journey through slavery is presented in four parts. For each era, you'll find a historical Narrative, a Resource Bank of images, documents, stories, biographies, and commentaries, and a Teacher's Guide for using the content of the Web site and television series in U.S. history courses."
- PBS Online
The Afro American Newspaper
Online version of the weekly newspaper from Baltimore.
- History
Sections include: Black Resistance...Slavery in the U.S. ; The Tuskegee Airmen ; Jackie Robinson ; The Black Panther Party ; Black or White ; The Million Man March ; The Scottsboro Boys ; This is Our War.
Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy, 1719-1920
Prof. Hall "uncovered the background of 100,000 slaves who were brought to Louisiana in the 18th and 19th centuries making fortunes for their owners. Pouring through documents from all over Louisiana, as well as archives in France, Spain and Texas, Dr. Hall designed and created a database into which she recorded and calculated the information she obtained from these documents about African slave names, genders, ages, occupations, illnesses, family relationships, ethnicity, places of origin, prices paid by slave owners, and slaves' testimony and emancipations."
By Dr. Gwendolyn Hall, Professor Emerita, History Dept. Rutgers University
American Slave Narratives
An Online Anthology
"...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 Amistad Research Center
"An independent archives, library, & museum dedicated to preserving African-American & ethnic history and culture."
Tulane University
Amistad Trial Home Page
Includes maps, newspaper accounts, biographies, the trial record, the Supreme Court arguments & decision, letters & diary entries, bibliography, images and other links
Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record - (dead link)
"The hundreds of images in this collection have been selected from a wide range of sources, most of them dating from the period of slavery. This collection is envisioned as a tool and a resource that can be used by teachers, researchers, students, and the general public."
By Jerome S. Handler and Michael L. Tuite Jr.
A Project of The Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and The Digital Media Lab at the University of Virginia Library
Beyond Face Value: Depictions of Slavery in Confederate Currency
"This electronic exhibit focuses on the depictions of slaves in Confederate currency. It is important to remember that these images were created by those who institutionalized and worked to preserve slavery, and they do not necessarily portray the slaves as they viewed themselves and their condition...Images of slavery, however, were not the only illustrations on such documents: Vignettes featuring modes of transportation, mythical characters, historical figures of the American Revolution, and romantic portrayals of white women and children also decorated paper money issued in the Confederacy. These scenes offer a new perspective on the Civil War era South."
A Project of the United States Civil War Center, Louisiana State University
Black Codes of Mississippi, 1745
From the Afro-American Almanac
Black Loyalists: Our History, Our People
"This site explores an untold story of our nation's history: how Canada became the home of the first settlements of free blacks outside Africa.
"The Documents section contains a number of original historical documents which we have transcribed for your use, including several first hand accounts of life as a Black Loyalist in Nova Scotia. In addition we have court records, official proclamations, personal letters, and a wealth of other material, all of which may be cited at your leisure. A separate page describes a number of valuable secondary sources, historians, and web sites you may wish to consult for further information."
In addition to the Documents section this well designed site includes: Our Story ; People ; Communities ; Loyalist Now ; Timeline
From Canada's Digital Collections
Booker T. Washington Papers Online
"...is a completely free and searchable web site designed to provide researchers worldwide with full access to the thousands of pages comprising this 14-volume printed work, originally published by the University of Illinois Press.
The History Cooperative
Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938
"...contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and assembled and microfilmed in 1941 as the seventeen-volume Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves. This online collection is a joint presentation of the Manuscript and Prints and Photographs Divisions of the Library of Congress and includes more than 200 photographs from the Prints and Photographs Division that are now made available to the public for the first time."
American Memory, Library of Congress
The Church in the Southern Black Community - (dead link)
"This compilation of printed texts from the libraries at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill traces how Southern African Americans experienced and transformed Protestant Christianity into the central institution of community life. Coverage begins with white churches' conversion efforts, especially in the post-Revolutionary period, and depicts the tensions and contradictions between the egalitarian potential of evangelical Christianity and the realities of slavery. It focuses, through slave narratives and observations by other African American authors, on how the black community adapted evangelical Christianity, making it a metaphor for freedom, community, and personal survival."
