Research Guides: BST 200: Introduction to Black Studies: Primary Sources

Michael Schwartz Library

General History

MIT Visualizing Cultures
World History Matters
Internet History Sourcebooks Project
A collection of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts presented cleanly (without advertising or excessive layout) for educational use
World Digital Library
Large, well-organized collection of print and visual primary sources from ancient to current times.
Contentdm Collection of Collections
Try a keyword search for "United States Civil War." Collections that contain materials from this time period will come up as results.
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database
Information on almost 36,000 slaving voyages

Library of Congress Digital Archives
"Written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience."
Archiving Early America
In-depth background that allows you to understand this country's formative years
Avalon Project - Confederate States of America
Ullyses S. Grant Presidential Library
15,000 linear feet of correspondence, research notes, artifacts, photographs, scrapbooks, and memorabilia

African American History

African American Migration Experience
Images, texts, and maps about African American migrations.
The African-American Mosaic
A Library of Congress Resource Guide for the Study of Black History & Culture
American Memory: African American History
Library of Congress digital collections
Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South
A selection of 410 recorded oral history interviews chronicling African-American life during the age of legal segregation in the American South, from the 1890s to the 1950s.
Brown v. Board of Education Digital Archive
Contains documents and images which chronicle events surrounding this historically significant case up to the present.
African Americans in the Columbia River Basin
A part of the Columbia River Basin Ethnic History Archive. Includes selected documents, reports, records, maps, photographs, newspapers, artifacts, and oral history interviews.
Digital Public Library of America: African Americans
Brings together the collections of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world.
Umbra First African American History
More than 500,000 digitized materials from over 1,000 libraries and archives across the country.
African Americans in Ohio
A listing of collections based on the subject of African Americans in Ohio.

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.

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

Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive
University of Mississippi. Includes a selection of digitized photographs, letters, diaries, and other documents. Oral history transcripts are also available, as well as finding aids for manuscript collections.
Freedom Summer Project
Includes key documents and teacher resources.
Historical Publications of the United States Commission on Civil Rights
University of Maryland, Thurgood Marshall Law Library
Integrating Ole Miss: A Civil Rights Milestone
Letters, recorded telephone conversations, and images documenting racial violence in 1960s Mississippi.
The Jack Rabin Collection on Alabama Civil Rights and Southern Activists
Compilation of documents, sound recordings, and visual images.
The Martin Luther King Jr. Research & Education Institute
Includes MLK Jr. papers and other primary sources.
Rosa Parks Papers
Library of Congress Collection
Who Speaks for the Negro? An Archival Collection
A digital archive of materials related to the book of the same name published by Robert Penn Warren in 1965. Includes interview Warren made on reel-to-reel tape.
Civil Rights Digital Library
A collection of unedited news film from the WSB (Atlanta) and WALB (Albany, Ga.) television archives as well as teacher resources and primary sources.

Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South
A selection of 410 recorded oral history interviews chronicling African-American life during the age of legal segregation in the American South, from the 1890s to the 1950s.
Black Panther Party
Sound files such as oral histories, interviews, and songs documenting the development of the Black Panther party.
Voices from the Days of Slavery
Library of Congress collection of oral histories, with interviewees speaking about the 1870s to the 1930s and beyond.
Who Speaks for the Negro? An Archival Collection
A digital archive of materials related to the book of the same name published by Robert Penn Warren in 1965. Includes interview Warren made on reel-to-reel tape.
A.P. Marshall African American Oral History Archive
Chronicles the lives and struggles of Black Ypsilantians in their own words.

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.
Adam Francis Plummer Diary
Plummer was born into slavery in 1819 and wrote in his diary from 1841 to 1905. Full diary text.

Hiphop Archive
Facilitating and encouraging the pursuit of knowledge, art, culture and responsible leadership through hiphop.
Images of African Americans in the 19th Century
New York Public Library Digital Collections
Uncle Tom's Cabin & American Culture
A multimedia archive from the University of Virginia

Art & Images

World Digital Library: Arts
Collection of print and visual resources. Use limiters in left column to focus search on a specific geography, date range, topic or type of resource.

ARTstor This link opens in a new window
Searchable database of digital images and associated information, with new image collections added several times a year. ARTstor covers the fields of architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, design, anthropology, ethnographic and women's studies, as well as many other forms of visual culture. Users can search, view, download and organize images.

Mobile version of ARTstor.

Michael Schwartz Library