Subject Liaison
Subject Librarian
Reference Source
- Encyclopedia VirginiaEncyclopedia Virginia is the online reference work about the Commonwealth of Virginia. It aggregates in a single resource information on Virginia history, business, politics, and geography, plus the state's proud heritage in the arts, religion, culture, and folklife. As the Encyclopedia grows, it will also explore areas of science, medicine, education, and technology and interpret the state's significance to the people of Virginia, the nation, and the world.
Example Streaming Videos in Virgo
- The Reconstruction Revolution (2015, 30 min.)The era of Reconstruction following the Civil War was a turbulent and divisive period in American life. Learn about governmental policies and legislation that were enacted to safeguard the welfare of former slaves and average citizens, and how these policies were then progressively dismantled, ultimately returning the South to white-dominated rule.
- Tattered Remains (2004, 27 min)Abuses of the system threatened Reconstruction. Compare southern successes of the time including improvements in education, the rebuilding of families, and sharecropping with the violence and legal barriers that subverted the rights of black citizens. Choose the link "Part of the Films on Demand collection" in Virgo to watch online.
- Your Ancestors in Ship Passenger Lists (2014, 33 min.)Learn how to make sense of passenger arrival records: the single most precious document for reconstructing your ancestors' voyage to North America. Using several key guideposts and sources (including colonial land records and immigrant directories), you can uncover facts about arrivals from colonial days through the 1950s.
Example Primary & Secondary Sources in Virgo
- Emancipation in the Virginia Tobacco Belt, 1850-1870 (PhD dissertation, 1986)This dissertation explores the transformation from slavery to freedom in the tobacco region that formed the hinterland for an industrially-advanced southern city. This transformation was decisively influenced by Afro-Americans who employed pieces of the slave past to shape the contours of legal freedom, showing thereby the power of black labor over the process of emancipation and the development of capitalism. The study identifies market-oriented aspects of antebellum society that preceded free labor, and it integrates the experiences of the region with those of both state and nation.
- History and Manual of the Colored Knights of Pythias (1917)A digitized copy of this 1917 manual and history is available through the Center for Research Libraries. Access using link in Virgo, then choose file to download and read item.
- Labor and Landownership in Halifax County, Virginia, 1865-1880 (MA Thesis, 1980)This History Master's thesis is a study of Halifax County, in the heart of the Virginia bright tobacco region. It provides a glimpse of the change from slavery to sharecropping, the fate of the wealthy landed class, and the role of rural merchants between 1865 and 1880.
- The Malungeon Tree and Its Four Branches (1891)This late 19th-century work about the Melungeons is available through HathiTrust. Use link in Virgo to access.
Helpful URLs
- Ask a LibrarianQuestions? Ask us! Chat, call, text, or email anytime.
- Purchase RecommendationsIs there an ebook you think the UVA Library should own but doesn't? Make a purchase recommendation.
- Using Databases Off GroundsHave questions about accessing databases from off-grounds? Find more information here.
Research Using Library Databases
The UVA Library subscribes to hundreds of databases that contain scholarly resources not available on the free web. Access to most of these databases is restricted to current members of the UVA community. Since you will be accessing from off Grounds, you will be prompted to sign in with NetBadge when using these resources. For some resources, you may need to use the VPN - see tab on left side menu (see the Off-Grounds Access link for more information).
The best way to connect to the library's databases is through the research portal. This page provides a list of recommended databases for your assignment. In addition, library subject specialists have created research guides for academic departments here at UVA. Subject research guides list the most important databases for conducting research in that discipline. Other guides that may be useful for this course include:
Databases & More for Finding Primary Sources
Some of the links below will take you to library subscription databases, while others are for resources made freely available on the web. If you have trouble connecting to or searching any of these resources, please contact Sherri or Chris (information on left) for help.
Slavery 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.
Slavery, Abolition & Social Justice - This resource is designed as an important portal for slavery and abolition studies, bringing together documents and collections covering an extensive time period, between 1490 and 2007, from libraries and archives across the Atlantic world. The link is to AM Explorer. Choose Collections, then Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice. This database is on trial and therefore only available through May 30, 2020. Because it is a trial, no PDF downloads are available.
