History of the United States

From the website: “The Trans-Atlantic and Intra-American slave trade databases are the culmination of several decades of independent and collaborative research by scholars drawing upon data in libraries and archives around the Atlantic world. The new Voyages website itself is the product of three years of development by a multi-disciplinary team of historians, librarians, curriculum specialists, cartographers, computer programmers, and web designers, in consultation with scholars of the slave trade from universities in Europe, Africa, South America, and North America.”

This massive digital project seeks to identify and visualize the millions of individuals involved in the historical slave trade.

This site contains the digitized records of hundreds of freedom suits filed by enslaved people in Washington, D.C. between 1800 and 1862.

From the website: “The library of the New-York Historical Society holds among its many resources a substantial collection of manuscript materials documenting American slavery and the slave trade in the Atlantic world. 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.”

The Digital Library on American Slavery is an expanding resource compiling various independent online collections focused upon race and slavery in the American South, made searchable through a single, simple interface. Although the current focus of DLAS is sources associated with North Carolina, there is considerable data contained herein relating to all 15 slave states and Washington, D.C., including detailed personal information about slaves, slaveholders, and free people of color.

The Frederick Douglass Papers at the Library of Congress presents the papers of the nineteenth-century African American abolitionist who escaped from slavery and then risked his freedom by becoming an outspoken antislavery lecturer, writer, and publisher. The online collection, containing approximately 7,400 items (38,000 images), spans the years 1841-1964, with the bulk of the material dating from 1862 to 1865.

One of the individual collections at the Library of Congress, this 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 (FWP) of the Works Projects Administration (WPA).

This is an original manuscript collection, hosted by Southern University, that was compiled by John Brother Cade, Sr., by 1935. It consists of digitized reports from ex-slaves from 17 states.

Via Cornell University, this is an extensive collection of pamphlets (from the mid-19th century) devoted to the anti-slavery struggle.

Also at the University of Chicago, this archive contains original correspondence, newspaper and journal articles written by the pioneering African-American journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett.

This Google Doc is an amazing list of digital humanities projects and resources (some of which feature digitized primary sources) devoted to Black history.

The Crisis, founded by W.E.B. Du Bois as the official publication of the NAACP, was (and still is) a journal of civil rights, history, politics, and culture and seeks to educate and challenge its readers about issues that continue to plague African Americans and other communities of color. This collection (via Google Books) dates back to 1910.

This marvelous collection, hosted by the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, contains more than 100,000 digitized items (correspondence, speeches, articles, newspaper columns, etc.) connected to DuBois.

This collection at the University of Georgia is particularly useful for the historic television clips (including interviews) relating to the history of the Civil Rights movement.

This fabulous digital historical project allows students to access the maps and descriptions used by agents of the federal government’s Home Owners Loan Corporation between 1935 and 1940, to carry out redlining, making it difficult or impossible for people (usually African-Americans and immigrant families) to become homeowners.

This project at Fordham University is dedicated to “uncovering the cultural, political, economic and religious histories of the more than 500,000 people of African descent in the Bronx.” It contains hundreds of transcripts and oral audio files of interviews with New York City’s African Americans, who have “transformed the [Bronx’s] character since the 1930s.”

This collection, from the Wisconsin Historical Society, contains over 40,000 pages of official records of organizations, personal papers, letters, racist propaganda, diaries, images and newsletters connected to the 1964 Freedom Summer project.

This collection (through the University of Virginia) contains television footage from the period particularly from two Roanoke (Virginia) television stations, as well as other relevant documents.