American Memory, Library of Congress / University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Conflict of Abolition and Slavery
Part of the Library of Congress exhibit African-American Mosaic Exhibition
Death or Liberty : Gabriel, Nat Turner, and John Brown
"The spirit of revolt exhibited by Gabriel in 1800 and Nat Turner in 1831 convinced John Brown in 1859 that the slaves across the South were ready and willing to emancipate themselves. All they needed, Brown concluded, was the moral and military guidance of an inspired leader. "Death or Liberty" examines these events and the debates about slavery, freedom, and sectional politics that raged in their wake. Finally the exhibition offers an overview of how the public memory of these events has changed."
Companion Website for an exhibit at The Library of Virginia
Detroit Area Library Network (DALNET) - Digital Projects
"The DALNET libraries serve many different user groups. Their collections include instructional materials, rich cultural heritage resources and collections of unique one-of-a-kind objects. Each member library plans the production, processing and presentation of digital contents from several perspectives."
- University of Detroit Mercy - Black Abolitionist Archive
"The Black Abolitionist Archive is a collection of documents created by antebellum blacks. In contrast to the popular belief that the abolitionist crusade was driven by wealthy whites, these important documents provide a portrait of black involvement in the anti-slavery movement."
DiscoverySchool.com - (dead link)
- Understanding Slavery
"Learn about the history of slavery around the world. Follow the journey of one man who was enslaved in both Africa and the United States. Then, travel back in time to Richmond, Virginia in 1845 to witness a slave auction. Along the way, you'll learn just how pervasive the institution of slavery was in the United States and how it differed from slavery abroad." [K-12]
The Dred Scott Case
"Arguments about slavery in the print and in public debate had a direct impact on the Scotts and the people who surrounded them. The records contained in this exhibit document the Scotts' early struggle to gain their freedom through litigation and are the only extant record of this significant case as it was heard in the St. Louis Circuit Court ... The 85 documents in the Dred Scott collection are presented here as arranged by the Missouri State Archives..."
Washington University Libraries, St. Louis
Dred Scott v. Sandford
Text of the Circuit Court's decision
The Emancipation Proclamation
Encyclopedia of Slavery
The Spartacus Internet Encyclopedia
"A comprehensive website with over 150 entries on slavery in the United States. This includes biographies of 30 slaves and 76 anti-slavery campaigners. The text within each entry is hyper-linked to other relevant pages in the encyclopedia. In this way it is possible to research individual people and events in great detail. The sources are also hyper-linked so the student is able to find out about the writer, artist, newspaper, organisation, etc., that produced the material."
Excerpts from Slave Narratives
Edited by Steven Mintz, University of Houston
The Face of Slavery & Other African American Photographs
From The American Museum of Photography
The Fredrick Douglass Institute
West Chester University
The Fredrick Douglas Papers at the Library of Congress
"...presents the papers of the nineteenth-century African-American abolitionist who escaped from slavery and then risked his own freedom by becoming an outspoken antislavery lecturer, writer, and publisher. The first release of the Douglass Papers, from the Library of Congress's Manuscript Division, contains approximately 2,000 items (16,000 images) relating to Douglass's life as an escaped slave, abolitionist, editor, orator, and public servant."
- American Memory, Library of Congress
Harriet Ann Jacobs
History Now - Abolition
Sections include: Lesson Plans ; Interactive History ; The Historian's Perspective.
Quarterly Themed Online Journal. Issue Five, September 2005.
- The Glider Lehrman Institute of American History
[Kansas] Territorial Kansas Online, 1854-1861
A Virtual Repository for Territorial Kansas History
"Explore the turbulent times of "Bleeding Kansas." Hundreds of personal letters, diaries, photos, and maps bring to life the settling of Kansas during the fierce debate over slavery... Verbal and physical confrontations between pro- and anti-slavery supporters were common."
Library of Congress - American Memory
Voices from the Days of Slavery: Former Slaves Tell Their Stories
"...provides the opportunity to listen to former slaves describe their lives. These interviews, conducted between 1932 and 1975, capture the recollections of twenty-three identifiable people born between 1823 and the early 1860s and known to have been former slaves."
