Exploring Amistad at Mystic Seaport
Mystic Seaport, the Museum of America and the Sea, Connecticut
This site explores the Amistad Revolt of 1839-1842 and how historians have interpreted the relevant evidence.
African America Women Writers of the 19th Century
The New York Public Library Digital Library Collections, Digital Schomburg
This selection of published works by African American women writers encompasses 52 works.
The Frederick Douglass Papers at the Library of Congress
The Frederick Douglass Papers at the Library of Congress presents the papers of the nineteenth-century African-American abolitionist who escaped from slavery and then risked his own freedom by becoming an outspoken antislavery lecturer, writer, and publisher. The first release of the Douglass Papers, from the Library of Congress's Manuscript Division, contains approximately 2,000 items (16,000 images) relating to Douglass's life as an escaped slave, abolitionist, editor, orator, and public servant. The papers span the years 1841 to 1964, with the bulk of the material from 1862 to 1895. The printed Speech, Article, and Book Series contains the writings of Douglass and such contemporaries in the abolitionist and early women's rights movements as Henry Ward Beecher, Ida B. Wells, Gerrit Smith, Horace Greeley, and others. The Subject File Series reveals Douglass's interest in diverse subjects such as politics, emancipation, racial prejudice, women's suffrage, and prison reform. Scrapbooks document Douglass's role as minister to Haiti and the controversy surrounding his interracial second marriage.
African American Perspectives: Pamphlets from the Daniel A.P. Murray Collection, 1818-1907
American Memory, Library of Congress
The Daniel A. P. Murray Pamphlet Collection presents a panoramic and eclectic review of African-American history and culture, spanning almost one hundred years from the early nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries, with the bulk of the material published between 1875 and 1900. Among the authors represented are Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Benjamin W. Arnett, Alexander Crummel, and Emanuel Love.
Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia
This website contains 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. These former slaves traveled to Liberia with the assistance of the American Colonization Society, an organization formed in 1817 to help free blacks and emancipated slaves establish a new life in the recently founded Liberia. The Society provided them with housing and food for six months while they built their own houses and planted their own crops. Due to shortages of supplies and tools, the new Liberians relied heavily on supplies from home. In all of these letters, correspondents request that food, clothing, and tools to be sent to them in Liberia--commonly requested items include pork, flour, sugar, seeds, tobacco, cotton, guns, and hand tools.
The African-American Experience in Ohio, 1850-1920: Selections from the Ohio Historical Society
American Memory, Library of Congress
This selection of manuscript and printed text and images drawn from the collections of the Ohio Historical Society illuminates the history of black Ohio from 1850 to 1920, a story of slavery and freedom, segregation and integration, religion and politics, migrations and restrictions, harmony and discord, and struggles and successes.
The Church in the Southern Black Community, 1780-1825
American Memory, Library of Congress
This compilation of printed texts from the libraries at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill traces how Southern African Americans experienced and transformed Protestant Christianity into the central institution of community life. Coverage begins with white churches' conversion efforts, especially in the post-Revolutionary period, and depicts the tensions and contradictions between the egalitarian potential of evangelical Christianity and the realities of slavery. It focuses, through slave narratives and observations by other African American authors, on how the black community adapted evangelical Christianity, making it a metaphor for freedom, community, and personal survival.
Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938
American Memory, Library of Congress
Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938 contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and assembled and microfilmed in 1941 as the seventeen-volume Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves. This online collection is a joint presentation of the Manuscript and Prints and Photographs Divisions of the Library of Congress and includes more than 200 photographs from the Prints and Photographs Division that are now made available to the public for the first time.
African-American Sheet Music, 1850-1920: Selected From the Collections of Brown University
American Memory, Library of Congress
This collection consists of 1,305 pieces of African-American sheet music dating from 1850 through 1920. The collection includes many songs from the heyday of antebellum black face minstrelsy in the 1850s and from the abolitionist movement of the same period. Numerous titles are associated with the novel and the play Uncle Tom's Cabin. Civil War period music includes songs about African-American soldiers and the plight of the newly emancipated slave. Post-Civil War music reflects the problems of Reconstruction and the beginnings of urbanization and the northern migration of African Americans. African-American popular composers include James Bland, Ernest Hogan, Bob Cole, James Reese Europe, and Will Marion Cook. Twentieth century titles feature many photographs of African-American musical performers, often in costume. Unlike many other sorts of published works, sheet music can be produced rapidly in response to an event or public interest, and thus is a source of relatively unmediated and unrevised perspectives on quickly changing events and public attitudes. Particularly significant in this collection are the visual depictions of African Americans which provide much information about racial attitudes over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.