The African American Experience to 1865
Books, Essays, and Poetry:
- Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America.
- Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South
- “American Slavery in History and Memory and the Search for Social Justice.” The Journal of American History 90, no. 4 (2004): 1251–68. https://doi.org/10.2307/3660347.
- Blackett, Richard J., The Captives Quest for Freedom: Fugitive Slaves, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and the Politics of Slavery.
- Brown, Kathleen M., Good Wives, Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race and Power in Colonial Virginia
- Camp, Stephanie. Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South
- Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, 1818-1895.
- DuBois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880
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The Souls of Black Folk
- Egerton, Douglas R., Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America
- Fields, Barbara J. and Karen E. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life
- Franklin, John Hope. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans
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Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantations
- Furstenberg, François. “Beyond Freedom and Slavery: Autonomy, Virtue, and Resistance in Early American Political Discourse.” The Journal of American History 89, no. 4 (2003): 1295–1330. https://doi.org/10.2307/3092544.
- Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made
- Glymph, Thavolia. Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
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The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation.
- Gosse, Van. The First Reconstruction: Black Politics in American From the Revolution to the Civil War
- Holton, Woody. Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution
- Horton, James Oliver and Lois E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community and Protest among Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860
- Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself.
- Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul: Life Inside An Antebellum Slave Market
- Jones, Nikole-Hannah. The 1619 Project: A New Origins Story.
- Jordan, Winthrop D. White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812
- Kendi, Ibram X. and Blaine, Keisha. Four Hundred Souls, a Community History of African America
- Litwack, Leon. Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery
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North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States.
- Morgan, Edmund., American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virgina.
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“Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox.” The Journal of American History 59, no. 1 (1972): 5–29. https://doi.org/10.2307/1888384.
- Nash, Gary B. The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolutions
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Race and Revolution
- Northup, Solomon., Twelve Years a Slave (1855)
- Oakes, James., The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders.
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Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865.
- O'Donovan, Susan Eva. Becoming Free in the Cotton South
- Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study
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“Slavery.” Annual Review of Sociology 3 (1977): 407–49. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2945942.
- Quarles, Benjamin A. The Negro in the Civil War.
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The Negro in the American Revolution.
- Reed, Annette Gordon., The Hemings of Monticello: An American Family
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On Juneteenth
- Rockman, Seth Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore
- Rodgers, Stephanie Jones. They Were Her Property: White Women as Slaveowners in the American South
- Rose, Willie Lee. Rehearsal For Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment
- Rosen, Hannah. Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009)
- Rothman, Adam Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South
- Sinha, Manisha. The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition
- Smallwood, Stephanie., Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to the American Diaspora
- Stampp, Kenneth., The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Antebellum South
- Stuckey, Sterling, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America
- Taylor, Alan. The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832
- Waldstreicher, David., Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification
- Williams, George Washington. History of the Negro Troops in the War of the Rebellion, 1861-1865.
Movies, Music, and Other Media:
Primary Source Collections:
- Documenting the American South
Primary 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 Narratives
This 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.
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- Voices of Former Slaves
Consists 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 Records
Consists 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.
- US Newspapers: Databases and Digital Resources
U.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, 1639-1800
Searchable 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, 1801-1819
Searchable 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 Congressional
Information 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 Trade
Database 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 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.
- Black Abolitionist Archive From the University of Detroit Mercy. 1830s-1860s covered. Search by keyword, subject, name, date, organization, newspaper.
- 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 Southeast a 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.
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Slavery and the Law Slavery 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 Slavery 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