HIST 4363: American Slavery

Includes an online encyclopedia of thousands of famous and lesser known figures in African American history, Global African history, and the history of African Americans in the West. Also has full-text primary documents and major speeches of black activists and leaders, 18th century to present; links to hundreds of websites that address the global history of people of African ancestry; and more.

Documenting the American South (DocSouth) is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes sixteen thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs.

Database that digitizes, preserves, organizes, and enables analysis of all surviving runaway ads from the historical period of North American slavery.

Presents more than 16,500 pages of texts, 8,300 illustrations, and more than 60 maps, organized around thirteen defining migrations that have formed and transformed African America and the nation.

Contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. Narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

The almost seven hours of recorded interviews presented here took place between 1932 and 1975 in nine Southern states. Twenty-three interviewees, born between 1823 and the early 1860s, discuss how they felt about slavery, slaveholders, coercion of slaves, their families, and freedom. Several individuals sing songs, many of which were learned during the time of their enslavement. It is important to note that all of the interviewees spoke sixty or more years after the end of their enslavement, and it is their full lives that are reflected in these recordings. The individuals documented in this presentation have much to say about living as African Americans from the 1870s to the 1930s, and beyond. (Library of Congress)

TARO (Texas Archival Resources Online) makes descriptions of the rich archival, manuscript, and museum collections in repositories across the state available to the public. The site consists of the collection descriptions or "finding aids" that archives, libraries, and museums create to assist users in locating information in their collections. Consider these an extended table of contents which describe unique materials only available at the individual repositories. In most cases, the collections themselves are NOT available online.

The Texas Slavery Project examines the spread of American slavery into the borderlands between the United States and Mexico in the decades between 1820 and 1850.

Database of runaway slave advertisements, articles and notices from newspapers published in Texas. The project has so far documented the names of over 1400 runaway slaves from Texas.

Find and search American History primary source collections on the Internet

Find and search Texas History primary source collections on the Internet

"Slavery presents a huge obstacle for anyone tracing African American lineages. Because slaves were treated as property..., evidence that can help put African American families together is often difficult to come by. These online slave databases and record collections are great resources for anyone navigating the challenge of slavery research."