African American and African Diasporic Studies: Primary Sources

"The documents presented here represent a selection of primary sources available in several ProQuest databases. The databases represented in this website include American Periodicals, Black Abolitionist Papers, ProQuest History Vault, ProQuest Congressional, Supreme Court Insight and Alexander Street’s Black Thought and Culture"

"The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, one of The New York Public Library’s renowned research libraries, is a world-leading cultural institution devoted to the research, preservation, and exhibition of materials focused on African American, African Diaspora, and African experiences."

"The Archives holds a wealth of material documenting the Black experience. This page highlights these resources online, in programs, and through traditional and social media."

"The Amistad Research Center is committed to collecting, preserving, and providing open access to original materials that reference the social and cultural importance of America's ethnic and racial history, the African Diaspora, human relations, and civil rights."

"Established in 2015 and housed at the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, the BDA collects documentary, audiovisual, digital, and artistic works related to the Black Diaspora of the Americas and Caribbean. This encompasses historical publications, contemporary records, personal papers, and rare material produced by and/or about people of African descent—including scholars, professionals, community groups, activists, and artists."

"DocsTeach is a product of the National Archives education division. Our mission is to engage, educate, and inspire all learners to discover and explore the records of the American people preserved by the National Archives."

"Established in 1954, the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies at Northwestern University is the largest separate Africana collection in existence. Its scope is as wide as the continent of Africa itself; its subject matter ranges from art, history, literature, music, science, technology and religion to communications, engineering, management and cooking. The Africana collection is a resource for the entire university, and most of Northwestern's disciplinary programs are reflected in the collection. In addition to serving the NU community, the Herskovits Library also serves regional, national and international scholars."

"The blog of the Black History Guide, sharing records relating to the Black Experience at the National Archives."

"The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, one of The New York Public Library’s renowned research libraries, is a world-leading cultural institution devoted to the research, preservation, and exhibition of materials focused on African American, African Diaspora, and African experiences."

"The largest African American history and literature collection in the Midwest, the Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature documents the Black experience with a strong focus on Chicago."

Access to over one million digital images from nearly 200 collections, representing all artistic periods. Numerous African American artists can be found within these collections. Further, the photographic collections showcase African American history.

"Black Drama, now in its expanded third edition, contains the full text of more than 1,700 plays written from the mid-1800s to the present by more than 200 playwrights from North America, English-speaking Africa, the Caribbean, and other African diaspora countries. Many of the works are rare, hard to find, or out of print. More than 40 percent of the collection consists of previously unpublished plays by writers such as Langston Hughes, Ed Bullins, Willis Richardson, Amiri Baraka, Randolph Edmonds, Zora Neale Hurston, and many others."

This database contains recordings that come from Smithsonian Folkways Recordings and archival audio collections from Folkways Records and other labels. The collection encompasses the blues, jazz, hip hop, gospel, Latin and rock.

This collection of items includes brochures, campaign posters and other documents relating to the civil rights movement, specifically to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). Also included are oral histories from MFDP leaders Fannie Lou Hamer, Aaron Henry, and Victoria Gray-Adams.

The Civil Rights Digital Library promotes an enhanced understanding of the Movement by helping users discover primary sources and other educational materials from libraries, archives, museums, public broadcasters, and others on a national scale. The CRDL features a collection of unedited news film from the WSB (Atlanta) and WALB (Albany, Ga.) television archives.

"The Civil Rights Movement Archive (CRMA) is a 501c3 nonprofit corporation based in California. We are a free, non-commercial, web-based archive created by civil rights workers active in CORE, NAACP, SCLC, SNCC and similar Southern Freedom Movement organizations during the 1950s and 1960s. We are part of the national African American Civil Rights Network. The CRMA has a Memorandum of Understanding with Duke University Libraries that they will assume stewardship over the archive to preserve and sustain it when the current managers are no longer able to carry the work forward. This website has been (and is still being) created by veterans of the Southern Freedom Movement (1951-1968). It's an online archive to preserve and make available original-materials, histories, narratives, remembrances, and commentaries related to that movement. It is where we tell it like it was, the way we lived it, the way we saw it, the way we still see it. "

This project includes the digitization of manuscripts, early journals, narratives, reports, letters, photographs, prints, paintings, audio and video clips that document the history of social welfare in the United States, emphasizing two foci: the historical development of social welfare services, programs and policies in the state of New York; and in a parallel fashion, the history of social welfare provisions in the form of policies, programs and services by and for African Americans.

The Hurricane Digital Memory Bank uses electronic media to collect, preserve, and present the stories and digital record of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Items included are photography and oral histories.

