African American History

(PBS)--Breaks down the period from 1450 until 1865 in Black American history. Note in the red section at the bottom that each era has a Resource Bank. If you click on Resource Bank it is further broken down to People & Events, Historical Documents (***Primary Documents***) and Modern Voices.

(University of Virginia)-- 13 slave narratives, one of which has some sound files. Includes links to related readings and online resources.

(Boston Public Library)--includes papers of William Lloyd Garrison and the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. One of the free collections in Fold3 database.

(Library of Congress)--"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."

(University of North Carolina at Greensboro)--" Designed as a tool for scholars, historians, teachers, students, genealogists, and interested citizens, the site provides access to information gathered and analyzed over an eighteen-year period from petitions to southern legislatures and country courts filed between 1775 and 1867 in the fifteen slaveholding states in the United States and the District of Columbia." There are 282 documents on Texas between 1845 and 1865, 38 between 1861 and 1865.

(University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill)--"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."

(New York Historical Society)--"The fourteen collections on this web site are among the most important of these manuscript collections. They consist of diaries, account books, letter books, ships’ logs, indentures, bills of sale, personal papers, and records of institutions. Some of the highlights of these collections include 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"

(Cornell University)--"Numbering over 10,000 titles, May's pamphlets and leaflets document the anti-slavery struggle at the local, regional, and national levels. Much of the May Anti-Slavery Collection was considered ephemeral or fugitive, and today many of these pamphlets are scarce. Sermons, position papers, offprints, local Anti-Slavery Society newsletters, poetry anthologies, freedmen's testimonies, broadsides, and Anti-Slavery Fair keepsakes all document the social and political implications of the abolitionist movement."

(University of Nebraska-Lincoln)--The District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act, signed on April 16, 1862, allotted an average of $300 per slave to all slaveowners who were loyal to the Union, if slaveowners submitted petitions requesting compensation and identified certain information about the slaves.

(University of Virginia)--"The Texas Slavery Project takes a deep look at 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 offers a number of digital tools that allow users to explore the changing face of slavery in early Texas."

-Database of voyages of documented slaving expeditions, estimates of slave trade, and African names database; information on more than 15,000 slave voyages that forcibly embarked over 12 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the 16th and 19th centuries.

(University of Richmond)--"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.

(Library of Congress)--"The almost seven hours of recorded interviews presented here took place between 1932 and 1975 in nine Southern states. Twenty-three interviewees, born between 1823 and the early 1860s, discuss how they felt about slavery, slaveholders, coercion of slaves, their families, and freedom."

(Brown University)--Documents related to the 1764-1765 voyage of the Sally, in which 196 Africans were acquired and at least 109 died, some in a failed insurrection, others by suicide, starvation, and disease.