| Slavery Webography compiled by Deb Boatwright & Jess Bogie |
| Other Resources Standards |
| Samuel J. May
Anti-Slavery Collection Cornell University Library. This site features one of the richest collections of anti-slavery and Civil War materials in the world. Reverend Samuel J. May was an American abolitionist and he donated his collection of anti-slavery materials to the Cornell Library in 1870. Following May’s lead, other abolitionists in the U.S. and Great Britain contributed their collections to the University. The collection now consists of more than 10,000 pamphlets, leaflets, broadsides, newsletters of local and regional anti-slavery societies, sermons, essays, and arguments for and against slavery. Materials date from the 18th to the 19th centuries and cover slavery in the United States and the West Indies, the slave trade, and emancipation. The site features the 1833 pamphlet “On Negro emancipation and American colonization” and another 1805 pamphlet entitled “The horrors of Negro slavery existing in our West Indian Islands.” More than 300,000 pages are available for full-text searching. Accompanying the electronic documents are 12 links to other anti-slavery collections and a visual record of the conservation process. Resources Available:TEXT, IMAGES. Website last visited on 2004-7-27. |
| Digital History Steven Mintz and Sara McNeil. Provides multimedia resources and links for teaching American history and conducting basic research, while focusing on slavery, ethnic history, private life, technological achievement, and American film. The Institute, founded by businessmen and philanthropists Richard Gilder and Lewis E. Lehrman, strives to reflect the current state of professional historian scholarship. Presents more than 600 documents pertaining to American politics, diplomacy, social history, slavery, Mexican American history, and Native American history, searchable by author, time period, subject, and keyword, and annotated with essays of 300–500 words each. The site offers a full U.S. history textbook and more than 1,500 searchable and briefly annotated links to American history-related sites, including approximately 150 links to historic Supreme Court decisions, 330 links to audio files of historic speeches, and more than 450 links to audio files and transcripts of historians discussing their own books. Also includes five high school lesson plans; 39 fact sheets with quotations and study questions on major historical topics; 10 essays (800 words) on past controversies, such as the Vietnam War, socialism, and the war on poverty; seven essays presenting historical background on more recent controversies, such as hostage crises and NATO in Kosovo; and essays of more than 10,000 words each on the history of American film and private life in America. Four current exhibits offer 217 photographs, ca. 1896–1903, from the Calhoun Industrial School in Alabama, a freedmen’s school; 19 watercolor sketches by a Civil War soldier; seven letters between 18th-century English historian Catharine Macaulay and American historian Mercy Otis Warren; and an 1865 letter from Frederick Douglass to Mary Todd Lincoln. A valuable site for high school students and teachers looking for comprehensive guidance from professional historians on the current state of debate on many topics in American history. Resources Available:TEXT, IMAGES. Website last visited on 2004-7-27. |
| Territorial
Kansas Online Kansas State Historical Society and University of Kansas. This repository of Territorial Kansas collections convey the growing divisions in Kansas and the nation over the expansion of slavery, federalism, nationalism, industrialization of the North, and changing political coalitions in Congress. Users have access to government documents, diaries, letters, photographs, maps, newspapers, rare secondary sources, historical artifacts, and images of historic sites where some of the territorial confrontations occurred. Divided into five sections ( Territorial Politics and Government, Border Warfare, Immigration and Early Settlement, Personalities, and National Debate about Kansas) each is searchable by keyword, author, and county. The topical sections are subdivided into relevant themes and include an introductory essay (between 1,000 and 2,000 words). Visitors will find essays on territorial politics, the rights of women and African Americans, military organizations, and free state and pro-slavery organizations. The Personalities section list 31 individuals, including John Brown and John Calhoun, and the final section presents both anti-slavery and pro-slavery perspectives of the national debate about Kansas. The site also includes a timeline with links and an annotated bibliography. An ongoing project, lesson plans are currently being added. Resources Available:TEXT, IMAGES. Website last visited on 2004-7-27. |
| Born in Slavery:
Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project,
1936–1938 American Memory, Library of Congress. This new American Memory site is a gold mine of information on the history of slavery from those who lived as slaves. A collaborative effort of the Library of Congress Manuscripts and Prints and Photographs Divisions, this site has more than 2,300 first person accounts of slavery and 500 black and white photographs of former slaves, 200 of which have never before been available to the public. These narratives and photographs were collected as part of the 1930s Federal Writers' Project of the Works Project Administration, and they were assembled and microfilmed in 1941 as the 17-volume Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves. Each digitized transcript of a slave narrative is accompanied by notes including the name of the narrator, place and date of the interview, interviewer’s name, length of transcript, and cataloging information. Each photograph has similar notes regarding the name of the subject, place and date of photograph, name of photographer, and cataloging information. Visitors can browse photographs and narratives by keyword, subject, and narrator. The site also includes a 3000-word introductory essay on the significance of slave narratives by Norman Yetman, Professor of American Studies and Sociology at the University of Kansas. “Voices and Faces,” includes a selection of excerpts from eight narratives along with photographs of the former slaves. This is a rich resource for students and teachers exploring the institution of slavery. Resources Available:TEXT, IMAGES. Website last visited on 2004-7-27. |
| Valley of the Shadow: Two
Communities in the American Civil War Edward L. Ayers, Anne S. Rubin, William G. Thomas, University of Virginia. Conceived by Edward Ayers, Hugh P. Kelley Professor of History at the University of Virginia, this site is a massive, searchable archive relating to two Shenandoah Valley counties during the Civil War period—Augusta County, Virginia and Franklin County, Pennsylvania—divided by 200 miles and the institution of slavery. Thousands of pages of maps, images, letters, diaries, and newspapers, in addition to church, agricultural, military, and public records—census, tax, Freedmen’s Bureau, and veterans—-provide data, experiences, and perspectives from the eve of the war until its aftermath. Offers both a narrative “walking tour” and direct access to the archive. Also presents bibliographies, a “fact book,” student essays and projects, and other materials intended to foster primary-source research. “Students can explore every dimension of the conflict and write their own histories, reconstructing the life stories of women, African Americans, farmers, politicians, soldiers, and families.” Includes a section titled “Memory of the War” that presents postwar writings on battles, soldier and camp life, reunions, obituaries and tributes, and politics. Also includes material omitted from Ayres’s recent book about the communities, In the Presence of Mine Enemies, along with digitized texts of cited materials. This is an important and innovative site, particularly valuable to historians of 19th-century American life. Resources Available:TEXT, IMAGES. Website last visited on 2004-7-27. |
