Research Guides: HST 222WI: Cherokees, Slaves, Racial Justice: Web Resources: African Americans

Selected Online African American Resources

African-American Perspectives: Pamphlets from the Daniel A. P. Murray Collection, 1818-1907
"Presents a panoramic and eclectic review of African-American history and culture, spanning almost one hundred years from the early nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries, with the bulk of the material published between 1875 and 1900. Among the authors represented are Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Benjamin W. Arnett, Alexander Crummel, and Emanuel Love." A rich source of primary material.
American Slave Narratives: An Online Anthology
"From 1936 to 1938, over 2,300 former slaves from across the American South were interviewed by writers and journalists under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration. These former slaves, most born in the last years of the slave regime or during the Civil War, provided first-hand accounts of their experiences on plantations, in cities, and on small farms. Their narratives remain a peerless resource for understanding the lives of America's four million slaves. What makes the WPA narratives so rich is that they capture the very voices of American slavery, revealing the texture of life as it was experienced and remembered."
The Avalon Project: Documents on Slavery
"A primary source project of the Yale University Law School."
Best of History Websites: American History
Created by UShistory.org this website includes context and connections to related websites.
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."
Digital Schomburg African-American Women Writers of the 19th Century
"A digital collection of some 52 published works by 19th-century black women writers. A part of the Digital Schomburg, this collection provides access to the thought, perspectives and creative abilities of black women as captured in books and pamphlets published prior to 1920. A full text database of these 19th and early 20th- century titles, this digital library is key-word-searchable."
Documenting the American South: North American Slave Narratives
"Documenting the American South (DocSouth), a digital publishing initiative sponsored by the University Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, provides access to digitized primary materials that offer Southern perspectives on American history and culture. It supplies teachers, students, and researchers at every educational level with a wide array of titles they can use for reference, studying, teaching, and research."
Freedom on the Move: Rediscovering the Stories of Self-Liberating People: a db of fugitives from American Slavery
A crowd-sourced db of ads reporting runaways from multiple newspapers.
From Slavery to Freedom: The African-American Pamphlet Collection, 1822-1909
"Presents 396 pamphlets from the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, published from 1822 through 1909, by African-American authors and others who wrote about slavery, African colonization, Emancipation, Reconstruction, and related topics. The materials range from personal accounts and public orations to organizational reports and legislative speeches. Among the authors represented are Frederick Douglass, Kelly Miller, Charles Sumner, Mary Church Terrell, and Booker T. Washington."
Lantern Project
The Lantern Project is a collaborative project digitizing legal records of enslavement in the Deep South.
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The Lantern Project is a collaborative project led by Mississippi State University as part of a coalition of institutions located within Mississippi and Alabama, including the University of Mississippi Libraries (Oxford, MS); Delta State University (Cleveland, MS); The Natchez Historical Foundation (Natchez, MS); Columbus-Lowndes County Public Library (Columbus, MS); and the Montgomery County Archives (Montgomery, AL).The Lantern Project provides, for the first time, centralized and institutionally supported access to information in legal records documenting enslaved persons, including probate records, court records (orphans court, civil court, criminal court, and others), deeds, receipts, bills of sale, and other documents which were or could have been used as evidence in a trial, from across Mississippi and the Deep South.
Secession Era Editorials Project
The Secession Era Editorials Project has digitized a number of newspaper editorials written just prior to the Civil War addressing four particular subject areas. Newspaper editors did not pretend to be objective or above the political fray in the 1850s, and made no bones about giving their opinions about current events. They were perfectly willing to take a stand on moral, political, and any other issues. Readers did not have to try to guess the writers' biases, because these were plainly and unashamedly laid out for all to see.
Slaves and the Courts, 1740-1860
"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."

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