Slavery in the United States: Free Web Resources
A guide for resources at the University of Iowa on the history of slavery in the United States
Selected Web Resources
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African-American Museum of IowaThe Cedar Rapids museum, opened in 2003, offers exhibits on the history of African and African Americans in the United States, with emphasis on Iowa.
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African-American Women: On-line Archival CollectionThe content for this website derives from the Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture, and provides access to online archival collections featuring scanned pages and texts of the writings of African-American women.
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The African American MosaicA Library of Congress Resource Guide for the Study of Black History & Culture
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The African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full CitizenshipThis Special Presentation of the Library of Congress exhibition, The African-American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship, showcases the Library's incomparable African-American collections.
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African American Perspectives: Pamphlets from the Daniel A.P. Murray Collection 1818-1907A panoramic and eclectic review of African-American history and culture, spanning almost 100 years from the early 19th through the early 20th centuries, with the bulk of the material published between 1875 and 1900.
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Amistad Research CenterAn independent manuscripts library dedicated to preserving African American and ethnic history and culture.
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The Antislavery Literature ProjectAntislavery literature represents the origins of multicultural literature in the United States. It is the first body of American literature produced by writers of diverse racial origins. It encompasses slave narratives, lectures, travel accounts, political tracts, prose fiction, poetry, drama, religious and philosophical literature, compendia, journals, manifestos, and children's literature. There is a complex and contradictory range of voices, from journalistic reportage to sentimental poetry, from racial paternalism and stereotyping to advocacy of interracial equality, from religious disputation to militant antislavery calls. In its whole, this literature is inseparable from an understanding of democratic development in US society.
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Association of African American MuseumsThe Association of African American Museums (AAAM) is a non-profit membership organisation for black museums, cultural institutions and black museum professionals in America.
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Black Abolitionist ArchiveFrom the University of Detroit Mercy. 1830s-1860s covered. Search by keyword, subject, name, date, organization, newspaper.
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Black Craftspeople Digital ArchiveFrom 1619 to beyond, Black craftspeople, both free and enslaved, worked to produce the valued architecture, handcrafts, and decorative arts of the American South. The Black Craftspeople Digital Archive seeks to enhance what we know about Black craftspeople by telling both a spatial story and a historically informed story that highlights the lives of Black craftspeople and the objects they produced. The first and second phases of this project focus on Black craftspeople living and laboring in the eighteenth-century South Carolina Lowcountry and mid-nineteenth century Tennessee.
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The BlackPast.org : an online reference guide to African American historyThis website has been created by staff associated with the University of Washington, Seattle. It provides free access to materials relating to Black African American history from the 18th Century to the present day.
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Books in Slavery25 titles (out of copyright) that deal with slavery in the US, available for download on Project Gutenberg.
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Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938Contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves.
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Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice - Repository of Historical DocumentsThe repository contains high resolution images of over one hundred and fifty historical documents, some six hundred manuscript pages in all, as well as introductory headnotes, bibliographic information, and technical data. The collection can be browsed by date, name, or type of document. Many of the documents have been transcribed, as part of an ongoing project.
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Center for Black Music ResearchThe Centre for Black Music Research (CBMR), is a research unit of Columbia College Chicago, and is "devoted to research, preservation, and dissemination of information about the history of black music on a global scale".
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Digital Library on American SlaveryDLAS is an expanding resource compiling independent collections focused upon race and slavery in the American South, made searchable through a single, simple interface. DLAS houses tens of thousands of records relating to all 15 slave states and Washington, D.C. as well as a number of northern states. DLAS contains detailed personal information about over 100 thousand individuals, including enslaved people, enslavers, free people of color, and more.
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Documenting the American SouthDocumenting the American South (DocSouth) includes sixteen thematic collections of primary sources for the study of southern history, literature, and culture.
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Enslaved People in the SoutheastA digital exhibit created and curated by the ASERL Special Collections Interest Group. This collaborative online exhibit recognizes the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first Africans sold into bondage in the English Colonies. This date, in 1619, is regarded as the beginning of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade in North America.