| Uncle Tom’s
Cabin and American Culture Stephen Railton, University of Virginia. This well-designed site explores Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin “as an American cultural phenomenon.” The section of “Pre Texts, 1830–1852” provides dozens of texts, songs, and images from the various genres Stowe drew upon: Christian Texts, Sentimental Culture, Anti-Slavery Texts, and Minstrel Shows. The section on Uncle Tom’s Cabin includes Stowe’s preface, multiple versions of the text, playable songs from the novel, and Stowe’s defense against criticism, The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. A third section focuses on responses to the book from 1852 to 1930, including 12 reviews, over 100 articles and notes, 20 responses from African Americans, and dozens of pro-slavery responses. The final section explores “Other Media,” including children’s books, songs, games, and theatrical versions. Three interpretive exhibits (with more in development) challenge students to explore how slavery and race were defined and redefined as well as how the character of Topsy was created and re-created, assuming a range of political and social meanings. Excellent for teachers and students. Resources Available:TEXT, IMAGES, AUDIO, VIDEO. Website last visited on 2004-7-27. |
| The Time of the
Lincolns PBS Online, WGBH, American Experience. A companion site to the six-hour “American Experience” PBS documentary, Abraham and Mary Lincoln: A House Divided. Organized into five topical sections—Partisan Politics; Slavery & Freedom; A Rising Nation; Americans at War; and A Woman’s World—the site offers more than 30 textual documents—including book excerpts, newspaper articles, poems, lectures, letters, and diaries—. Visitors will also find more than 50 photographs, maps, and political cartoons. Essays of approximately 500 words each and nine videos address such subjects as the antislavery movement, the Underground Railroad, defenses for slavery, “wage slavery” in the North, African-Americans in the North, developments in technology, women’s rights, and literary women. Includes works by well-known authors, such as Frederick Douglass, Angelina and Sarah Grimke, Harriet Jacobs, Sojourner Truth, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lydia Maria Child, George Fitzhugh, and Edmund Ruffin, in addition to letters by ordinary soldiers, slaves, and nurses. Also provides previously published essays of 6,000–7,000 words by historians James McPherson and R. J. M. Blackett on aspects of the press; a political timeline; a teacher’s guide; a program transcript; an annotated list of 16 related sites; and a bibliography of approximately 150 titles. Valuable as an introduction for students to important social, political, and cultural aspects of life in antebellum America and during the Civil War. Resources Available:TEXT, IMAGES, VIDEO. Website last visited on 2004-7-27. |
| Making of America University of Michigan. This site is a “digital library” of thousands of primary documents in American social history from the Antebellum period through Reconstruction. The result of a collaborative project between the University of Michigan and Cornell University, begun in 1995, it currently offers more than 3 million pages of text from 11,063 volumes and 50,000 journal articles. Includes 10 major 19th-century journals—like Appleton’s from 1869 to 1881, the Southern Literary Messenger from 1835 to 1864, Ladies Repository from 1841 to 1876, and DeBow’s from 1846 to 1869 — as well as novels and tracts important for understanding the development of American education, sociology, history, religion, psychology, and science. A recent addition includes 149 volumes on New York City, some from the early 20th century. Searchable by word or phrase, the site provides a complete bibliography of books and journals, organized by author. Well-designed and executed, this is an excellent collection of material. Resources Available:TEXT. Website last visited on 2004-7-27. |
| Documenting the American South University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Libraries. This database presents nearly 1,400 primary documents about the American South in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. Culled from the premier collections at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (UNC), the database features seven major projects. First-Person Narratives of the American South, 1860–1920 offers approximately 140 diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, travel accounts, and ex-slave narratives, and concentrates on women, blacks, workers, and American Indians. (See separate History Matters entry for more details.) “North American Slave Narratives” also furnishes about 250 texts. And the “Library of Southern Literature” makes available an additional 51 titles in Southern literature. “The Church in the Southern Black Community, Beginnings to 1920,” traces “how Southern African Americans experienced and transformed Protestant Christianity into the central institution of community life.” "The Southern Homefront, 1861–1865“ documents ”non-military aspects of Southern life during the Civil War." “The North Carolina Experience, Beginnings to 1940” provides approximately 575 histories, descriptive accounts, institutional reports, works of fiction, images, oral histories, and songs. “North Carolinians and the Great War” offers approximately 170 documents on effects of World War I and its legacy. The projects are accompanied by essays from the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, and are searchable by author, keyword, and title. They reflect a larger effort, begun in 1995, to digitize the Southern collections at UNC. Resources Available:TEXT. Website last visited on 2004-7-27. |
| The
African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship American Memory, Library of Congress. More than 240 items dealing with African-American history from collections of the Library of Congress, including books, government documents, manuscripts, maps, musical scores, plays, films, and recordings. The exhibition explores black America’s quest for political, social, and economic equality from slavery through the mid-20th century. Organized into nine chronological periods covering the following topics: slavery; free blacks in the antebellum period; antislavery movements; the Civil War and African-American participation in the military; Reconstruction political struggles, black exodus from the South, and activism in the black church; the “Booker T. Washington era” of progress in the creation of educational and political institutions during a period of violent backlash; World War I and the postwar period, including the rise of the Harlem Renaissance; the Depression, New Deal, and World War II; and the Civil Rights era. Each section includes a 500-word overview and annotations of 100 words in length for each object displayed. In addition to documenting the struggle for freedom and civil rights, the exhibit includes celebratory material on contributions of artists, writers, performers, and sports figures. Valuable for students and teachers looking for a well-written and documented guide for exploring African-American history. Resources Available:TEXT, IMAGES. Website last visited on 2004-7-27. |