The Colored Conventions Project (CCP) is a digital humanities interdisciplinary research hub that uses digital tools to bring the buried history of nineteenth-century Black organizing to life. The site features hundreds of primary sources from the conventions movement. Primary sources include minutes, proceedings, newspaper articles, speeches, letters, transcripts, and images. The digital collections are organized by year, type, and region. Many primary sources have been transcribed and are keyword searchable. Mirroring the collective nature of the nineteenth-century Colored Conventions, CCP uses inclusive partnerships to locate, transcribe, and archive the documentary record related to this nearly forgotten history and to curate engaging digital exhibits that highlight its significant events and theme.
Freedom on the Move is a database of fugitive slave advertisements from North America created by researchers at Cornell University and other institutional partners.
Documenting the American South includes primary sources that document the cultural history of the American South from the Southern point of view. Includes diaries, autobiographies, travel accounts, titles about slavery, and regional literature. Emphasis is on the 19th century.
The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas is a media database with images documenting many aspects of the slave trade and its aftermath.
Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database provides the most comprehensive source of data on the Atlantic slave trade. Based on the records of almost 35,000 Atlantic slave trade voyages, the database provides information on ships, crew, slave cargo, and routes. Information is supplemented by extensive maps and other resources.
Ancestry Library Edition is an academic version of ancestry.com. Along with images of original documents, it includes narratives, oral histories, indexes, and abstracts to other resources. Over 30,000 Ancestry.com record collections and 11 billion records available to search. Record collections span the 1500s–2000s. NOTE: UVA Library has a trial of this until April 10, 2020. You will likely need to use the VPN to access (see VPN tab on left for more info).
African American Resources for Virginia from FamilySearch provides a list of online resources for conducting research on African Americans in Virginia.
The African-American Families Database (AFFD) "is hosted by the Central Virginia History Researchers, a partnership among local historians, anthropologists, genealogists, and community residents. CVHR is developing a database for connecting African-American families to their antebellum roots and tracing patterns of community formation in the post-bellum period. We locate ante-bellum ancestors, and descendants of enslaved individuals, as well as visualize communities, research Projects, and map social networks."
Unknown No Longer: A Database of Virginia Slave Names was launched in 2011 by the Virginia Museum of History & Culture to make accessible biographical details of enslaved Virginians from unpublished historical records in its collections. The site provides researchers with the ability to discover information on ancestors not found in other sources.
Virginia Untold: The African American Narrative: The Library of Virginia houses local court records, state records, personal papers, business records, newspapers, special collections, books, journals, etc., that date back to the 1600s. Collectively, these records contain the names of millions of African Americans both enslaved and free. These names are access points to the individual stories of African Americans who lived in Virginia from the establishment of slavery in the 1600s until its demise in 1865. Taken as a whole, these individual stories help to shed light on the narrative of a people that has not been fully told.
African-American Genealogy is a list of resources compiled by UVA librarian and genealogy expert Jean Cooper. Some resources are available online.
DPLA - Immigration since 1840 - Resources about immigration available from the Digital Public Library of America
Immigration to the United States, 1789-1930 - This digital collection of historical materials in Harvard's libraries, archives, and museums, documents "voluntary immigration to the United States from the signing of the Constitution to the start of the Great Depression."
Databases for Newspaper & Magazine Articles
Accessible Archives includes texts and page images from The Pennsylvania Gazette (1728-1800), 7 African-American newspapers from 1827-1860, and 3 Civil War newspapers: New York Herald, Richmond Enquirer, and Charleston Mercury.
The African American Historical Serials Collection features 173 periodicals spanning from 1816 through 1922. The periodicals in this collection include newspapers and magazines, in addition to reports and annuals from various African American organizations, including churches and educational and service institutions.
Databases for Scholarly Journal Articles
America History & Life covers the history of the United States and Canada from prehistory to present with records from 2,000 English-language journals published worldwide.
Academic Search Complete is a large general database of articles from scholarly journals, magazines, and newspapers on many topics. Updated daily, it can be the best source for resources about very current topics.
JSTOR includes older issues of scholarly journals in many disciplines, from the start to 3-5 years ago.
Project Muse Searchable full text of nearly 600 scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, and mathematics, mostly from North American university presses. Older volumes are often available from JSTOR.
Finding items using Virgo
Virgo, the UVA Library’s primary search tool, contains catalog records for books, print journals, DVDs, maps, and digitized materials, as well as links to online articles from our rich array of subscription journals. You can search catalog materials and articles together, or view those results separately, using the facets provided to limit your results by author, format, publication period, and more. To find online content, use the Format limiters like EBook, Streaming Video, or Online to limit your catalog search results.
