A centralized resource for information about historical and current discrimination of African Americans in the United States, Pennsylvania, and the Greater Philadelphia Region.
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 (FWP) of the Works Progress Administration, later renamed Work Projects Administration (WPA). At the conclusion of the Slave Narrative project, a set of edited transcripts was 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.
The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.
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 (FWP) of the Works Progress Administration, later renamed Work Projects Administration (WPA). At the conclusion of the Slave Narrative project, a set of edited transcripts was 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.
A massive digital collection of 18th and 19th century documents; Pamphlets, Books, Correspondence, Newspapers, Legal Documents, Manuscripts, and other materials. Includes over 1 million pages of unpublished archival material produced by pro and anti-slavery organizations and individuals.
Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture & Law brings together, for the first time, all known legal materials on slavery in the United States and the English-speaking world, as well as materials on free African-Americans in the colonies and the U.S. before 1870. Included are every statute passed by every state and colony, all federal statutes, all reported state and federal cases on slavery, and hundreds of books and pamphlets on the subject. In total, the collection contains more than 1,000 titles and nearly 850,000 pages.
Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture & Law brings together, for the first time, all known legal materials on slavery in the United States and the English-speaking world, as well as materials on free African-Americans in the colonies and the U.S. before 1870. Included are every statute passed by every state and colony, all federal statutes, all reported state and federal cases on slavery, and hundreds of books and pamphlets on the subject. In total, the collection contains more than 1,000 titles and nearly 850,000 pages.
Alphabetical list and signed entries, terms, concepts, associations, and people important to an understanding of African American slavery in the United States. Includes maps, tables, chronology, brief bibliographies.
Brilliantly illuminates the horror and injustices of slavery as it tells the true story of one of the last-known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade--abducted from Africa on the last "Black Cargo" ship to arrive in the United States. In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation's history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo's firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States. In 1931, Hurston returned to Plateau, the African-centric community three miles from Mobile founded by Cudjo and other former slaves from his ship. Spending more than three months there, she talked in depth with Cudjo about the details of his life.
American Inheritance by Edward J. Larson
ISBN: 9780393882209
Publication Date: 2023-01-17
New attention from historians and journalists is raising pointed questions about the founding period: was the American revolution waged to preserve slavery, and was the Constitution a pact with slavery or a landmark in the antislavery movement? Leaders of the founding who called for American liberty are scrutinized for enslaving Black people themselves: George Washington consistently refused to recognize the freedom of those who escaped his Mount Vernon plantation. And we have long needed a history of the founding that fully includes Black Americans in the Revolutionary protests, the war, and the debates over slavery and freedom that followed. We now have that history in Edward J. Larson's insightful synthesis of the founding. With slavery thriving in Britain's Caribbean empire and practiced in all of the American colonies, the independence movement's calls for liberty proved narrow, though some Black observers and others made their full implications clear. In the war, both sides employed strategies to draw needed support from free and enslaved Blacks, whose responses varied by local conditions. By the time of the Constitutional Convention, a widening sectional divide shaped the fateful compromises over slavery that would prove disastrous in the coming decades.
A unique set of primary sources from African Americans actively involved in the movement to end slavery in the United States between 1830 and 1865. The content includes letters, speeches, editorials, articles, sermons, and essays. The majority of the content is from the United States, with some coverage of the abolitionist movement in England, Scotland, Ireland and Canada, Over 15,000 items written by nearly 300 Black men and women are available for searching.
A unique set of primary sources from African Americans actively involved in the movement to end slavery in the United States between 1830 and 1865. The content includes letters, speeches, editorials, articles, sermons, and essays. The majority of the content is from the United States, with some coverage of the abolitionist movement in England, Scotland, Ireland and Canada, Over 15,000 items written by nearly 300 Black men and women are available for searching.
The Black Abolitionist Digital Archive is a collection of over 800 speeches by antebellum blacks and approximately 1,000 editorials from the period. These important documents provide a portrait of black involvement in the anti-slavery movement; scans of these documents are provided as images and PDF files.