The Jack Rabin Collection on Alabama Civil Rights and Southern Activists is a compact but highly complex, multi-layered compilation of documents, sound recordings, and visual images. Some of its components, including copies of records of the Montgomery Improvements Association (MIA) and many hours of oral history of the renowned cival liberties lawyer Clifford Durr, complement major holdings in other American archives.

The John Elon Phay collection contains photographic images of the segregated Mississippi public school system taken during the 1940s and 1950s. These Kodachrome slides were taken as part of surveys performed in the mid-1950s by the Bureau of Educational Research at the University of Mississippi.

"Land of (Unequal) Opportunity: Documenting the Civil Rights Struggle in Arkansas” is an attempt to compile in one on-line resource a variety of records and photographs that document the history of civil rights in the state. A central focus of the project is to insure that both documents and illustrations were included, in the belief that photographs, cartoons, drawings, etc., are also important research tools.

Documenting the Civil Rights Movement in Baton Rouge and surrounding parishes.

The Louisiana State Museum Digital Library Jazz collection is composed of photographs, audio recordings and musical instruments from the collections of the Louisiana State Museum. Primarily dealing with traditional New Orleans jazz, the collections focus on photographs (including all of the Museum's images of Louis Armstrong) and audio recordings of musicians and bands that were primarily active in New Orleans, although many toured throughout the country and the world.

The Natchitoches / Cane River Civil Rights Oral History Project features interviews with leading civil rights activists from the Natchitoches and Cane River areas.

Four years after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954, "massive resistance" to school desegregation in Virginia left 10,000 students out of school in Norfolk, the largest number of any school system in Virginia.

This exhibit examines African American's education in Mississippi before integration. It includes photographs from the John E. Phay Collection taken to document the Mississippi public school system, as well as materials from two private black institutions established in the early 1900s -- the Piney Woods Country Life School and the Mississippi Industrial College.

The University of Louisville Library's Oral History Center initiates oral history projects and supports projects undertaken by community groups in a variety of ways. The linked topic list provides a breakdown of many topics related to African American history.

In 1965, Robert Penn Warren wrote a book, now out of print, entitled Who Speaks for the Negro? To research this publication, he traveled the country and spoke with a variety of people who were involved in the Civil Rights Movement. He spoke with nationally-known figures as well as people working in the trenches of the Movement. The volume contains many of the transcripts from these conversations.

The American State Papers is a retrospective collection of Congressional and Executive materials originating from 1789 through 1838. This collection offers primary material for this time period, newly digitized. Fully searchable and browsable. Events that would be covered would be the Louisiana Purchase, Missouri Compromise, and the beginnings of the Abolition Movement.

The Antislavery Collection contains several hundred printed pamphlets and books pertaining to slavery and antislavery in New England, 1725-1911. The holdings include speeches, sermons, proceedings and other publications of organizations such as the American Anti-Slavery Society and the American Colonization Society, and a small number of pro-slavery tracts.

From the 1820s to the Civil War, African Americans assumed prominent roles in the transatlantic struggle to abolish slavery. In contrast to the popular belief that the abolitionist crusade was driven by wealthy whites, some 300 black abolitionists were regularly involved in the antislavery movement, heightening its credibility and broadening its agenda.

This is a primary source collection that details the extensive contributions of African Americans to the Abolitionist Movement.

In the late 1890's, the family of William Lloyd Garrison, along with others closely involved in the anti-slavery movement, presented the library with a major gathering of correspondence, documents, and other original material relating to the abolitionist cause from 1832 until after the Civil War.

The Broadside Verses provide a unique look into life in 19th century America, especially life in Maryland between 1860 and 1865, when the country was in turmoil, and immediately after the Civil War. Most of these verses have a political message, but others – advertisements, love songs, temperance songs, ballads about life and death – show what life was like for Marylanders and other Americans after the Civil War, providing insight into the American character and personality.

The Civil War & Slavery materials are part of a larger core collection of books, maps, diaries, correspondence, official documents, artwork, and artifacts related to Lincoln, the American Civil War, and the institution of slavery in the U.S.

These materials all date from the American Civil War era. They were selected for digitization because they relate to the people and history of Oneida County, New York in which Hamilton College is located. A large portion of them relate to the 117th New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment mustered in on August 8, 1862 at Oneida County.

This digital repository offers a sampling of a broader collection that includes political cartoons, letters, photographs, maps, and artifacts relating to the Civil War Era.

The Illustrated London News captured the news of the Civil War. The analysis is offered from a British side. This is an exemplary primary source material to gain insght on the struggle of the American Civil War.

The Civil War Photograph Album contains portraits of military personnel who fought during the American Civil War, 1861-1865. The album has 50 pages; each page has a capacity for four (4) photographs, and most of the photographs (cartes-de-visite) are Confederate enlisted men and officers. This photograph album can be viewed at Louisiana State University's Hill Memorial Library.

