CMU LibGuides: African American History: Primary Sources: Databases

Databases

Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy 1699 - 1820 Database
Names, genders, ages, occupations, illnesses, family relationships, ethnicity, places of origin, prices paid by slave owners, and slaves' testimonies and emancipations of 100,000 slaves brought to Louisiana in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Archives Unbound This link opens in a new window
Topically-focused digital collections of historical documents. Currently the Libraries offer 27 collections, 23 of which focus on African American History:
Grassroots Civil Rights & Social Activism: FBI Files on Benjamin J. Davis, Jr.
Ralph J. Bunche Oral Histories Collection on the Civil Rights Movement
The Southern Negro Youth Congress and the Communist Party: Papers of James and Esther Cooper Jackson
The Papers of Amiri Baraka, Poet Laureate of the Black Power Movement
Fannie Lou Hamer: Papers of a Civil Rights Activitist, Political Activist, and Woman
The Greensboro Massacre, 1979: Shootout between the American Nazis and the Communist Workers Party
The Quest for Labor Equality in Household Work: National Domestic Workers Union, 1965-1979
FBI Surveillance of James Forman and SNCC
Black Economic Empowerment: The National Negro Business League
The Black Liberation Army and the Program of Armed Struggle
Franklin D. Roosevelt and Race Relations, 1933-1945
Liberation Movement in Africa and African America
The Republic of New Afrika
Fight for Racial Justice and the Civil Rights Congress
Integration of Alabama Schools and the U.S. Military, 1963
African America, Communists, and the National Negro Congress, 1933-1947
Federal Surveillance of African Americans, 1920-1984
Rastafari Ephemeral Publications from the Written Rastafari Archives Project
James Meredith, J. Edgar Hoover, and the Integration of the University of MississippiV
The Bush Presidency and Development and Debate Over Civil Rights Policy and LegislationV
Black Nationalism and the Revolutionary Action Movement: The Papers of Muhammad Ahmad (Max Stanford)
""We Were Prepared for the Possibility of Death:"" Freedom Riders in the South, 1961

Atlanta Funeral Programs Collection
Over 3300 funeral programs documenting the funeral services of Georgia residents, primarily from the Atlanta, Georgia area. Most of the programs are from services held during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. A majority of the programs are from churches in the Atlanta, Georgia area, with a few programs from other states such as South Carolina, Tennessee, Florida, Michigan, New Jersey, and New York, among others. The programs typically contain a photograph of the deceased, an obituary, a list of surviving relatives, and the order of service. The collection provides extensive genealogical information about the deceased, including birth and death dates, maiden names, names of relatives, past residences, and place of burial. Alongside this genealogical information, the obituaries provide a rich source of local history.
Freedom on the Move: A Database of Fugitives from North American slavery
A work in progress, eventually the database will compile all North American slave runaway ads and make them available for statistical, geographical, textual, and other forms of analysis.

HathiTrust This link opens in a new window
Digitized books, journals, and government documents from all countries and time periods.
Text-mine (full text search) over 17 million digitized works and create customized collections. HathiTrust is a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries. Offers reading access to the fullest extent allowable by U.S. copyright law, computational access to the entire corpus for scholarly research, and other emerging services based on the combined collection.
History Vault This link opens in a new window
Access to millions of primary source, cross-searchable, full-text/full-image documents on the most widely studied topics in 19th and 20th-century American history. Search or browse digitized letters, papers, photographs, scrapbooks, financial records, diaries, and many more primary source materials. See especially: Southern Life, Slavery, and the Civill War

North Carolina Runaway Slave Advertisements
Online access to all known runaway slave advertisements (more than 2300 items) published in North Carolina newspapers from 1751 to 1840. These brief ads provide a glimpse into the social, economic, and cultural world of the American slave system and the specific experience within North Carolina.
Race and Slavery Petitions Project
Searchable database of detailed personal information about slaves, slaveholders, and free people of color. Designed as a tool for scholars, historians, teachers, students, genealogists, and interested citizens, the site provides access to information gathered and analyzed over an eighteen-year period from petitions to southern legislatures and country courts filed between 1775 and 1867 in the fifteen slaveholding states in the United States and the District of Columbia.
Runaway Slave Advertisement Databases
List of databases that contain runaway slave advertisements.
Slave House Database
An interdisciplinary national study of slave houses in the United States. Through the SHD project a vast array of information about slave houses is collected and housed in a centralized repository. The SHD is designed to be a crosswalk for diverse fields to analyze and interpret slave houses, as well as connect to other resources.
Slave Societies Digital Archive (SSDA)
Dedicated to identifying, cataloging, and digitally preserving endangered archival materials documenting the history of Africans and their descendants in the Atlantic World.
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database
Comprises more than 35,000 individual slaving expeditions between 1514 and 1866. Records of the voyages have been found in archives and libraries throughout the Atlantic world. 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, a timeline, and an animation.