| Historical New York
Times Project—The Civil War Years,
1860–1866 University Library, Carnegie Mellon University. Designed originally to provide access to issues of The New York Times for the Civil War years in order to offer “a glimpse on how people in the 1860s saw the events of the war and of the world,” the site now has expanded to include reproductions of all pages from all newspapers for the entire decade of the 1860s and for the years 1900–1907, despite the fact that its title still references a time frame of 1860–1866. For the war years, it provides category listings of more than 80 selected articles arranged chronologically by years and by the following topics: battles, military, politics, relations among the States, and social issues. The site lists articles on Lincoln’s election, inaugural, and assassination, censorship of the press, abolition of slavery, formation of the Confederate States of America, and Sherman’s March to the Sea, among other topics. In addition, users can select any page number for any year in the decade. This “first of a series of projects undertaken by the Universal Library at Carnegie Mellon University, to provide everyone with a glimpse into the actual events as they were seen by the people of the day” is marred by limited subject access and poor quality of reproduction. The creators note they “will be providing much more detailed indexing and full-text over time.” Despite the current work-in-progress state of the site, it can be extremely rewarding to those studying American life during the 1860s. Resources Available:TEXT, IMAGES. Website last visited on 2004-7-27. |
|
WPA Life Histories, Virginia Interviews Library of Virginia. Provides approximately 1,350 life histories and youth studies created by the Virginia Writers‘ Project (VWP)—part of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers’ Project—between October 1938 and May 1941. In addition, the site offers more than 50 interviews with ex-slaves conducted by the VWP’s all-black Virginia Negro Studies unit in 1936 and 1937 and six VWP folklore studies produced between 1937 and 1942. The life histories—ranging between two and 16 pages in length—offer information on rural and urban occupational groups and experiences of individuals during the Depression, in addition to remembrances of late 19th-century and early 20th-century life. The youth studies investigate experiences of young people between the ages of 16 and 24 who left school and include a survey of urban black youth. The ex-slave narratives, selected from more than 300 that were conducted for the project—of which only one-half have survived—provided research for the 1940 WPA publication The Negro in Virginia. Interviews and studies were edited—sometimes extensively—at the Richmond home office. Each study includes a bibliographic record with notes searchable by keyword; for many records, notes are structured to include searchable data on age, gender, race, nationality, industrial classification, and occupation. The site includes a 2,300-word overview of the project. Valuable for those studying social, economic, and cultural life in Virginia during the Depression, in addition to early periods, youth culture, and the history of slavery. Resources Available:TEXT. Website last visited on 2004-7-27. |
| Chronology on the
History of Slavery, 1619 to 1789 Eddie Becker, Preservation Activist. This site offers a timeline on the history of slavery compiled by an activist for preservation of African-American history sites in Washington, D.C. The timeline was compiled from archive, library, and Internet sources to provide background information for research on the history of slavery and racism in the United States. The timeline is divided into three chronological sections: 1619–1789, 1790–1829, and 1830 to “the end”. For each year listed in the timeline there is an essay (150–750 words) describing major events and incorporating links to related sites and suggested readings. Approximately 20 graphs, tables, and images are also incorporated into the timeline. Though the site has no primary documents, it is a good start for the study of the history of slavery and Africans in America. Resources Available:TEXT. Website last visited on 2004-7-27 |
| Historical and Cultural Atlas
Resource University of Oregon. A collection of historical maps. Maps of the United States (21), focus on the late 18th and 19th centuries, and 33 maps about Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa cover ancient civilization to the medieval period. The American section is divided into three categories—“Territorial Expansion of the United States 1783–1898,” “Slavery Through 1860,” and “Legal Status of Slavery Through 1860.” Fifteen maps are “interactive,” and require a “shockwave plug-in” to access. Useful as geographic aids for those studying U.S. exploration in North America, westward expansion, campaigns against Native Americans, and slavery. Resources Available:IMAGES. Website last visited on 2004-7-27 |
| Gilder Lehrman Center for the
Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition Yale Center for International and Area Studies. This collection of essays, documents, and bibliographies addresses Atlantic slavery, resistance, and abolition. Source Documents includes about 200 speeches, letters, cartoons, graphics, and articles (visitors may browse by author, date, subject, or document type—no searching), that document slavery in the Americas. Bibliographies contains about 12 detailed bibliographies by scholars of slavery and abolition that can be used in teaching or studying in this area, as well as links to book reviews on the internet. A Scholars Forum posts a 4,500-word featured essay by a noted scholar, and visitors can read past essays as well. Teachers may find useful a Curriculum section, where lesson plans are available, including one for the Amistad affair. It includes a timeline of abolition, a narrative of the incident and the subsequent trials, and an essay. Tangled Roots uses a 1,000-word essay to examine the history shared by Irish Americans and African Americans in America. Neither the most complete digital archive nor the greatest collection of essays, this site is nonetheless a valuable resource for the most recent scholarship of American slavery and abolition. Resources Available:TEXT. Website last visited on 2004-7-27. |
| Archival
Research Catalog (ARC) National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). In addition to providing a catalog for researchers who plan to use National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) materials on site, ARC offers approximately 124,000 digital images of governmental textual records, photographs, and maps. Materials date from the Colonial period to the recent past. ARC includes items on presidents, the nation’s wars, slavery, civil rights, and American Indians. Approximately 500 images date from the 17th and 18th centuries. The search engine is clearly organized and invites queries on specific historical materials or general themes. To access digitized materials only, check the box marked “Descriptions of Archival Materials linked to digital copies.” The site plans to expand; as it stands, it provides an exceptional amount of government sanctioned material. Resources Available:TEXT, IMAGES, AUDIO, VIDEO. Website last visited on 2004-7-27. |