Example subject terms
- African Americans - Social Conditions - 19th Century
- Freedmen - United States - Biography
- Freedmen - Virginia
- Knights of Pythias
- Slave Narratives - United States
- Slavery - Political Aspects - Virginia
- Slavery - Virginia
- Slaves - Southern States - Biography
- Slaves - Southern States - Social Conditions
- Slaves' Writings, American
- Virginia - Politics and Government
Example E-Books of Interest
Almost Free: A Story About Family and Race in Antebellum Virginia by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in Virgo.ISBN: 9780820332291Publication Date: 2012In Almost Free, Eva Sheppard Wolf uses the story of Samuel Johnson, a free black man from Virginia attempting to free his family, to add detail and depth to our understanding of the lives of free blacks in the South. There were several paths to freedom for slaves, each of them difficult. After ten years of elaborate dealings and negotiations, Johnson earned manumission in August 1812. An illiterate "mulatto" who had worked at the tavern in Warrenton as a slave, Johnson as a freeman was an anomaly, since free blacks made up only 3 percent of Virginia's population. Johnson stayed in Fauquier County and managed to buy his enslaved family, but the law of the time required that they leave Virginia if Johnson freed them. Johnson opted to stay. Because slaves' marriages had no legal standing, Johnson was not legally married to his enslaved wife, and in the event of his death his family would be sold to new owners. Johnson's story dramatically illustrates the many harsh realities and cruel ironies faced by blacks in a society hostile to their freedom. Wolf argues that despite the many obstacles Johnson and others faced, race relations were more flexible during the early American republic than is commonly believed. It could actually be easier for a free black man to earn the favor of elite whites than it would be for blacks in general in the post-Reconstruction South. Wolf demonstrates the ways in which race was constructed by individuals in their day-to-day interactions, arguing that racial status was not simply a legal fact but a fluid and changeable condition.
Becoming Melungeon: Making an Ethnic Identity in the Appalachian South by Call Number: Ebook - Use link in Virgo record to access.ISBN: 9780803271548Publication Date: 2013Appalachian legend describes a mysterious, multiethnic population of exotic, dark-skinned rogues called Melungeons who rejected the outside world and lived in the remote, rugged mountains in the farthest corner of northeast Tennessee. The allegedly unknown origins of these Melungeons are part of what drove this legend and generated myriad exotic origin theories. Though nobody self-identified as Melungeon before the 1960s, by the 1990s "Melungeonness" had become a full-fledged cultural phenomenon, resulting in a zealous online community and annual meetings where self-identified Melungeons gathered to discuss shared genealogy and history. Although today Melungeons are commonly identified as the descendants of underclass whites, freed African Americans, and Native Americans, this ethnic identity is still largely a social construction based on local tradition, myth, and media. In Becoming Melungeon, Melissa Schrift examines the ways in which the Melungeon ethnic identity has been socially constructed over time by various regional and national media, plays, and other forms of popular culture. Schrift explores how the social construction of this legend evolved into a fervent movement of a self-identified ethnicity in the 1990s. This illuminating and insightful work examines the shifting social constructions of race, ethnicity, and identity both in the local context of the Melungeons and more broadly in an attempt to understand the formation of ethnic groups and identity in the modern world.
Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in VirgoISBN: 0807849014Publication Date: 2000Long before the Montgomery bus boycott ushered in the modern civil rights movement, black and white southerners struggled to forge interracial democracy in America. This innovative book examines the most successful interracial coalition in the nineteenth-century South, Virginia's Readjuster Party, and uncovers a surprising degree of fluidity in postemancipation southern politics. Melding social, cultural, and political history, Jane Dailey chronicles the Readjusters' efforts to foster political cooperation across the color line. She demonstrates that the power of racial rhetoric, and the divisiveness of racial politics, derived from the everyday experiences of individual Virginians--from their local encounters on the sidewalk, before the magistrate's bench, in the schoolroom. In the process, she reveals the power of black and white southerners to both create and resist new systems of racial discrimination. The story of the Readjusters shows how hard white southerners had to work to establish racial domination after emancipation, and how passionately black southerners fought each and every infringement of their rights as Americans.