This collection is comprised of pamphlets, books, broadsides, cartoons, clippings, paintings, maps, and other print memorabilia about America from circa 1830 to 1880. Items are drawn primarily from the collection of the Library Company of Philadelphia.

Enslaved is a database of 600,000 (and growing) people records constructed from archival fragments and spreadsheet entries. Enables the identification of individuals and connecting them to particular events and places with a disambiguation tool.

Florida and the Civil War provides online access to primary sources about the American Civil War from the collections of the Department of Special & Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Library, University of Florida...

Collections in this project also provide a wealth of information about divided loyalties and realms of influence within Florida.

Freedom's Journal provided international, national, and regional information on current events and contained editorials declaiming slavery, lynching, and other injustices. The Journal also published biographies of prominent African-Americans and listings of births, deaths, and marriages in the African-American New York community. Freedom's Journal circulated in 11 states, the District of Columbia, Haiti, Europe, and Canada.

The Geography of Slavery is a digital collection of advertisements for runaway and captured slaves and servants in 18th- and 19th-century Virginia newspapers. Building on the rich descriptions of individual slaves and servants in the ads, the project offers a personal, geographical and documentary context for the study of slavery in Virginia, from colonial times to the Civil War.

This site currently includes 161 maps representative of the entire southern region, with particularly large groupings of North Carolina and Virginia maps. Most of the maps are dated 1861-1865.

Illinois During the Civil War is a product of Northern Illinois University Libraries Digitization Unit. Like its predecessor, the Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitization Project, this resource brings together primary source materials from a number of libraries, museums and archives. These institutions include the Newberry Library, the Chicago Historical Society and the Illinois State Library.

This photograph album was compiled by Sgt. Marshall Dunham of the New York 159th regiment and consists of photographs taken in Louisiana during the Civil War. They are categorized according to cities, with the largest group being New Orleans. The album includes photos of buildings and street scenes.

The NEW SOUTH offers a glimpse into an era of unprecedented social upheaval in the South Carolina Lowcountry. In the Battle of Port Royal Sound of Nov. 7, 1861, Union Navy forces seized control of Port Royal Harbor, and Beaufort District's white residents fled in their wake. Union forces occupied the district through the end of the war. Officials confiscated the abandoned properties and resold them to former slaves and Northern cotton speculators.

"North American Slave Narratives" collects 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. This collection includes all the existing autobiographical narratives of fugitive and former slaves published as broadsides, pamphlets, or books in English up to 1920.

Images in the North Carolina Collection depicting the war are from woodcuts, engravings, lithographs, and photographs. The overwhelming majority of these were made by persons accompanying Union forces or were made from sketches and other information they provided.

Pennsylvania Civil War Era Newspaper Collection contain all the words, photographs, and advertisements from selected newspapers published during the pivotal years before, during, and after the U.S. Civil War. Newspapers played a prominent role in the conflict. They helped mobilize public opinion for, or against, the war, relayed battlefield developments to their readers, and documented political life on the homefront.

Published from 1884 to 1903, the Richmond Dispatch was originally established on October 19, 1850, as the Daily Dispatch by James A. Cowardin and William H. Davis. The Dispatch became the leading newspaper that served Richmond and would provided voice of the Capital of the CSA.

This HeinOnline collection brings together a multitude of essential 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. Case coverage extends into the 20th century because long after slavery ended courts were still resolving issues emanating from slavery.

The State Historical Scoiety of Missouri has digitized many items from its holdings pertaining to soldiers of the Civil War and the conflict within Missouri's state boundaries.

The purpose of the project is to build a digital repository of unique U.S. Civil War materials from East Central Indiana for teaching, learning, and research by elementary, high school, college/university students and faculty, and the public. Users will be able to remotely access, examine, and study letters, diaries, photographs, videotaped readings, and other Civil War documentation that have been previously available only onsite.

The Valley of the Shadow is an electronic archive of two communities in the American Civil War--Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennyslvania. The Valley Web site includes searchable newspapers, population census data, agricultural census data, manufacturing census data, slaveowner census data, and tax records. The Valley Web site also contains letters and diaries, images, maps, church records, and military rosters.

The Virginia Civil War Archive includes information on 400 illustrations produced for the Harper's Weekly during 1861-1865 and which relate specifically to the Commonwealth of Virginia's involvment in the Civil War. From this group 100 images have been scanned for research and study by students and scholars on the World Wide Web. The images reflect the unfolding events and drama of the war as well as the superb artistry of the Weekly's many artists. These images can be accessed for research via the World Wide Web.