| North American Slave
Narratives, Beginnings to 1920 William Andrews, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Offers 230 full-text documents on the lives of American slaves, including all known-to-be published slave narratives and many published biographies of slaves. Documents are available in HTML and SGML/TEI file formats. Users can also view images of the covers, spines, title pages, and versos of title pages. Accessible through alphabetical and chronological listings. The documents have been indexed by subject, but subject searching brings up additional materials included in other collections in the University of North Carolina’s “Documenting the American South” parent site. Provides a 2,200-word introductory essay by Professor Andrews. Of great value to those studying the history of American slavery, the South, African-American culture, and literary properties of slave narratives. Resources Available:TEXT, IMAGES. Website last visited on 2004-7-27. |
| African
Americans in Lancaster County Lancaster County Historical Society. A collection of more than 100 documents on antebellum life in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Includes photographs, letters, a burial record, wills, tax records, maps, census records, court records, newspaper articles, inventories, and local government records regarding slavery in the county. Provides nine activities and more than 50 documents for elementary and secondary students to learn about the underground railroad and the “Christiana Resistance”—the killing in 1851 of a Maryland farmer who came north to recover four escaped slaves, an event that achieved national significance. Also includes an exhibit on middle-class African-American life in the county. A bibliography lists more than 125 books, pamphlets, and articles, and a timeline fits the history of African Americans in Lancaster County into a national context. Valuable for those studying African-American history at the local level. Resources Available:TEXT, IMAGES. Website last visited on 2004-7-27. |
| Africans in America PBS Online. This well-produced site was created as a companion to the Public Broadcasting Company series, Africans in America, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. It traces the history of Africans in America in four chronological parts: “The Terrible Transformation” (1450–1750) deals with the beginning of the slave trade into America and slavery’s growth in the early 18th century; “Revolution” (1750–1805) discusses the justifications for slavery in a new nation that was supposed to represent equality and freedom; “Brotherly Love” (1791–1831) traces the development of a wide abolition movement in the North; and “Judgment Day” (1831–1865) depicts the debates over slavery, strengthening of sectionalism, and the Civil War. Each section begins with a roughly 1500-word narrative that offers links to images and documents related to the topic. A Resource Bank lists all the primary documents and images offered within that section. The site offers a total of more than 200 primary documents, more than 75 images and maps, and 153 brief (150-word) descriptions by historians of specific aspects of the history of slavery, servitude, abolition, and war in America. Teacher guides offer ideas for questions, activities, and lessons for elementary and secondary students. The lack of a search engine or comprehensive index makes the site a bit difficult to navigate, but it is certainly worth the trouble. This site is ideal for researching and teaching African-American history up to the Civil War. College survey teachers will find it particularly useful for providing anecdotes for lectures and material for discussion. Click here for Audio Review. Resources Available:TEXT, IMAGES. Website last visited on 2004-7-27. |
| Library of Virginia Digital Library
Program Library of Virginia. This site offers access to tens of thousands of digitized documents and photographs and 16 exhibits on aspects of Virginia’s history. Users can find more than 26,000 photographs that document buildings and people, including 1,500 photos related to African American life in the Lee F. Rodgers Collection and patents and grants submitted to the Virginia Land Office between 1623 and 1992. Northern Neck Grants and Survey forms filed between 1692 and 1892 are available as are military records, including Revolutionary War state pensions material and World War I History Commission Questionnaires. The site also offers WPA Life Histories and Virginia Religious Petitions from 1774–1802. Exhibits deal with the legacy of the New Deal in Virginia; resistance to slavery; Virginia roots music, with seven audio selections; Thomas Jefferson; John Marshall; Virginia’s coal towns; and political life in Virginia. A wealth of material for those studying Virginia and life in the South. Resources Available:TEXT, IMAGES. Website last visited on 2004-7-27. |
| The
19th Century in Print: Books American Memory, Library of Congress. This site, part of the Library of Congress American Memory project, features over 1500 full-text images of 19th-century books digitized by the University of Michigan as part of the “Making of America” project. Books in the collection primarily date from 1850 to 1880 and cover such subjects as education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, science and technology, and poetry. The collection is divided into seven general themes: Civil War, Slavery and Abolition, Religion, Education, Self-Help and Self-Improvement, Travel and Westward Expansion, and Poetry. Each section opens with a 200-word descriptive essay, and each book featured on the site is accompanied by notes on the author, full title of the work, date and place of publication, and the publisher. The site is keyword searchable and can be browsed by subject, author, and title. The site is ideal for exploring late-19th-century literature and popular culture. Resources Available:TEXT. Website last visited on 2004-7-27. |
| Capital and
the Bay: Narratives of Washington and the Chesapeake Bay Region,
ca. 1600–1925 American Memory, Library of Congress. This site offers published books selected from the Library of Congress’ general and rare book collections in an “attempt to capture in words and pictures a distinctive region as it developed between the onset of European settlement and the first quarter of the twentieth century.” Contains 139 books, a few by well-known figures, such as Edwin Booth, Frederick Douglass, and Thomas Jefferson, but most by little-known residents and visitors to the region. Includes memoirs, autobiographies, biographies, books of letters, journals, poems, addresses, reports, speeches, travel books, sermons, books of photographs, and promotional brochures. In addition to Washington, D.C., the cities of Baltimore, Maryland, and Richmond, Virginia, are featured. A special presentation entitled “Pictures of People and Places from the Collection” consists of selected illustrations organized in three sections of 10 images each on Maryland, the District of Columbia, and Virginia. The site includes 10 works dealing with slavery—a number of which were written by former slaves—and approximately 10 works dealing with encounters between whites and Native Americans. Includes links to 22 related sites. A valuable collection for those studying ways that Washington, D.C., and neighboring regions have been described in print over several centuries. Resources Available:TEXT, IMAGES. Website last visited on 2004-7-27. |
