Subject Guide
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.
- Jefferson's University: The Early LifeSesrch for information about the people at the University of Virginia, 1819-1870.
- Monticello Plantation DatabaseInformation on more than 600 individuals "who lived in slavery on Thomas Jefferson's Virginia plantations."
- Thomas Jefferson's Farm BookThomas Jefferson's working records primarily of his home, Monticello, and his private retreat, Poplar Forest, but also other farms and estates that he owned in Albemarle, Bedford, and Campbell counties in Virginia including Lego, Shadwell, Tufton, Elk Hill, Willis's Creek, and Bear Creek.
- 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. - 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.
- Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project,From the Library of Congress. See the Virginia material.
- Documenting the American South This link opens in a new windowPrimary 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.
- 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
- American Periodicals Series (1740-1940) This link opens in a new windowFull text of over 1000 magazines and journals published in the US between 1740 and 1940.
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.
- Virginia Chronicle NewspapersSearchable collection of Virginia newspapers provided by the Library of Virginia.
- Richmond Daily Dispatch (1860-1865)Nearly the full run of the Richmond Daily Dispatch from the eve of Lincoln's election in November 1860 to the evacuation of the city in April 1865. A project from the University of Richmond.
- 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.
- Virginia Emigrants to Liberia"The website now includes a searchable database of nearly 3700 Virginia emigrants to Liberia and nearly 250 Virginia emancipators, a timeline of relevant events and documents between 1787 and 1866, and a compilation of important related sources...".
- Geography of Slavery in VirginiaA digital collection of advertisements for runaway and captured slaves and servants in 18th- and 19th-century Virginia newspapers. Building on the rich descriptions of individual slaves and servants in the ads, the project offers a personal, geographical and documentary context for the study of slavery in Virginia, from colonial times to the Civil War.