Marjoleine Kars
Slavery Websites
A. Around the world
B. United States
C. Caribbean
D. Slave Trade
E. African Diaspora
F. Bibliographical Links
G. Images of Slavery
H. Historians
I. E-Journals
Around the world
Slave Studies.Net "offers a subject catalog and a search engine providing access to internet resources for the study of slavery and abolition across all geographical areas and historical periods (with the exception of forced labor and sexual slavery under totalitarian regimes in the 20th century)." Part of: The Virtual Library History – European History Project, coord. by Serge Noiret and Iñaki López Martín. Florence: The Library of the European University Institute, 2004.
Black History Canada, a new bilingual site with thematically organized information and resources, vetted for accuracy and compiled by editors from The Canadian Encyclopedia in consultation with Rosemary Sadlier, President of the Ontario Black History Society. Contains a section on enslavement.
African Nova Scotians in the Age of Slavery and Abolition, virtual exhibit, with many documents, put together by the Nova Scotia Archives and Records Management.
Slavery in Ancient Rome, course companion website at the University of Pennsylvania.
Race - The Power of an Illusion, accompanying website for a 3-part documentary on race. Includes many interviews with American historians talking about the historical development of race - see the "background reading" section.
Bibliotheque Nationale Voyages en Afrique
In French. "900 volumes de textes, 3am a0 titres de revues, 80 cartes venant des collections imprimées de la BnF, 20 heures d'enregistrements sonores des fonds du Musée de la parole et du geste et 6500 photographies issues des fonds de la Société de géographie." Access documents by type (books, journals, maps, photographs), geographic area, era.
British History Online is the digital library containing some of the core printed primary and secondary sources for the medieval and modern history of the British Isles. Created by the Institute of Historical Research and the History of Parliament Trust. Contains Calendar of State Papers, Colonial; Journals of the Board of Trade and Plantations; and other documents about slavery and British colonialism. Fully searchable. An amazing site.
United States
Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy, 1718-1820, a database about some 100,000 Afro-Louisianans. Contains information about African slave names, genders, ages, occupations, illnesses, family relationships, ethnicity, places of origin, prices paid by slave owners, and slaves' testimony and emancipations, put together by Dr. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, a noted scholar of African American history.
Voices from the Days of Slavery: Former Slaves Tell Their Stories, put together by the Library of Congress, allows you to listen to interviews with 23 formerly enslaved people born between 1823 and the early 1860s. Be sure to check out the companion site.
Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938, which contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts and 500 photographs of former slaves, collected as part of the Federal Writers' Project in the 1930s.
Slaves and the Courts, 1740-1860, also a part of the Library of Congress' American Memory site, contains just over a hundred pamphlets and books (published between 1772 and 1889) concerning the difficult and troubling experiences of African and African-American slaves in the American colonies and the United States. Click on the "about the collection" tab for links to many other pamphlets and primary online document collections on slavery in the US.
Online Resources about Slavery in the Library of Congress: useful compilation of internet sources on slavery that is part of the "Slaves and the Courts" website. Lists links to Library of Congress sources and others.
The Virginia Runaways Project is "a digital database of runaway and captured slave and servant advertisements from 18th-century Virginia newspapers. When a slave or servant ran away, masters often placed remarkably detailed advertisements for their return. Sheriffs and other county officials also often advertised the capture of runaways or suspected runaways. This project offers full transcripts and images of all runaway and captured ads for slaves, servants, and deserters placed in Virginia newspapers from 1736 to 1790."
The Geography of Slavery in America: provides transcriptions and images of more than 2,400 runaway slave advertisements between 1736 and 1777.
The Book of Negroes, a list of 3,000 black men, women and children evacuated from New York between April and November 1783 as part of the British withdrawal from North America at the end of the War of Independence. Searchable database provides names, descriptions, and former owners' names.
The Allen Parker slave narrative provides the complete text and further information of Allen Parker's Recollections of Slavery Times (1895), the autobiography of a man who was enslaved in coastal North Carolina from 1838 until his escape on a Union boat in 1862.
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, full text.
A website about Olaudah Equiano and the controversy over the authenticity of his narrative
A Chronology on the History of Slavery and Racism, with links to other sites about slavery.
Africans in America, website for the PBS Series, traces the history of African Americans in America through the Civil War.
Legal documents related to the treatment of slaves living in the State of Delaware.
New York Times Story about Two Journals Kept by Enslaved Men
Rhode Island Slavery, a 7 part web production put together by the Providence Journal. Worth taking a look! You may have to register to see all parts. Includes info on ship board revolts, the Brown brothers, and other topics.
Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, contains the committee's final report about Brown's historical relationship to slavery and the transatlantic slave trade as well as scholarly resources, including the full set of documents about a Rhode Island slave ship in 1765.
New Jersey State Archives: a collection of freedom papers (slave manumissions) from Hunterdon County, NJ., dating from 1788-1836.
Race and Slavery Petitions Project: a labor of love carried out by Prof. Loren Schweniger at UNC-Greensboro - this site contains information about thousands of petitions to southern legislatures and southern courts between 1777 and 1867.
African Americans and the End of Slavery in Massachusetts, a site put together by the Massachusetts Historical Society, featuring "historical manuscripts and rare published works that serve as a window upon the lives of African Americans in Massachusetts from the late seventeenth century through the abolition of slavery under the Massachusetts Constitution in the 1780s." Click on "List of All Featured Manuscripts and Objects" in the side bar to see the list of documents, all of which may be accessed on line, in the original and in transcription.
Slavery in New York: An exhibit organized by the New York Historical Society.