| African-American
Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century Digital Schomburg: The New York Public Library. Part of the Digital Schomberg/New York Public Library Project, this site is a digital collection of 52 published works by black women writers from the late 18th century through 1920. The site features a full-text database of works by such African-American woman writers as late-18th century poet Phillis Wheatley, late-19th century essayist and novelist Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Harriet Jacobs, a woman born into slavery who published her memoirs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, in the late-19th century. The site can be browsed by title, author, or type of work (fiction, poetry, biography and autobiography, and essays). Each browse category also contains a keyword search with which the visitor can search for subjects such as religion, family, and slavery. The site also provides an MLA-style guide to citing the works found on the site, as well as brief (approximately 300-word) biographies of the 37 featured writers. This easily-navigable site is ideal for students and researchers interested in African-American history, African-American women’s history, and 19th-century American literature. Resources Available:TEXT. Website last visited on 2004-7-27. |
| National Park Service: Links to the
Past National Park Service. Visitors to this site are invited to explore historical aspects of the roughly 200 National Park Service locations designated important to this country’s history and prehistory. Organized by “cultural resource subjects”—including archeology, architecture and engineers, cultural groups, cultural landscapes, historic buildings, mapping, maritime and military history—and “cultural resource programs,” such as the American Indian Liaison Program and Heritage Preservation Services. Visitors can search for information on more than 2.5 million Civil War soldiers and sailors; more than 71,000 properties listed in the National Register of Historic Places; and approximately 240,000 reports on federal archeological projects in the National Archeological Database. National Register Travel Itineraries provide historic guides to 18 cities and communities. The National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom contains information on 51 sites of importance and on slavery and antislavery efforts in general. Also of interest are bibliographies on the African-American west and public history, and full-text publications on the Antiquities Act of 1906 and the promotion of the city of Seattle during the gold rush era. Additional National Park Service sites are described in History Matters. This valuable site emphasizes the importance of place in the study of history. Resources Available:TEXT, IMAGES. Website last visited on 2004-7-27 |
| Images of African
Americans from the 19th Century Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. Part of the Digital Schomburg/New York Public Library project, this site contains roughly 500 images selected primarily from the Photographs and Prints Division of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. The items, selected by Marilyn Nance, freelance photographer, and Mary Yearwood, Curator of Photographs and Prints, include prints, original negatives, and transparencies from the 19th century, drawn from collections of family photographs, African-American school photographs, and personal collections. The images in this archive depict the social, political, and cultural worlds of their African American subjects. The site can be searched through 17 subject categories, such as family, labor, Civil War, slavery, social life and customs, and portraits. Under each subject category is a list of images with 15-word descriptions. This easily-navigable site also offers a keyword search engine through which collection items can be accessed. The images download quickly and are of good quality. Ideal for researching African American and 19th century history. Resources Available:TEXT, IMAGES. Website last visited on 2004-7-27. |
| National Geographic
Online: The Underground Railroad National Geographic. This multimedia educational site from National Geographic offers a diverse set of materials that describe the Underground Railroad, the well-known network of men and women who helped transport African Americans to freedom before the abolition of slavery. Students can start by taking an interactive journey to the North and to freedom. Using visual materials (such as historical photographs of slaves and abolitionists) and audio selections (such as popular spirituals of the day), students make decisions about what to do in order to reach the North. The site is also comprised of a map of the Underground Railroad routes, including those specific to Harriet Tubman, and a section entitled "Faces of Freedom" that allows students to study 12 brief (25 words or less) biographies of individuals who helped enslaved African Americans reach the North. A timeline provides some context to the history of slavery in the New World, beginning with the importation of slaves by Spaniards to Santo Domingo in 1501 and concluding in 1865 when slavery was abolished by the passage of the 13th Amendment. The site is rounded out by a number of educational resources for K-12 teachers. Resources Available:TEXT, IMAGES, AUDIO. Website last visited on 2004-7-27 |
| Tangled Roots: A Project
Exploring the Histories of Americans of Irish Heritage and
Americans of African Heritage MaryAnn Matthews & Tim O’Brien, Affiliates, Gilder Lehrman Center, Yale University. This site explores the cultural connections between the history of African Americans and Irish immigrants in America. Sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, the project offers more than 200 documents related to individual leaders, historical events, economic, political, and social factors, and cultural achievements of African Americans and Irish Americans. All of the themes and documents that the site explores are presented in a format that makes them easy for teachers to use in the classroom. A section entitled “Making Connections” offers 15 questions about historical events and people that represent the intertwined histories of Africans and Irish in America and provide links to 36 related documents and images. For example, “What renowned abolitionist visited Ireland during the 1840s?” The answer (Frederick Douglass) provides links to two addresses Douglass gave while in Ireland. Other topics covered include the end of English participation in the slave trade, the emergence of the nativist Know-Nothing Party in the 1850s, and Ku Klux Klan activities against Catholics and blacks after the Civil War. A section on “Acceptance” explores perceptions of individual and group identities among African- and Irish-Americans and gives visitors five questions to consider as they explore four timelines on displacement, oppression, discrimination, and acceptance in America, from the late 17th century to the present. Documents featured in this section include five American and British political cartoons and 16 links to images, related primary documents, and brief (roughly 150–200 words) biographies of people and groups who acted as “Barrier Breakers” to ethnic and racial acceptance. Figures like writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and the Tuskeegee Airmen are included. “Voices” provides a sample of 12 public statements and interviews on ethnicity and race from ordinary modern Americans, such as Jamaican-American Reverend Hopeton Scott and a group of DeLaSalle Christian Brothers. The site also provides a bibliography of ten works of fiction, memoirs, and scholarly works on Irish and Africans in America; a 500-word essay by writer James McGowan, a black American with an Irish paternal grandfather; and 25 links to related websites. This site is a well-designed tool for use in the secondary and college survey classroom when studying cross-cultural encounters, ethnicity, race, and identity. Resources Available:TEXT, IMAGES. Website last visited on 2004-7-27 |