Harriet Tubman by Kate Clifford Larson
ISBN: 9781538113561
Publication Date: 2022-07-08
Harriet Ross Tubman, born enslaved in Maryland emerged from the most oppressive of conditions to lead others to freedom along the Underground Railroad and then continue her fight against slavery on the battlefields of the Civil War. During the last fifty years of her life in New York she campaigned for voting and civil rights, became an entrepreneur, a philanthropist, community organizer and leader. Harriet Tubman: A Reference Guide to Her Life and Works captures her life, her works, and legacy.
The definitive biography of one of the most courageous women in American history "reveals Harriet Tubman to be even more remarkable than her legend" (Newsday). Celebrated for her exploits as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman has entered history as one of nineteenth-century America's most enduring and important figures. But just who was this remarkable woman? To John Brown, leader of the Harper's Ferry slave uprising, she was General Tubman. For the many slaves she led north to freedom, she was Moses. To the slaveholders who sought her capture, she was a thief and a trickster. To abolitionists, she was a prophet. Now, in a biography widely praised for its impeccable research and its compelling narrative, Harriet Tubman is revealed for the first time as a singular and complex character, a woman who defied simple categorization. "A thrilling reading experience. It expands outward from Tubman's individual story to give a sweeping, historical vision of slavery." --NPR's Fresh Air
“I am at peace with God and all mankind.” —Harriet Tubman to Mary Talbert, on the occasion of their last visit, 1913 Now, from the award-winning novelist and biographer, an astonishing reimagining of the remarkable life of Harriet Tubman—the “Moses of Her People.” During her lifetime Harriet Tubman was an escaped slave, lumberjack, laundress, raid leader, nurse, fund-raiser, cook, intelligence gatherer, Underground Railroad organizer, and abolitionist. She was known both as Moses and as General Tubman. In Harriet Tubman: Imagining a Life, Beverly Lowry goes beyond the familiar tales to create a portrait of Tubman in lively imagined vignettes that, as Lowry writes, “catch her on the fly” and portray her life as she herself might have presented it. Lowry offers readers an intimate look at Tubman’s early life firsthand: her birth as Araminta Ross in 1822 in Dorchester, Maryl∧ the harsh treatment she experienced growing up—including being struck with a two-pound iron when she was twelve years old; and her triumphant escape from slavery as a young woman and rebirth as Harriet Tubman.
The Grimkes by Kerri K. Greenidge
ISBN: 9781324090847
Publication Date: 2022-11-08
Sarah and Angelina Grimke--the Grimke sisters--are revered figures in American history, famous for rejecting their privileged lives on a plantation in South Carolina to become firebrand activists in the North. Their antislavery pamphlets, among the most influential of the antebellum era, are still read today. Yet retellings of their epic story have long obscured their Black relatives. In The Grimkes, award-winning historian Kerri Greenidge presents a parallel narrative, indeed a long-overdue corrective, shifting the focus from the white abolitionist sisters to the Black Grimkes and deepening our understanding of the long struggle for racial and gender equality.
Discover how a man born into slavery became one of the most influential voices for democracy in U.S. history. Directed by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Stanley Nelson and Nicole London, the film features the voice of actor Wendell Pierce as Douglass.
Ratified in 1865, the 13th Amendment abolished slavery in the United States. This guide provides access to digital collections at the Library of Congress, external websites, and print materials related to the amendment.
In the century after emancipation, the long shadow of slavery left African Americans well short of the freedom promised to them. While sharecropping and debt peonage entrapped Black people in the South, European colonialism had bred a new slavery that menaced the liberty of even more Africans. A core group of Black freedom movement leaders, including Ida B. Wells and W. E. B. Du Bois, followed their nineteenth-century predecessors in insisting that the continuation of racial slavery anywhere put Black freedom on the line everywhere. They even predicted the consequences that ignited the recent nationwide Black Lives Matter movement--the rise of a prison industrial complex and the consequent erosion of African Americans' faith in the criminal justice system.
Microfilm collection Contains the official records and papers of the Society for the years 1775-1975; also includes the records of 15 related organizations, collectively spanning the period 1794-1870. Link for a guide to the microfilom available in catalog record.