Rambles of a Runaway from Southern Slavery by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in VirgoISBN: 9780813932385Publication Date: 2012Rambles of a Runaway from Southern Slavery tells of an extraordinary life in and out of slavery in the United States and Canada. Born Elijah Turner in the Virginia Tidewater, circa 1810, the author eventually procured freedom papers from a man he resembled and took the man's name, Henry Goings. His life story takes us on an epic journey, traveling from his Virginia birthplace through the cotton kingdom of the Lower South, and upon his escape from slavery, through Tennessee and Kentucky, then on to the Great Lakes region of the North and to Canada. His Rambles show that slaves were found not only in fields but also on the nation's roads and rivers, perpetually in motion in massive coffles or as solitary runaways. A freedom narrative as well as a slave narrative, this compact yet detailed book illustrates many important developments in antebellum America, such as the large-scale forced migration of enslaved people from long-established slave societies in the eastern United States to new settlements on the cotton frontier, the political-economic processes that framed that migration, and the accompanying human anguish. Goings's life and reflections serve as important primary documents of African American life and of American national expansion, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.
Slave Culture: A Documentary Collection of the Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in VirgoISBN: 9781440800863Publication Date: 2014For the first time, the WPA Slave Narratives are organized by theme, making it easier to examine--and understand--specific aspects of slave life and culture. There is no better way to appreciate history than to experience it through the eyes of those who lived it. Slave Culture: A Documentary Collection of the Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project brings together the memories of the last generation of enslaved African Americans gathered through interviews conducted between 1936 and 1938. This three-volume work stands apart from previous Slave Narrative collections in that it organizes the narratives thematically, bringing the rich tapestry of slave culture to life in a fresh way. Within each thematic area, multiple excerpts span time, gender, and geography. An introductory essay for each theme and a contextual explanation for each narrative help readers draw lessons from this vast collection, while an introduction to the work explains the Works Progress Administration's Slave Narrative project--illuminating still another era in American history.
Slavery and Class in the American South: A Generation of Slave Narrative Testimony, 1840-1865 by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in VirgoISBN: 9780190908386Publication Date: 2019In William L. Andrews's magisterial study of an entire generation of slave narrators, more than 60 mid-nineteenth-century narratives reveal how work, family, skills, and connections made for social and economic differences among the enslaved of the South. Slave narrators disclosed class-based reasons for violence that broke out between "impudent," "gentleman," and "lady" slaves and their resentful "mean masters." Andrews's far-reaching book shows that status and class played key roles in the self- and social awareness and in the processes of liberation portrayed in the narratives of the most celebrated fugitives from U.S. slavery, such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, and William and Ellen Craft. Slavery and Class in the American South explains why social and economic distinctions developed and how they functioned among the enslaved. Noting that the majority of the slave narrators came from the higher echelons of the enslaved, Andrews also pays close attention to the narratives that have received the least notice from scholars, those from the most exploited class, the "field hands." By examining the lives of the most and least acclaimed heroes and heroines of the slave narrative, Andrews shows how the dividing edge of social class cut two ways, sometimes separating upper and lower strata of slaves to their enslavers' advantage, but at other times fueling pride, aspiration, and a sense of just deserts among some of the enslaved that could be satisfied by nothing less than complete freedom. The culmination of a career spent studying African American literature, this comprehensive study of the antebellum slave narrative offers a ground-breaking consideration of a unique genre of American literature.
Sons of the Fathers: The Virginia Slavery Debates of 1831-1832 by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in Virgo.ISBN: 9780739141717Publication Date: 2010Erik Root's book explores the Virginia Slavery Debate of 1831-1832, conducted in the House of Delegates. This is possibly the greatest debate to have occurred in any southern state before the Civil War. The speeches in this book provide, for the first time ever, an unedited version of that debate where many of the sons of America's Founders deliberated over the necessity of emancipating the slaves in Old Dominion. In August 1831, Nat Turner led the most successful slave rebellion in America's history, killing some 60 men, women, and children. This insurrection provided the historical backdrop to the proposal for a gradual emancipation plan. The forces for emancipation, led by Thomas Jefferson's grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, were defeated in the course of the debate as the members of the House of Delegates rejected that it was a necessity to free the slaves. As a result, rift between what is now Virginia and Western Virginia developed, never to heal. Some in the debates believed slaves had the same rights as every human being. Those who balked at emancipation diminished slavery as an "evil" and came closer to the view that the slaves were mere property. They affirmed that the slave was property and rejected the natural rights grounding of the Founding. In this collection of primary source material-which consists of the speeches made public to the press and the people-the reader will be able to decide just how close the emancipation forces attached themselves to the "laws of Nature and Nature's God." The reader will also be able to decipher how far many Virginians departed from not only the Declaration of Independence, but the Virginia Declaration of Rights.