Mariners' Museum
Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society and Museum
Key West, Florida
- Key West African Cemetery - The Last Slave Ships - (dead link)
"A riveting story about slave ships captured by the US Navy and brought to shore in Key West. A story about the ships, their crew and human cargo that united the town in a humanitarian
effort to end human suffering. Exhibition located at the Mel Fish."
Sections include: Introduction ; U.S. Navy and the Slave Trade ; Africa ; Slave Ships and the Clandestine Trade ; Africans in Key West ; Cuba ; Liberia ; African Cemetery in Key
__________
National Geographic Online
- The Underground Railroad
"Retrace the perilous route taken by slaves and learn about the abolitionists, both white and black, that risked their safety in order to help liberate fleeing slaves."
National Underground Railroad Freedom Center
Opening: Summer 2004, Cincinnati, OH
"The Underground Railroad is the core experience, but the exhibits will also include history galleries on pre-slavery African Kingdoms as well as post-slavery freedom movements in America, Poland, South Africa, India, etc."
PBS - American Experience - John Brown's Holy War (January 2004)
Companion website to the PBS broadcast of the film by Robert Kenner.
"Martyr, madman, murderer, hero: John Brown remains one of history's most controversial and misunderstood figures. In the 1850s, he and his ragtag guerrilla group embarked on a righteous crusade against slavery that was based on religious faith -- yet carried out with shocking violence. His execution set off a chain of events that led to the Civil War."
Sections include: The Film & More ; Special Features ; Timeline ; Maps ; People & Events ; Teacher's Guide.
PBS - American Experience - Reconstruction: The Second Civil War (January 2004)
Website companion to the TV broadcast.
"...offers insights into topics in American history including the Civil War, slavery, abolition, race relations, definitions of freedom and citizenship, civil rights, black suffrage and election to political office, impeachment, regional political differences, nationbuilding after war, the cotton economy, sharecropping, federal government intervention in the states, and more."
Sections include: Watch the Program ; 40 Acres and a Mule ; Plantations in Ruins ; Black Legislators ; Northerners in the South ; Slave to Sharecropper ; In God We Trust ; White Men Unite ; State by State ; Teacher's Guide ; 1870 Map ; Black Citizens.
PBS - American Experience - The Time of the Lincolns (January 2004)
"A companion to the film Abraham and Mary Lincoln: A House Divided, produced and directed by David Grubin...offer insights into topics in American history including women's rights, slavery, abolition, politics and partisanship, the growth of the industrial economy, and the Civil War."
Sections include: Partisan Politics ; Slavery & Freedom ; A Rising Nation ; Americans at War ; A Woman's World ; Teacher's Guide ; Maps ; Foot Soldiers ; Virtual Tour [slave cabin and examine the conditions of slavery].
Slavery Era Insurance Registry
"[I]nsurance policies from the slavery era have been discovered in the archives of several insurance companies, documenting insurance coverage for slaveholders for damage to or death of their slaves, issued by a predecessor insurance firm. These documents provide the first evidence of ill-gotten profits from slavery, which profits in part capitalized insurers whose successors remain in existence today." SB2199 Sec. 1(a).
Gov. Davis signed the bill into law in September 2000.
"...links to the Departmentís report to the California Legislature describing the information received from insurers in response to this statute, including the database of slave and slaveholder names and identifying information."
- California Dept. of Insurance
Slave Movement During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
"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."
Data and Program Library Service (DPLS), University of Wisconsin
Slave Relic Museum
Walterboro, South Carolina
"...is dedicated to documenting, preserving, interpreting, and celebrating the history and culture of peoples of African descent. Though victimized, exploited and oppressed, enslaved Africans in the Americas were active, creative agents in the making of their own history, culture, and political future. The Slave Relic Museum exhibits actual artifacts that were made and used by enslaved Africans from 1750 to the mid 1800's."
Slaves and the Courts, 1740-1740
"...contains just over a hundred pamphlets and books (published between 1772 and 1889) concerning the difficult and troubling 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."
- American Memory, Library of Congress
Tangled Roots
A Project Exploring the Histories of Americans of Irish Heritage and Americans of African Heritage.
"Tangled Roots is a research project about the shared history of African Americans and Irish Americans... seeks to investigate the history of American slaves and immigrants from Ireland and to consider the links between them. A collection of primary documents from the 17th century to the present provides portraits of people and events from the history of African and Irish Americans."