| HarpWeek: Explore History John Adler Within the larger HarpWeek site—which for a hefty subscription fee allows full-text searching of all Harper’s Weekly issues from 1857–1912—this collection of 13 exhibits presents free access to a wealth of texts and images taken primarily from Harper’s on a variety of subjects dealing with 19th-century American political and social history. “The Presidential Elections—1860–1912” offers hundreds of political cartoons annotated with explanatory essays up to 700 words in length, in addition to biographies, shorter essays on issues and campaigning, and overviews of up to 3,000 words on each of the 14 elections. “American Political Prints, 1766–1876” presents 750 cartoons and other types of print from Library of Congress collections, with 100-word annotations and a 1,800-word introductory essay. “Finding Precedent: The Impeachment of Andrew Johnson” has more than 200 items from 1865–69, including 27 political cartoons, 47 news articles, 34 illustrations, and 90 editorials. “19th Century Advertising History” provides approximately 50 ads for items and services such as Civil War products, consumer goods, farmland, travel abroad, insurance, retailers, and souvenirs. "Toward Racial Equality: Harper’s Weekly Reports on Black America, 1857–1874“ presents approximately 70 cartoons, illustrations, and advertisements dealing with slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and African-American culture and society. ”A Sampler of Civil War Literature“ includes 15 complete stories, indexed according to nine categories. ”The American West“ offers 42 illustrations organized into eight categories—buffalo, farming, wagon trains, gold, railroads, life on the plains, the frontier, and Indians. In ”Finding Precedent: Hayes vs. Tilden, The Electoral College Controversy of 1876–1877,“ visitors will find 23 cartoons and illustrations, a 4,200-word overview, a day-by-day timeline, more than 20 biographies, and an essay relating it to the 2000 election. ”The Chinese American Experience: 1857–1892“ presents 126 documents, including ads, cartoons and illustrations, news articles, editorials, fiction, and poetry. ”The World of Thomas Nast" offers nearly 50 cartoon by the illustrious Harper’s illustrator. Recent additions to the site include exhibits on “Russian-American Relations, 1863–1905”; “Business Machines, 1857–1912”; and “Coffin Nails: The Tobacco Controversy in the 19th Century.” Finally, in “Educational Tools for Learning about the 19th Century World,” documents and classroom activities are presented for three topics: the Ku Klux Klan, the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, and the North’s victory in the Civil War. A valuable site for those studying 19th-century print culture, the history of publishing, and the political and social history of the latter half of the 19th-century. Resources Available:TEXT, IMAGES. Website last visited on 2004-7-27. |
| American Time
Capsule: Three Centuries of Broadsides and Printed Ephemera American Memory, Library of Congress. At present, this site furnishes more than 7,000 items of ephemera—“transitory documents created for a specific purpose, and intended to be thrown away”—from a collection of more than 28,000 items. The Library of Congress plans to put online several thousand more items and full transcriptions in late 2001. Items are from the U.S. and London, and date from the 17th century to the present, though they originate primarily from the 19th century. They include “a variety of posters, notices, advertisements, proclamations, leaflets, propaganda, manifestos, and business cards,” and pertain to subjects such as the American Revolution, slavery, western migration, the Civil War, the Industrial Revolution, travel, labor concerns, education, health, and woman suffrage. Users can search by keyword or browse by author, title, genre, or printing location. Of value to those studying various forms of popular print and consumer culture that relate to issues of public concern to ordinary people. Resources Available:TEXT, IMAGES. Website last visited on 2004-7-27. |
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African-American Women The Digital Scriptorium, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University. Writings of three African-American women of the 19th century are offered in this site. Features scanned images and transcriptions of an 85-page memoir by Elizabeth Johnson Harris (1867–1923), a Georgia women whose parents had been slaves, along with 13 attached pages of newspaper clippings containing short prose writings and poems by Harris; a 565-word letter written in 1857 by a North Carolinia slave named Vilet Lester; and four letters written between 1837 and 1838 by Hannah Valentine and Lethe Jackson, slaves on an Abingdon, Virginia, plantation. The documents are accompanied by three background essays ranging in length from 300 to 800 words, six photographs, a bibliography of seven titles on American slave women, and eight links to additional resources. Though modest in size, this site contains documents of value for their insights into the lives of women living under slavery and during its aftermath in the South. Resources Available:TEXT, IMAGES. Website last visited on 2004-7-27. |
| Douglass Archives of
American Public Address Douglass Web Project, Northwestern University. Created to serve courses in American rhetorical history at the Northwestern University School of Speech, this site, named for the great orator Frederick Douglass, features the texts of 97 speeches and documents, many chosen because they had not been anthologized or previously included in websites. Presents orators as diverse as John Winthrop and Hillary Clinton, and includes subjects such as slavery, “State’s Rights, Federalism, Sectionalism, and the Role of Government,” women’s rights in the 1990s, and war and peace. The bulk of the material treats the period from the American Revolution to the Progressive Era. Searchable by speaker or author, title, date, and subject. The site also furnishes the complete text of An Outline of American History, published by the United States Information Agency. Includes 17 links to professional speech associations and dozens of additional links to selected reference material. A useful collection of speeches and resources for the study of rhetoric. Resources Available:TEXT. Website last visited on 2004-7-27. |
| The Hartford Black
