Library & Cultural Services: History: Black History. Civil Rights. Slavery

Black History - General

Black Abolitionist Archive
Collection of black abolitionist speeches and editorials from the 1820s to the Civil War.
Black Freedom Struggle in the US
A collection of approximately 1,600 documents focused on six different phases of Black Freedom: Slavery and the Abolitionist Movement (1790-1860); The Civil War and the Reconstruction Era (1861-1877); Jim Crow Era from 1878 to the Great Depression (1878-1932); The New Deal and World War II (1933-1945); The Civil Rights and Black Power Movements (1946-1975); The Contemporary Era (1976-2000)

Ebony magazine archive
Ebony has been a leading African-American magazine since publication commenced in 1945. It focuses on news & stories important to the Black community in the US. The fully searchable full-text archive spans 1945-2014, and covers African-American business, history & politics (including civil rights), education, entertainment, fashion and culture.
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Proquest historical newspapers
This historical newspaper archive includes 10 black newspaper titles, providing students and researchers with unprecedented access to perspectives and information that was excluded or marginalised in mainstream sources. The titles included are: Chicago Defender, The Baltimore Afro-American, New York Amsterdam News, Pittsburgh Courier, Los Angeles Sentinel, Atlanta Daily World, The Norfolk Journal and Guide, The Philadelphia Tribune, Cleveland Call and Post, and Michigan Chronicle.
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Women's magazine archive
An archival research resource comprising the backfiles of leading women's interest consumer magazines, including Essence - a magazine written for black women. The Essence archive covers the period 1970-2005.
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Slavery

African Americans and the End of Slavery in Massachusetts
Collection of digitised documents, including letters, warrants, bills of sale and anti-slavery material.
Antislavery Pamphlet Collection, 1725-1911 (New England)
A digitised collection of pamphlets and books pertaining to slavery and antislavery in New England, 1725-1911. Includes speeches, sermons, proceedings and other publications of organisations such as the American Anti-Slavery Society and the American Colonization Society, and a small number of pro-slavery tracts.

British Online Archives
Includes access to the following collections:
Slave Trade Records from Liverpool, 1754-1792;
Slavery Through Time: from Enslavers to Abolitionists, 1675-1865;
Slave Trading Records from William Davenport & Co., 1745-1797
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Charles F. Heartman Manuscripts of Slavery Collection (Louisiana)
Over 6000 letters and other documents dating from 1724 to 1897, directly relating to the social, economic, civil, and legal status of enslaved Negroes and Free People of Color in Louisiana and especially in New Orleans. The documents are written in French, Spanish, and English.
Digital Library on American Slavery
Compiles various independent online collections focused upon race and slavery in the American South (particularly North Carolina), and makes them searchable through a single interface. Includes detailed personal information about slaves, slaveholders, and free people of colour.

Empire online
This database offers approximately 60,000 images of original documents linked to essays by leading scholars in the field of Empire Studies. The sections cover Cultural Contacts, 1492-1969; Empire Writing and the Literature of Empire; The Visible Empire; Religion and Empire; and Race, Class and Colonialism, c1783-1969. The images are sourced from about ten different libraries and archives around the world, including a strong core of document images from the British Library, including the Oriental and India Office Collections at the British Library; the University of Birmingham Library; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; and the Public Record Office and the State Records, New South Wales, Australia.
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Enslaved.org
Allows you to discover, connect, and visualise 600,000 (and growing) enslaved people records and over 5 million data points.
Friend of Man, 1836-1842
Digitised version of the rare anti-slavery newspaper, from Cornell University's collection.
From Slavery to Freedom: The African-American Pamphlet Collection, 1822-1909
Collection of pamphlets from the Library of Congress, written by African-American authors and others who wrote about slavery, African colonisation, Emancipation, Reconstruction, and related topics.
Legacies of British Slave-ownership
Includes an Online Encyclopaedia of British Slave-ownership, containing information about (1) every slave-owner in the British Caribbean, Mauritius or the Cape at the moment of abolition in 1833; (2) all the estates identified in the British Caribbean in the period 1763-1833; and (3) all the slave-owners, attorneys, mortgagees and legatees identified to date for the estates between 1763 and 1833. Entries for individuals include information about their activities, affiliations and legacies, with a particular emphasis on the "absentee" owners based in Britain.
Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection
Large digitised collection of anti-slavery and abolitionist materials.
Slave Biographies
Data repository of information on the identities of enslaved people in the Atlantic World, including the names, ethnicities, skills, occupations, and illnesses of individual slaves.
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 held by the Library of Congress.

Slavery, abolition and social justice
Bringing together primary source documents from archives and libraries across the Atlantic world, this resource allows students and researchers to explore and compare unique material relating to the complex subjects of slavery, abolition and social justice. In addition to the primary source documents there is a wealth of useful secondary sources for research and teaching; including an interactive map, scholarly essays, tutorials, a visual sources gallery, chronology and bibliography.

Slavery Images
A visual record of the African slave trade and slave life in the Early African Diaspora.
Slaves and the Courts, 1740 to 1860
Collection of books and manuscripts from the Library of Congress. Includes trials and cases, reports, arguments, accounts, examinations of cases and decisions, proceedings, journals, letters, and other works of historical importance.
South Kingstown Colonial Records
Records from the Town Clerk’s Office in South Kingstown, Rhode Island, dating back to the late seventeenth century and chronicling the social relations and material culture of this early American town. Moreover, they document the existence of enslaved people. Traces of these individuals remain in probate records, where human beings were assigned value and treated as property. In 2018, Salve Regina University Archives and Special Collections in Newport began the Documenting Slavery Project to digitize, describe, and publish these town records. They serve as evidence of how slavery was conceived of, recorded, and carried out in colonial Rhode Island.
Texas Slavery Project
Offers a window into the role slavery played in the development of Texas in the years before the region became part of the United States. Includes interactive maps, population database search engine and digitised original documents.
Voices Remembering Slavery: Freed People Tell Their Stories
Audio recordings from the Library of Congress, featuring 23 former slaves discussing how they felt about slavery, slaveholders, coercion of slaves, their families, and freedom. The recordings took place between 1932 and 1975 in nine US states.
Voyage of the Slave Ship Sally
Offers a unique opportunity to retrace the journey of a single slave ship, from its initial preparation through the long months on the African coast, to the auctioning of surviving captives on the West Indian island of Antigua. Accompanying documents include manifestos, letters and contracts.
Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database
Contains information on almost 36,000 slaving voyages which forcibly transported over 10 million Africans to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.

American Civil War

Allegheny College - John Omenhausser Civil War Sketchbook
John Jacob Omenhausser was a Confederate soldier imprisoned at the Union camp at Pt. Lookout, Maryland from June 1864 to July 1865. This sketchbook documents prison life in vibrant watercolour drawings.
Antebellum & Civil War Era Documents
This collection contains manuscripts, documents, and pamphlets dating from the 1700s to circa 1869, including documents from the Anti-Slavery Pamphlet Collection
Valley of the Shadow
A digital archive of sources relating to the American Civil War, focusing on the experiences of two opposing communities.

Civil Rights Movement

Civil Rights Digital Library
Publications, video, oral histories, and more documenting the Civil Rights Movement.
Civil Rights Movement Photographs
Original photographs documenting the involvement of Queens College students and other Northerners in the Civil Rights Movement of the early to mid 1960s, including Mississippi Freedom Summer, the Virginia Student Help Project, the Summer Community Organization and Political Education (SCOPE) Project, and the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR).
Civil Rights History Project
Filmed oral history interviews of people involved in the Civil Rights Movement, from the Library of Congress collection.