Yale University - Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition
Third Person, First Person
Slave Voices From the Duke University Special Collections Library
"...based on the catalog of an exhibit mounted at Perkins Library, Duke University, in November and December, 1995. Some of the items described here were too large or fragile to be scanned, so images of them were not included in the on-line version even though descriptions of the items are."
Uncle Tom's Cabin & American Culture
A Multi-Media Archive
Use this site in three different "modes" :
Browse Mode "provides access to all the primary material in the archive -- texts, images, songs, 3-D objects, film clips, &c. -- one at a time."
Search Mode "allows you to search all the primary material at once. You can either use or cut across the site's organizational categories."
Interpret Mode "includes an interactive timeline, virtual exhibits designed to suggest ways of exploring and understanding the primary material, as well as lesson plans for teachers and student projects."
Directed by Stephen Railton, Dept. of English, University of Virginia
Uncle Tom's Cabin Historic Site (Ontario Canada)
"...commemorates the life of Reverend Josiah Henson and his contributions to the famous Underground Railroad. It was Henson's life experiences that inspired Ms. Stowe's creation of the character Uncle Tom in her 1852 outcry against slavery."
The Underground Railroad
Niagara's Freedom Trial
"...The majority of passengers who traveled along the Underground Railroad headed North towards Canada...The region of Niagara was a safe haven for refugee slaves crossing the Niagara River into freedom. The heart of the region was also a sanctuary for abolitionists activities centered around the city of St. Catharines [Ontario]. The focus of the website is to bring the life the History of the Underground Railroad in the city of St. Catharines and the Niagara Region.
From Canada's Digital Collections
Underground Railroad: Special Resource Study
"This study includes a general overview of the Underground Railroad, with a brief discussion of slavery and abolitionism, escape routes used by slaves, and alternatives for commemoration and interpretation of the significance of the phenomenon."
National Parks Service
The Underground Railroad in Rochester, New York
"...an overview of slavery, the Fugitive Slave Act, abolitionists, the Railroad and its history in Rochester, New York."
By Ilana May, Mark Beigel, and Lenny Hochschild
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
- The Slave Trade Archives Project
"is concerned with the access to and preservation of original archive materials relating to the slave trade...The countries foreseen as participating in the project at this stage are: Angola, Benin, Brazil, Cameroon, CÙte d'Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, HaÔti, Mozambique, Nigeria, Republic of Congo, Senegal, and Togo."
Up from Slavery
by Booker T. Washington, 1901.
Online version by Bartleby.com
Virginia Runaways Project
"The Virginia Runaways Project is a digital database of runaway and captured slave advertisements from 18th-century Virginia newspapers. When a slave ran away, slaveowners often placed remarkably detailed advertisements for their return. Sheriffs and other county officials also often advertised the capture of runaways or suspected runaways. This project offers full transcripts and images of all runaway and captured ads placed in Virginia newspapers from 1736 to 1790."
By Thomas Costa, History Department, University of Virginia's College at Wise
WPA Life Histories
Works Progress Administration - Virginia Life Histories
"...consists of approximately 1,350 life histories, social-ethnic studies, and youth studies; more than 50 interviews with former slaves, and a small number of folklore studies, all of which were created by the staff of the Virginia Writers' Project."
- The Library of Virginia
Yale University - Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition
Yale, Slavery & Abolition
Yale University and its Legacy
A critical and controversial examination of Yale's historic links to slavery.
Sections include: Who Yale Honors ; Endowments ; Abolitionists ; Town-Gown ; Summary ; Additional Resources.
See also
Anti-Slavery Issues in Canada, 1830-1870:
A Selective Bibliography
"The following is a list of materials held by the National Library of Canada and the National Archives of Canada on the anti-slavery movement in Canada between approximately 1830 and 1870. As the historiography relating to slavery is vast, including thousands of monographs and journal articles dealing with aspects of the issue, the present bibliography is restricted to primary material dating from the period when slavery was being debated and criticized in public discourse."
Focus on the Slave Trade
"As European countries debate whether to apologise for the transatlantic slave trade in past centuries, BBC News Online's Tom Housden examines the enforced movement of millions."
From BBC News - Africa (September 2001)
|
|
