Librarian for African American & African Studies
Librarian for History and Religious Studies
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Online Resources for North American Slavery
- VIRGO: The University of Virginia Online Library CatalogSearch the U.Va. Library's holdings, including Special Collections and many of our online resources.
The keyword searching is "Google-like," though advanced options are available. Advanced catalog searching allows user to search subject terms like "Slave trade" AND sources or slavery AND sources to more easily identify primary sources.
- America: History & Life (1964-present) This link opens in a new windowCovers the history of the United States and Canada from prehistory to present with records from 2,000 English-language journals published worldwide. Includes book reviews.
- Documenting the American South This link opens in a new windowPrimary sources that document the cultural history of the American South. Includes diaries, autobiographies, travel accounts, titles about slavery, and regional literature. Emphasis is on the 19th century. The subject browse under the letter S gives a sense of the range of materials related to slavery. The University Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill sponsors Documenting the American South, and the texts and materials come primarily from its southern holdings.
- Documenting the American South: North American Slave NarrativesThis collection within Documenting the American South is of special interest. 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.
- Voices of Former SlavesConsists of 26 audio-recorded interviews with ex-slaves, capturing the stories of former slaves in their own words and voices. Freely available fom the Library of Congress
- Southern Life and African American History, 1775-1915: Plantation RecordsConsists of two major components: records of ante-bellum southern plantations from the Revolution through the Civil War, and plantation records from Emancipation to the Great Migration. The primary source documents cover business and day-to-day labor operations, as well as the roles of women, racial attitudes, slave-master relations, and social and cultural life on the plantations. Choose "Southern Life and Slavery" to enter the collection.
Many more plantation records are available from our microfilm collections in VIRGO. - US Newspapers: Databases and Digital ResourcesU.Va. Library research guide including links to Accessible Archives (containing links to 7 African-American newspapers), America's Historical Newspapers, other African-American and Confederate newspapers, and the New York Times.
- Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans, 1639-1800Searchable full text with page images of books published in 17th- and 18th-century America. Browsable by genre, subject, author, printer, place of publication, and language. See also Early English Books Online and Eighteenth Century Collections Online.
- Early American Imprints, Series II: Shaw-Shoemaker, 1801-1819Searchable full text with page images of books published in early 19th-century America. The collection can also be browsed by genre, subject, author, printer, place of publication, and language.
- ProQuest CongressionalInformation by and about the U.S. Congress: documents and reports, legislative histories, hearings, and members and committees. Formerly LexisNexis Congressional. For the period 1789-1829, it may be helpful to use as a guide The Negro in the Congressional Record, available from Hathi Trust via VIRGO.
- Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave TradeDatabase comprises records of nearly 35,000 individual slaving expeditions between 1514 and 1866. They provide information about vessels, enslaved peoples, slave traders and owners, and trading routes. A variable (Source) cites the records for each voyage in the database. Other variables enable users to search for information about a particular voyage or group of voyages. The website provides full interactive capability to analyze the data and report results in the form of statistical tables, graphs, maps, or on a timeline.
- Slavery and Anti-Slavery This link opens in a new windowSlavery and Anti-Slavery includes collections on the transatlantic slave trade, the global movement for the abolition of slavery, the legal, personal, and economic aspects of the slavery system, and the dynamics of emancipation in the U.S. as well as in Latin America, the Caribbean, and other regions.
Black Abolitionist Archive From the University of Detroit Mercy. 1830s-1860s covered. Search by keyword, subject, name, date, organization, newspaper.
America's Historical Newspapers Searchable full text collection of US newspapers. For additional titles see 19th Century U.S. Newspapers
African-American Newspapers (1827-1860) Searchable text and page images for 7 African-American newspapers published between 1827 and 1860. The Accessible Archives Collections is in fact much broader and includes a range of early American newspapers from a number of localities throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, including the South Carolina Newspapers.
Sabin Americana 1500-1926. Sabin reaches into all aspects of American history and culture. It touches upon the political and religious life in North America and at times South America and the Caribbean. It features American and European views of the colonization of the Americas, the American Revolution, the days of the early Republic and Jacksonian period, the antebellum period, Civil War, era of Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction, the settlement of the West and the onset of the Gilded Age. Through published pamphlets, tracts, memoirs, congressional legislation, correspondence, broadsides, biographies, histories, fiction and poetry, eulogies, sermons and innumerable other genres, Sabin opens a window onto the Americas.
- Enslaved People in the Southeasta new 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.
- Slavery and the Law This link opens in a new windowSlavery and the Law features petitions on race, slavery, and free blacks that were submitted to state legislatures and county courthouses between 1775 and 1867. These petitions were collected by Loren Schweninger over a four year period from hundreds of courthouses and historical societies in 10 states and the District of Columbia. The petitions document the realities of slavery at the most immediate local level and with amazing candor. Slavery and the Law also includes the important State Slavery Statutes collection, a comprehensive record of the laws governing American slavery from 1789-1865.
- Slavery in Antebellum Southern Industries This link opens in a new windowSlavery in Antebellum Southern Industries presents some of the richest, most valuable, and most complete collections in the entire documentary record of American slavery, focusing on the industrial uses of slave labor. The materials selected include company records; business and personal correspondence; documents pertaining to the purchase, hire, medical care, and provisioning of slave laborers; descriptions of production processes; and journals recounting costs and income. The work ledgers in these collections record slave earnings and expenditures and provide extraordinary insight into slave life. The collections document slavery in such enterprises as gold, silver, copper, and lead mining; iron manufacturing, machine shop work, lumbering, quarrying, brickmaking, tobacco manufacturing, shipbuilding, and heavy construction; and building of railroads and canals.