LibGuides: History: 79-200: Introduction to Historical Research & Writing: The Slave Experience: Primary Sources

Primary Sources - North America and the United States

African American History: Primary Sources

Primary Sources - The Caribbean and Latin America

The University of Pittsburgh has a fantastic Latin American collection-see Latin American Resources @ Pitt: Eduardo Lozano Latin American Collection.

Africans in the New World, 1493-1834 [microform]: from the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.
HUNT MFILM-3 973.0496073 A2586
Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC)
A cooperative digital library for resources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean. Includes newspapers, official documents, ecological and economic data, maps, histories, travel accounts, literature, poetry, musical expressions, and artifacts. dLOC now provides access to 2,783,922 pages of content related to the Caribbean.
Latin American Travelogues
A digital collection of Latin American travel accounts written in the 16th-19th centuries.
Primary Sources Page: Slavery

Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice This link opens in a new window
Thousands of original materials related to slavery, abolition, and social justice ranging from 1490-2007.
Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture & Law This link opens in a new window
All known legal materials on slavery in the United States and the English-speaking world. This includes every statute passed by every colony and state on slavery, every federal statute dealing with slavery, and all reported state and federal cases on slavery, as well as every English-language legal commentary on slavery published before 1920, which includes many essays and articles in obscure, hard-to-find journals in the United States and elsewhere

Transatlantic Slave Trade
Includes documents, photographs, artwork, and maps that tell the story of the slave trade and its impact.

Primary Sources - Africa

Africa and the West : a Documentary History from the Slave Trade to Independence
HUNT STACKS-2 DT353 .5.E9 A34 2001
Africa Remembered; Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade
HUNT STACKS-2 DT471 .C8 and OFFSITE

Empire Online This link opens in a new window
Essays and original documents relating to Empire Studies, race, class, imperialism, and colonialism, sourced from libraries and archives around the world.
Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice This link opens in a new window
Thousands of original materials related to slavery, abolition, and social justice ranging from 1490-2007.

Transatlantic Slave Trade
Includes documents, photographs, artwork, and maps that tell the story of the slave trade and its impact.

HathiTrust

A rich resource containing all types of materials, many appropriate as primary sources. You can search the description of items (author's name, title, subject headings) as well as the full text of materials. Items that are outside copyright protection will be displayed in full text. Items are from all countries, in many different languages. Filters allow you to limit to language, date of publication, etc. Items can be downloaded by logging in with your Andrew user ID and password.

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.

Images

African Americans in Slavery: Photographs:1847-1863
Beyond Face Value: Depictions of Slavery in Confederate Currency
Many Southern notes did not feature images of slavery; this exhibit focuses on the ones that did. This collection features notes issued and circulated in the South during the Antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction Eras. Notes were issued by various entities, including the Confederate government, state governments,merchants, and railroad companies.
Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 to 1938
Contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) of the Works Progress Administration, later renamed Work Projects Administration (WPA).
Images of African American Slavery and Freedom
From the Collections of the Library of Congress
Slave Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora
Over 1,200 images.

Searching Catalogs

The resources listed here are not the only ones available. Many others are in print or microform and can be found by searching library catalogs, like the CMU library catalog or Worldcat, a database of library holding thoughout the world (though mainly U. S.). Use some of these terms combined with your topic:

personal narratives
diaries
sources
correspondence
interviews
pamphlets
speeches
early works to 1800

For example:

women and diaries
slavery and "early works"
Holocaust and "personal narratives"

History Librarian

Charlotte Kiger Price

she/her

Contact:

On leave until Dec. 2023. For assistance in History, contact CMU Librarian Ashley Werlinich, liaison librarian for English, Drama, and temporary liaison for History. For assistance in Modern Languages, use our general feedback forms.

Subjects: History, Language & Linguistics, Religion, Women's Studies