History Project Haines Brown, Hartford Black History Project. Provides two exhibits on black history in Hartford, Connecticut. “A Struggle from the Start” charts stages in the life of the Hartford African-American community from 1638 to 1920. Structured in five chronological sections, each with three-to-four thematic subsections, a text of 21,000 words is punctuated with approximately 60 images of documents, photographs, illustrations, newspaper clippings, tables, paintings, and maps. This exhibit covers slavery, black codes, free blacks, Black Governors in the early Republic period, black soldiers, the black bourgeoisie, the formation of the black community, black labor, black society, black churches, the “Talented Tenth” in Hartford, black painters Charles Ethan Porter and Holdridge Primus, black migration from the South, mass politics, and black community institutions. A second exhibit presents approximately 80 photographs from Hartford’s African-American community covering the years 1870 to the 1970s. Valuable for those interested in studying African-American history from a community perspective. Resources Available:TEXT, IMAGES. Website last visited on 2004-7-27. |
| Sunday
School Books: Shaping the Values of Youth in 19th-Century
America American Memory, Library of Congress; Michigan State University Libraries; and Central Michigan University. Presents full-text transcriptions and page images of 163 “Sunday school books” of religious instruction for youth published in the U.S. between 1815 and 1865. Includes texts used by Methodists, Baptists, Mormons, and other denominations. Searchable by subject, author, title, and keyword, and categorized according to nine types—“Advice Books, Moral Tales”; “Animals, Natural History”; “Child Labor, Orphans, Poverty”; “Death, Dying, Illness”; “Holidays”; “Immigrants”; “Slavery, African Americans, Native Americans”; “Temperance, Tobacco”; and “Travel, Missionaries.” Includes 62 author biographies ranging from 400 to 1,000 words in length and a 7,300-word essay on Sunday school books. Titles selected from the Russel B. Nye Popular Culture Collection at the Michigan State University Libraries and the Clarke Historical Library of Central Michigan University. Valuable to those studying the culture of the antebellum period, American religious history, print culture, and education history. Resources Available:TEXT, IMAGES. Website last visited on 2004-7-27. |
| Beyond Face
Value: Depictions of Slavery in Confederate Currency Leah Wood Jewett, Project Director, U.S. Civil War Center. Funded by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities as a project of the U.S. Civil War Center at Louisiana State University, this exhibit focuses on depictions of slaves on Confederate currency. The project treats currency as a way to interpret the culture and identity of the southern people during the Civil War. The site offers over 70 images of Confederate Currency printed by individual southern states and provides roughly 500-word narratives of the general history and economic environment of the Confederate states as background to the interpretation of the images. The images are grouped both by state of origin and thematically, in seven categories that describe the kinds of activities that slaves are depicted performing on the money: Individuals with Cotton; Individuals with Assorted Tasks; Field Scenes; Stylistic Scenes; Post-Civil War Scenes; Sugar Plantations; and Transportation. There are 15–20 word captions with each image describing the currency on which the image appeared. There is a list of ten Web links and a bibliography of over 50 scholarly books and articles on the Confederate economy and currency. This site is useful for researching the economic history of the southern states as well as for learning about southern identity during the Civil War. Resources Available:TEXT, IMAGES. Website last visited on 2004-7-27. |
| American Museum of
Photography American Museum of Photography. Photographs from 1839 to the late 20th century are on view in 12 exhibits that offer 100 to 600-word introductory essays and a diverse range of images. “The Face of Slavery” presents ten photographs of African Americans from 1855 to 1905. The work of Southworth and Hawes, a photography team active between 1843 and 1862, is represented by eight daguerreotypes of women. In “Do You Believe?” visitors may consider evidence of ghostly existence offered by 22 “spirit photographs” taken between 1875 and 1932. In “Photography as a Fine Arf!,” 16 photos from the 1850s to the 1950s “explore the complex relationships of people and dogs.” In “At Ease,” nine photographs from around 1850 refute the popular notion that early portraiture was stiff. An exhibit of the trick photography of William H. “Dad” Martin presents eight photos produced between 1894 and 1912 that show exaggerated ordinary objects. In “Of Bricks and Light,” the museum exhibits 33 architectural photographs. Business executive and photographer Shotaro Shimomura took pictures of his trip around the world in 1934–35; nine of these are exhibited in “An Eye for the World.” An interactive exhibit of nine cartes de visite allows visitors to investigate details such as the hats worn by men in Abraham Lincoln’s funeral procession. “Scott Mutter: A More Perfect World” presents 11 “hyper-realistic” photomontages by the acclaimed image maker. “Masterworks of Photography” includes 25 images produced from 1840 to 1975, including English inventor William Henry Fox Talbot’s “The Footman,” of 1840, considered the earliest photograph on paper of a human being. In addition, the museum showcases 42 of its favorite pieces. The site also provides a 1,700-word explanatory essay on photographic processes and links to 25 other resources concerning the history and art of photography. This site cannot be searched by subject, however, which limits its usefulness for research. Resources Available:TEXT, IMAGES. Website last visited on 2004-7-27. |
| African-American
Experience in Ohio: Selections from the Ohio Historical
Society American Memory, Library of Congress and Ohio Historical Society. This Library of Congress American Memory site, a cooperative effort with the Ohio Historical Society, presents manuscripts, printed materials, and photographs drawn from the Ohio State Archives/Library in Columbus and the National African-American Museum and Cultural Center in Wilberforce. The collection includes more than 30,000 items relating to African-American life in Ohio between 1850 and 1920, including personal papers, association records, a plantation account book, ex-slave narratives, legal records, pamphlets and speeches. More than 300 photographs of local community leaders, buildings, ex-slaves, and African-American members of the military and police, as well as more than 15,000 articles from 11 Ohio newspapers and the African Methodist Episcopal Church Review, perhaps the oldest African-American periodical, are included. The materials represent themes such as slavery, abolition, the underground railroad, African-Americans in politics and government, and African-American religion. Items include an extensive collection of correspondence by George A. Myers, an African-American businessman and politician active in the Republican party around the turn of the 20th century, and prominent political speeches such as an 1863 speech by Congressman William Allen protesting a bill that would permit the use of Negro soldiers in the war. Each image is accompanied by notes on the source, subjects, medium, and repository. The site also includes a list of two related scholarly resources and seven links to websites with related materials. The materials, searchable by keyword, are arranged by document type. Though no interpretation of the sources is included in this site beyond a brief (750-word) introduction by John Fleming, Director of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, this site is ideal for those interested in African-American and Ohio history. Resources Available:TEXT, IMAGES. Website last visited on 2004-7-27. |