The exhibit documents the history of the enslaved in the Southeast and includes material related to the many varied aspects of enslavement, including paper documents and records as well as images. These provide valuable information about the entire infrastructure and system of enslavement as well as the individual and group experiences of enslaved people. Items submitted include photos, letters, bills of sale, emancipation documents, insurance and taxation documents, and maps indicating segregation zones. The exhibit will also explore the legacies of slavery by including documents and images related to convict lease labor and Jim Crow in the 20th century. -
Frederick Douglass PapersThe Frederick Douglass Papers provide full-text access to a wealth of materials relating to the life, work, and legacy of African-American slave and anti-slavery campaigner Frederick Douglass.
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Freedmen's Bureau OnlineThis site looks at the creation and history of the Freedmen's Bureau, as well as issues facing freed slaves after the Civil War. "The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, often referred to as the Freedmen's Bureau ... supervised all relief and educational activities relating to refugees and freedmen, including issuing rations, clothing and medicine." Links to government records dealing with the Freedmen's Bureau as well as genealogy sites.
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The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and AbolitionThis academic center is "dedicated to the investigation and dissemination of information concerning all aspects of the Atlantic slave system and its destruction."
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Images of African-American Slavery and FreedomA large collection of slavery-related images from the Library of Congress
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In Motion: African American Migration ExperienceIt is an invaluable source for the study of Black American history, providing free access to over 16,000 texts, 8,000 images and 60 maps relating to Black migration movements from the 15th - 21st century.
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Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American PortraitsThis site provides free access to an online exhibition from the National Portrait Gallery. It comprises a collection of photographs of key figures from the African American community from the 19-20th Centuries.
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North American Slave NarrativesPart of 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.
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Schomburg Center for Research in Black CultureA national research library devoted to collecting, preserving and providing access to resources documenting the experiences of peoples of African descent throughout the world.
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Slavery ImagesWith a growing collection of over 1,200 images, this website is envisioned as a tool and a resource that can be used by teachers, researchers, students, and the general public - in brief, anyone interested in the experiences of Africans who were enslaved and transported to the Americas and the lives of their descendants in the slave societies of the New World.
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SlaveryStories.orgThis site seeks to make it easier for people to read about the history of American slavery, in the words of those who lived it and to create an open source collaboration that anyone in the world can access and contribute to.
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The Spread of U.S. Slavery, 1790-1860 (interactive map)L. Mullen has "created an interactive map of the spread of slavery in the United States from 1790 to 1860. Using Census data available from the NHGIS, the visualization shows the population of slaves, of free African Americans, of all free people, and of the entire United States. It also shows those subjects as population densities and percentages of the population."
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Unknown No Longer - Virginia Historical SocietyA resource for the study of African American slavery in Virginia - This database allows for viewing original documents in digital form, as well as read the pertinent information in transcript.
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Virginia RunawaysA digital database of runaway and captured slave and servant advertisements from 18th-century Virginia newspapers. Part of 'Virtual Jamestown'.
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Vocies from the Days of SlaveyThe 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.
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Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade DatabaseHas information on almost 35,000 slaving voyages that forcibly embarked over 10 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.
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W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American ResearchThe Du Bois Institute is the nation's oldest research center dedicated to the study of the history, culture, and social institutions of Africans and African Americans.
Subject Guide
British Slave Trade
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Parliament and the British Slave Trade 1600-1807: DocumentsFrom Parliament in the United Kingdom.
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Slavery and DiplomacyFrom the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office. A History Note on the Foreign Office and the suppression of the transatlantic slave trade
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The Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British SlaveryAt the core of the completed project is this online Encyclopaedia of British Slave-ownership containing information about (1) every slave-owner in the British Caribbean, Mauritius or the Cape at the moment of abolition in 1833; (2) all the estates identified in the British Caribbean in the period 1763-1833; and (3) all the slave-owners, attorneys, mortgagees and legatees identified to date for the estates between 1763 and 1833. Entries for individuals include information about the activities, affiliations and legacies of these men and women, with a particular emphasis on the "absentee" owners based in Britain.
The records of the Slave Compensation Commission, set up to manage the distribution of the £20 million compensation, provide a more or less complete census of slave-ownership in the British Empire in the 1830s. The individuals named in these records form the starting point of the Encyclopaedia. The records for the estates between 1763 and 1833 are more fragmented. These are discussed in more detail in the section on [Sources for the Estates] elsewhere in this website.