Research Guides: HIS 369: Comparative Emancipations: Primary Sources

Michael Schwartz Library

Primary Sources: Emancipation

Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice This link opens in a new window
A collection of primary source documents centered on the study of slavery, the African American experience and world history spanning from 1490 to 2007. The collection includes original manuscripts, pamphlets, books, paintings, maps, and images.

Liberated Africans
After 1807, over 250,000 people were involved in an international effort to abolish the Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades. This resource is dedicated to their memories.
Legacies of British Slave-ownership
Supported by the Hutchins Center at Harvard.
Slave Societies Digital Archive
Vanderbilt University (mostly in Spanish)
Slavery Images
A visual record of the African slave trade and slave life in the early African Diaspora
Transatlantic Slave Trade Database
Former British Colonial Dependencies, Slave Registers, 1813-1834
Ancestry.com
Recovered Histories
Anti-Slavery International has digitised its collection of 18th and 19th century literature on the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Recovered Histories captures the narratives of the enslaved, enslavers, slave ship surgeons, abolitionists, parliamentarians, clergy, planters and rebels.

Digital Library of the Caribbean
A cooperative digital library for resources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean
Danish West-Indies - Sources of History
Rigsarkivet (some content in Danish)
Early Caribbean Digital Archive
Northeastern University
Digital Library of the Caribbean
A cooperative digital library for resources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean

Defining Gender (1450-1910): Five Centuries of Advice Literature Online This link opens in a new window
Original documents from libraries and archives around the world.

British Library Collections
General collection of British primary sources
World Digital Library
Materials about the Caribbean
Primary Sources Collections: Caribbean
Research Guide from Berkeley
Latin American Travelogues
Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies
The JCB Library
Collection of 50,000 rare books, maps and manuscripts that encompasses more than two hundred languages and spans over three centuries of early American history.
HathiTrust
Legal Documents on the Amistad Trial
From the National Archives (US)
Haitian Declaration of Independence
Duke University Libraries

Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection
Cornell University
Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 to 1938
Library of Congress
North American Slave Narratives
Books and articles that document the individual and collective story of African Americans struggling for freedom and human rights in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries.
The Abolition Seminar: 50 Essential Documents
The Library Company of Philadelphia
Primary Sources on Slavery
The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History - History Now: American History Online
Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy, 1719-1820
A database of 100,000 slaves brought to Louisiana in the 18th and 19th centuries. Information was gathered from courthouses in Louisiana, and archives in France, Spain and Texas. Includes information about African slave names, gender, ages, occupations, illnesses, family relationships, ethnicity, places of origin, prices paid by slave owners, and slaves' testimony and emancipations.
Slavery and the Courts, 1740 – 1860
Approximately 100 books and pamphlets from the Library of Congress presenting an assortment of trials and cases, reports, arguments, accounts, examinations of cases and decisions, proceedings, journals, a letter, and other works of historical importance.
WPA Early Settlers' Personal Histories of African Americans in Arkansas
Presents a dozen interview transcripts or brief forms for persons who were enslaved in Arkansas or who migrated to Arkansas after the war