duPont Library: History 410: Five Centuries of Atlantic Slavery, 1400-1900: Find Primary Resources

Primary Source Collections: Slavery-related

Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade
Search to learn about people - "individuals who were enslaved, owned slaves, were connected to the slave trade, and worked to emancipate slaves."
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From: Matrix: the Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences and collaborating institutions.
Slave Voyages
Multiple databases related to tracing the slave trade; Trans-Atlantic database, Intra-American database, and database of African Names.

Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture & Law This link opens in a new window
Brings together 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. Also has hundreds of pamphlets and books written about slavery--defending it, attacking it or simply analyzing it. Also includes 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.

Freedom on the Move
A database of fugitives from American slavery. "Rediscovering the stories of self-liberating people."
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A joint effort by: Cornell University, Cornell University Library, Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Alabama, University of Kentucky, The University of New Orleans, and The Ohio State University.
Race & Slavery Petitions Project
"a searchable database of detailed personal information about slaves, slaveholders, and free people of color. Designed as a tool for scholars, historians, teachers, students, genealogists, and interested citizens, the site provides access to information gathered and analyzed over an eighteen-year period from petitions to southern legislatures and country courts filed between 1775 and 1867 in the fifteen slaveholding states in the United States and the District of Columbia."
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From Electronic Resources and Information Technology Department of University Libraries at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Northeast Slavery Records Index
"an online searchable compilation of records that identify individual enslaved persons and enslavers in the states of New York, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut and New Jersey."
Digital Library on American Slavery
Combination of multiple collections related to slavery in the South, including the Race and Slavery Petitions Project, NC Runaway Slave Advertisements, and Slave Deeds of NC.
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Content is focused on North Carolina, but much of it includes information from other states.

Primary Source Collections: South Carolina and Slavery

South Carolina Estate Inventories and Bills of Sale, 1732-1872
"This collection includes a diverse and valuable mix of 18th- and 19th-century South Carolina court records including estate inventories, appraisements books, bills of sale, and related court documents. Inventoried items may include household goods, furniture, plantation and farming implements, livestock, and slaves." Requires personal subscription account to access documents. From Ancestry.com

Primary Source Collections in History

Empire Online This link opens in a new window
Time Period: 1492-2007
Location: North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania
Brings together manuscript, printed and visual primary source materials for the study of "Empire" and its theories, practices and consequences. The materials span across the last five centuries and are accompanied by a host of secondary learning resources including scholarly essays, maps and an interactive chronology. It is organized into the following five thematic sections:I) Cultural Contacts, 1492-1969; II) Empire Writing & the Literature of Empire; III) The Visible Empire; IV) Religion & Empire; and V) Race, Class, Imperialism and Colonialism, c1607-2007. Each section features essays by leading scholars in the field. The essays relate directly to the source material covered by the resource, with 30-50 links per essay to documentary evidence.

World Digital Library
The World Digital Library (WDL) is a project of the U.S. Library of Congress, carried out with the support of the United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (UNESCO), and in cooperation with libraries, archives, museums, educational institutions, and international organizations from around the world. The WDL makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from all countries and cultures.

Gale Primary Sources This link opens in a new window
Allows cross-searching of all of our Gale primary source databases. Currently includes: 17th and 18th Century Burney Collection, 19th Century British Newspapers, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, The Making of the Modern World, Nineteenth Century Collections Online, The Times Digital Archive.
Making of the modern world, Part I: The Goldsmiths'-Kress Collection (Gale Primary Sources) This link opens in a new window
Time Period: 1450-1945
Location: North America, South America, Europe, Africa
Provides digital facsimile images of books, serials, pamphlets, essays and other unique primary sources that track the development of the modern western world through the lens of trade and wealth. Has full-text searching across millions of pages of works from the period 1450-1850. Provides material for research in the areas of history, political science, social conditions, technology and industry, economics, area studies and more.
Part I is based on Gale's microfilm collection: Goldsmiths'-Kress Library of Economic Literature. It combines the strengths of two pre-eminent collections--the Goldsmiths' Library of Economic Literature at the University of London Library and the Kress Library of Business and Economics at the Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration--along with supplementary materials from the Seligman Collection in the Butler Library at Columbia University and from the libraries of Yale University.

Types of Primary Resources

This is a list of the most common types of primary resources in history. When searching for sources, you might watch for these terms to help you figures out if you have found a primary resource. You might also use these terms in your searches to help focus on a particular type of source or narrow down a large list of results.

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autobiography/autobiographies
correspondence
description and travel
diary/diaries
documents
early works to 1800
interview/interviews
journal
letters
pamphlets
personal narratives
trials
sources
speeches

Jessie Ball duPont Library

History 410: Five Centuries of Atlantic Slavery, 1400-1900

Map of Europe, 1690

Primary Source Collections: Slavery-related

Primary Source Collections: South Carolina and Slavery

Primary Source Collections in History

Types of Primary Resources