Slaves

Using Primary Sources on the Web

A brief guide to using and evaluating primary source materials on the Internet. 
Primary sources may include letters, manuscripts, diaries, journals, newspapers, speeches, interviews, memoirs, documents produced by government agencies such as Congress or the Office of the President, photographs, audio recordings, moving pictures or video recordings, research data, and objects or artifacts

Timeline of slavery and emancipation.

Part of Library of Congress's "American Memory" project, "African American Odyssey" has information about early slave rebellions, the Underground Railroad, etc. Included are many excellent primary sources such as digitized images of black men voting after Reconstruction and schools founded by the Freedmen's Bureau.

The above link is the National Archives webpage dealing with blacks in the Civil War. Included are primary source documents, text as well as an overview and teaching aids.

An index of information about Slavery and Abolition available on the Internet

Primary source documents related to the Civil War.

Digitized images of primary sources relating to African Americans culled from Harper's Weekly 1857-1874

A large digitized collection of advertisements used by slave owners to recover runaway slaves.

Duke University’s “African-American Women” archival collection. Features primary source documents such as rare digitized slave letters along with memoirs of African-American women whose lives were impacted by slavery.

A fascinating website that documents two different communities, one Northern and one Southern, from the time of John Brown’s Raid through the era of Reconstruction. Site includes many primary source documents, photographs and digitized images of maps, objects, letters etc.

The following sites offer both written transcripts and taped interviews with former slaves discussing their experiences and those of their families under slavery.American Slave Narratives: An Online Anthology

Been Here So Long: Selections from the WPA American Slave Narrative

“American Slave Narratives” & “Been Here So Long” are both web sites featuring personal histories of former slaves as interviewed by writers working for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930’s. Some of the texts are accompanied by sound recordings of the interviews.

From the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a bibliographic site (a web site listing other resources for a topic) featuring many well known and lesser known autobiographies and biographies of slaves, fictionalized accounts of lives of slaves, and digitized images of primary documents.