The Univ. of Virginia, Electronic Text Center, provides the full text of two collections of letters written by former slaves from Virginia who settled in Liberia: Samson Ceasar's letters to David S. Haselden and Henry F. Westfall, 1834-1835, and Letters from the former slaves of Terrell, 1857-1866. The letters are held by University of Virginia Library Special Collections.
African-American Women, provides images and transcriptions of letters and an autobiography of enslaved or recently emancipated women, held by Special Collections Library, Duke University. Part of the Duke Library Online Archival Collections.
Caribbean
Caribbean Online-Routes to Roots, an online exhibition of archives relating to the Caribbean organized by the Institute of Commonwealth Studies Library (UK). The exhibition looks at slavery, war, agriculture, trade and politics. Images of documents, maps, posters, and photographs.
Clash (Comité de Liaison et d'Application des Sources Historiques) website which contains a large number of documents (click on Pièces d'archives) and images about Saint-Barthélemy (St. Barth), one of four Leeward Islands that comprised the French West Indies. Saint Barthélemy was first claimed by France in 1648. It was sold to Sweden in 1784, which sold it back to France in 1878. Documents include a 1737 affidavit about a slave conspiracy on the island. In French, English, and other languages.
Slave Trade
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Data Base: an amazing project providing data on more than 35,000 slaving voyages between the 16th and 19th centuries. Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard.
The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record, a project created by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and Public Policy, contains numerous images relating to the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, contains a full set of documents of a Rhode Island slave ship that left Providence in 1764, took 196 slaves on board in West Africa, of whom at least 109 died, from disease, starvation, suicide and in a ship-board uprising.
Unesco Slave Trade Archives, is the website of a UNESCO project to improve the conservation and accessibility of slave trade records, the so called Slave Trade Archives Project, set up in 1999 and funded by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD). Provides links to archives around the world which contain documents on the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Slave Compensations: This website lists people compensated for slaves in Barbados and Antigua under the 1833 Emancipation Act. The registry numbers provided may lead you to more records providing personal data for enslaved people on those two islands.
Abolition of the Slave Trade: a comprehensive site put together by the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture. Contains more than 8,000 pages of documents, essays, maps, timelines and other information about African resistance to the trade and its abolion in the US and Britain.
African Diaspora
Africa South of the Sahara: Selected Internet Sources, huge site maintained on the Stanford University library. Browse by topic and go to "African diaspora" or to "history" and then "slavery." Very worthwhile site.
Harriet Tubman Resource Centre on the African Diaspora, York University (Canada): provides news about upcoming conferences, books and reviews, important links to other Diaspora sites and contemporary discussions.
The African Diaspora Archaeology Network: focal point for archaeological studies of African diasporas, with news, current research, information and links to other web resources related to the archaeology and history of the dispersed descendants of African peoples.
Priscilla's Homecoming: She was just ten years old. No one knows for sure how it happened. She was kidnapped from her home, a village in Sierra Leone, taken to the coast, and sold into slavery... This website documents the story of "Priscilla," an African child taken to South Carolina in 1756 aboard the slave ship "Hare" - with documents, maps, etc.
Ignatius Sancho: African Man of Letters, site devoted to scholarship about this remarkable man (1729-1780) who lived in Britain. He composed music, appeared on the stage, and entertained many famous figures of literary and artistic London. Includes his own writings, as well as scholarship about him.
Bibliographical Links
H-South: Slavery and Antislavery: A Bibliography of Recent Works in English compiled by Steven Mintz organized by geographical region - very extensive.
Images of Slavery
Images of Slavery, a database compiled by Professor Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff at the University of Trier, Germany, contains several hundred images from both Europe and Africa.
The Slave Ship Fredensborg, a UNESCO sponsored website about the slave ship Fredensborg, and its last voyage in the triangular trade between Denmark-Norway, the Gold Coast in Africa, and the islands of St. Thomas and St. Croix. The wreck of the Fredensborg was discovered off the coast of Norway in 1974, more than 200 years after it sank in 1768.
The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record, a project created by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and Public Policy, contains numerous images relating to the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Traite négrière, esclavage et abolitions, pour un inventaire muséographique, website of a committee charged with inventorying images of slavery in French museums. This site presents a sample of such images, including maps. In French.
Historians
Interview with John Hope Franklin, Prof. Emeritus at Duke University, on the Diane Rehm show. Nov. 2005.
WGBH-Boston has placed a large number of history lectures online. Lecturers who have spoken on topics related to slavery and antislavery include: Mary Frances Berry, David Blight, David Eltis, Paul Finkelman, Henry Louis Gates, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Linda Heywood, Peter Hinks, James Oliver Horton, Lois E. Horton, Kate Clifford Larson, Patrick Manning, Philip D. Morgan, Gary Nash, Cassandra Pybus, Patrick Rael, Julie Saville, Simon Schama, Beth A. Salerno, Nina Silber, John Thornton, and Julie Winch.
E-Journals
"Nuevo Mundo-Mundos Nuevos", a multilingual periodical of the Centre de Recherches sur les Mondes Américains(CERMA). This publication has been conceived as an "evolutive" e-journal, profiting from web publishing developments for granting dynamic to its contents, by periodically updating them by adding new articles and critic responses. It is also a DOAJ approved e-journal, which assures visitors open access to articles including those published in previous issues.
African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter: published quarterly, with issues in March, June, September, and December. Addresses the subject areas of African diasporas worldwide and related archaeological and historical studies.
Movies/Videos
Traces of the Trade: interview with first-time filmmaker Katrina Browne’ whose documentary Traces of the Trade premiered at Sundance in 2008. She and nine other descendants of the DeWolf family, a Bristol, RI, slave trading empire, trace their ancestors' activities both before and after the slave trade was abolished in 1808 ― a quest which takes them from outside the gates of the family mansion-turned-house museum to the archives of the Bristol Historical Society, to Ghana and Cuba.