The VHS has digitized hundreds of items relating to the Civil War that are within their holdings. Included are books, photography, illustrations, engravings, and diaries about the conflict.

The Paris Exposition of 1900 included a display devoted to the history and "present conditions" of African Americans. W.E.B. Du Bois and special agent Thomas J. Calloway spearheaded the planning, collection and installation of the exhibit materials, which included 500 photographs. The Library of Congress holds approximately 220 mounted photographs reportedly displayed in the exhibition.

This database was created by staff and volunteers from the entries in the 131 volumes of the 1867 Voter Registration Records maintained by the Alabama Department of Archives and History (ADAH). The volumes are significant genealogical records as this is one of the first statewide government documents that record African-American males living in Alabama.

Once part of an album, the photographs (circa 1900) show plantations, African Americans, horses, hunting, rice threshing, wagons and carts, and churches in Berkeley County, S.C. Some featured landmarks are: Medway, Wappahoola, Mulberry Castle, Dean Hall (bulk of collection,) Dockon, Bushy Park, Exeter, Cote Bas, Bippy, Lewisfield, Strawberry Chapel, Strawberry ferry, and pine land house.

All issues of the Alabama newspaper from 1874 to 1887. This newspaper showacases how Birmingham became an Southern industrial and manufacturing center.

Papers of Bonds Conway (1763-1843), a free African-American resident of Camden (Kershaw County, S.C.). This collection of family letters, land papers, and other items documents several generations of a free family of color from the 18th through the 20th centuries in South Carolina, Georgia, Kansas, east Texas, and elsewhere. Topics discussed include social relations during antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction eras through the early 20th century.

This site allows you to search and view newspaper pages from 1860-1922 and find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present. Chronicling America is sponsored jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress as part of the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). Oklahoma newspapers are included in this collection.

The Civil Unrest in Camilla, Georgia, 1868 collection, located at the DeSoto Trail Library and comprised of photostatic copies from the Freedman's Bureau records held by the National Archives, consists of letters, affidavits, reports and a newspaper clipping relating to a violent episode in Camilla, Georgia.

The Digital Durham website offers students, teachers, and researchers a range of primary sources with which they can investigate the economic, social, cultural, and political history of a post-bellum southern community. Letters from mothers to daughters, parents to children, and husbands and wives give insight into the domestic lives of some of Durham's elite citizens.

"The Countryside Transformed: The Railroad and the Eastern Shore of Virginia, 1870-1935" is a digital archive of maps, photographs, manuscripts, newspapers, public documents, and other media. "The Countryside Transformed" shows how the coming in 1884 of the railroad to the counties of Accomack and Northampton profoundly changed the physical and mental landscapes in which the people of the region lived, worked, and traveled.

This compilation of printed texts from the libraries at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill documents the culture of the nineteenth-century American South from the viewpoint of Southerners. It includes the diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, travel accounts, and ex-slave narratives of not only prominent individuals, but also of relatively inaccessible populations: women, African Americans, enlisted men, laborers, and Native Americans.

The University's collections hold over 100 letters that date from before the Civil War, when Douglass was editor of The North Star, an anti-slavery newspaper which he published in Rochester, to a few years prior to his death in 1895. In addition, the collection also includes photographs of Douglass and copies of his newspapers.

Race and Place is an archive about the racial segregation laws, or the 'Jim Crow' laws from the late 1880s until the mid-twentieth century. The focus of the collection is the town of Charlottesville in Virginia. The Jim Crow laws segregated African-Americans from white Americans in public places such as schools, and school buses. The archive contains photos, letters, two regional censuses and a flash map of the town of Charlottesville.

Robert E. Williams (d. 1937), an African-American Photographer, operated a photography studio, R. Williams and Son, in Augusta, Georgia, from 1888 until around 1908. This collection consists of 86 Glass plate negatives and positive prints of African-Americans in the Augusta, Richmond County, Georgia area. The photographs depict dwellings and domestic chores, rituals of baptism, harvesting and transporting cotton, vehicles and transportation, and children and family life.

The Samuel Hugh Hawkins Diary, January - July 1877, chronicles Americus, Georgia entrepreneur, lawyer, and banker Samuel Hawkins' financial, agricultural, civic, and religious activities in Sumter County during the final months of Reconstruction. Diary entries briefly illustrate Hawkins' work at the Bank of Americus and his real estate interests in the county.

Digital collection of over 250 images of African Americans dating from the 19th and early 20th Century selected from the George and Huestis Cook Photograph Collection at the Valentine Richmond History Center...The Cook Collection consists of over 10,000 negatives taken from the 1860s to the 1930s in Virginia and the Carolinas.