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Private
Passions, Public Legacy: Paul Mellon’s Personal
Library |
| Our Documents National Archives and Records Administration, National History Day, and USA Freedom Corps. A cooperative effort, this website is an online repository of 100 milestone primary documents in American history. The first document is the Richard Henry Lee Resolution of June 7, 1776, proposing independence for the American colonies. The last is the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In between, visitors will find Eli Whitney’s 1794 cotton gin patent, the 1862 Pacific Railway Act, and the 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson ruling. There is a full-page scan and transcription of each document. In addition to the chronological list of 100 documents, the site includes a “People’s Vote” top-ten list. Of the 100 documents, Americans voted the Declaration of Independence number one, while the 1935 Social Security Act came in last. The site offers resource tools for educators and librarians on how to integrate the milestone documents into their classrooms. Resources Available:TEXT. Website last visited on 2004-7-27." |
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Third Person, First Person: Slave Voices
The Digital Scriptorium, Special Collections Library, Duke University. An exhibit of primary source material relating to slavery from the late 18th century to emancipation in the 19th century. Reproduces or describes 33 documents, such as a broadside announcing a reward for the return of a runaway slave, a map delineating slave labor on an indigo plantation, a New York bill of sale for the purchase of a slave in 1785, and an 85-page memoir written in 1923 by Elizabeth Johnson Harris, an African-American woman from Georgia who relates stories and experiences of her parents and grandparents, who had been slaves. The site “showcases the kinds of rare materials that under scrutiny reveal the ambitions, motivations, and struggles of people often presumed mute.” Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES. Website last visited on 2002-10-24. |
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Brooklyn’s Eighteenth-Century Lott House
Archaeological Institute of America, Archaeology Magazine. An archaeological exploration of a farmhouse built in early 18th-century Brooklyn that allows visitors to participate in a “virtual dig” to examine artifacts and documents relating to the lives of a Dutch family and their descendants. Chronicles the work done by Brooklyn College archaeologists and students, who have turned up evidence of slave rituals that originated in Africa and the existence of a secret garret room believed to have been used to hide slaves as part of the Underground Railroad in the 1840s. Provides family documents, including wills, probates, and deeds; oral histories of family members (including one audio file); old family recipes; field notes; student journals; an analysis of animal remains; a lesson in stratigraphy (study of rock strata); and approximately 30 photographs. Valuable for those studying family history and the use of material culture in determining ways of life in earlier periods of time. Links to The Lott House Restoration ProjectResources Available: TEXT, AUDIO. Website last visited on 2004-7-26. |
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Been Here So Long: Selections from the WPA American Slave Narratives
Dick Parsons. These three lessons use the American Slave Narratives gathered between 1936 and 1938 by journalists and other writers employed by the Federal Writers Project, part of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration (WPA). The site supplies 17 narratives for student use and also provides information on online and printed sources for additional narratives (approximately 2,300 were collected). The lessons ask students to explore the slave narratives to gain an understanding of the experiences of African Americans in nineteenth-century America and to consider the nature of oral history and personal narratives as historical evidence. One lesson requires students to use selected slave narratives to construct a “Document Based Question” for fellow students to answer. The lessons are accompanied by an essay on “The Ex-Slave Interviews in the Depression Cultural Context.” This activity comes from the New Deal Network Web site. Resources Available: TEXT. |
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Slave Interviews From 1936 to 1938, over 2,300 former slaves from across the American South were interviewed by writers and journalists under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration. These former slaves, most born in the last years of the slave regime or during the Civil War, provided first-hand accounts of their experiences on plantations, in cities, and on small farms. Their narratives remain a peerless resource for understanding the lives of America's four million slaves. What makes the WPA narratives so rich is that they capture the very voices of American slavery, revealing the texture of life as it was experienced and remembered. Each narrative taken alone offers a fragmentary, microcosmic representation of slave life. |
| The African American Biographical Available for free trial scroll to bottom to view information. Database is a resource of first resort when you are looking for biographical information, including photographs and illustrations, for African Americans. From the famous to the everyday person, AABD includes profiles and full-text sketches providing both biographical detail and illuminating narratives chronicling the lives of Black Americans. Each text used in the African American Biographical Database has been fully digitized so that in addition to searching for specific biographic sketches, you essentially have direct access to a rich collection of African American reference works, many of which are rare books. |
| http://dbs.ohiohistory.org/africanam/ This digital collection illuminates specific moments in the history of Ohio's African-Americans and provides an overview of their experiences during the time period 1850 to 1920 in the words of the people that lived them. The story of the African-American Experience in Ohio 1850-1920 is more diverse and complex than this collection can adequately portray. All we can hope is to provide the researcher with a place to begin. |
| " National Underground Freedom Center This website promotes the National Underground Freedom Center, scheduled to open during August of 2004, with lessons and collaborations for educating the public about the struggle for freedom.Visitors can take an interactive tour of the Freedom Center, Walk the floor plans and listen to demonstrations of the visitor experiences and exhibits. |
| "Making of America" Making of America (MOA), a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. This site provides access to 267 monograph volumes and over 100,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints. The project represents a major collaborative endeavor in preservation and electronic access to historical texts. |
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Reference: History Matters:
Many Pasts
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