Research Guides: HIST 4123: Africa and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: Primary Sources

What are Primary Sources?

Here's a great definition of primary sources from the American Library Association

"Primary sources are original records created at the time historical events occurred or well after events in the form of memoirs and oral histories. Primary sources may include:

letters,
manuscripts,
diaries,
journals,
newspapers,
speeches,
interviews,
memoirs,
documents produced by government agencies such as Congress or the Office of the President,
photographs,
audio recordings,
moving pictures or video recordings,
research data,
and objects or artifacts such as works of art or ancient roads, buildings, tools, and weapons.

These sources serve as the raw material to interpret the past, and when they are used along with previous interpretations by historians, they provide the resources necessary for historical research."

--Using Primary Sources on the Web, rev. 2008.

Primary Sources Help

Not sure how to work with primary sources? Here are some great tips:

Learning to do Historical Research
Step-by-step instructions and techniques for conducting research in history from the noted environmental historian, William Cronon
Using Primary Sources on the Web
A detailed guide to understanding the nature of primary sources in the field of history; from the American Library Association
Making Sense of Evidence
From the Center for History and New Media's "History Matters" site' offers tips on how to work with oral histories, films, maps, numbers, diaries, and other primary sources. Though aimed at the introductory survey level, still useful for the fundamentals.

Primary Sources Online

Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive This link opens in a new window
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Covers: 1500-1900. An archive of books, pamphlets, court records, and manuscript materials consisting of debates on slavery and abolition. Includes records from the American Colonization Society, from Oberlin's Anti-Slavery collection, from the American Missionary Society (Tulane), and records from the Library of Congress, the National Archives, Yale, Oxford, the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, and other archives.
World Newspaper Archive: African Newspapers Series 1 This link opens in a new window
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Covers: 1800-1922. Provides access to more than 40 fully searchable African newspapers. Features titles from Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. Languages include English, German, French, Portuguese, Afrikaans, Xhosa, Sotho, and others.
Times Digital Archive, 1785-Onwards This link opens in a new window
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Covers: 1785-[5 years ago]. Provides a fully searchable archive of this major world newspaper back to the 18th century, including both page images and search text transcription.

Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database
Documents more than 36,000 voyages, searchable by ship or captain name, point of origin, and destination. Also includes an African names database and a set of numberical estimates for slave trafficking in different eras.
Africana Digitization Project
Searchable texts for West African history with a focus on the era of slave trading
The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas
Presents 1,200+ images from a variety of sources, including broadsides, engravings, maps, and more. Browse broad categories such as Pre‐Colonial Africa, plantation scenes, family life, and individual portraits.
Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy, 1719-1820
A database of 100,000 slaves brought to Louisiana in the 18th and 19th centuries. Information was gathered from courthouses in Louisiana, and archives in France, Spain and Texas. Includes information about African slave names, gender, ages, occupations, illnesses, family relationships, ethnicity, places of origin, prices paid by slave owners, and slaves' testimony and emancipations.
Virginia Runaways Project
The site provides a "digital database of runaway and captured slave and servant advertisements from 18th-century Virginia newspapers."

Google Books This link opens in a new window
A growing collection of records for both recent and long out-of-print titles. Because a search may retrieve results from the full-text of many books, Google Books is most useful in helping you to identify titles of interest in your research. A number of popular magazines and government documents have also been added to the Google Books service.

Making of America
An impressive online collection of 19th century periodicals and some books
Calendar of State Papers. Colonial, 1574-1660
"Calendars" are lists, abstracts , or summaries of official documents. These transcripts and extended abstracts of material in the Public Record Office cover topics such as land grants, slave trade, piracy, agriculture, boundary disputes, fisheries, and foreign relations with the French, Spanish, Dutch, and Native Americans. Through British History Online. "Calendar of State Papers, Colonial: North America and the West Indies, 1574-1739" is also available in the Performing Arts and Media department as a CD-ROM
The Abolition of Slavery: National Archives (UK)
Offers a research guide to National Archives materials on the history of slavery, as well as some digitized documents.
The Church in the Southern Black Community, 1780 – 1925
Original documents from the Library of Congress and the University of North Carolina
Slavery and the Courts, 1740 – 1860 / Library of Congress
Approximately 100 books and pamphlets presenting an assortment of trials and cases, reports, arguments, accounts, examinations of cases and decisions, proceedings, journals, a letter, and other works of historical importance.

U.S. Congressional Serial Set This link opens in a new window
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Covers: 1817-1980. The 'Serial Set' refers to the bound, sequentially numbered volumes of all the Reports, Documents, and Journals of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.
Black Thought and Culture This link opens in a new window
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Covers: 1850s-. Offers non-fiction published works of leading African Americans, including interviews, journal articles, speeches, essays, pamphlets, letters and periodicals such as The Black Panther.
Early English Books Online (EEBO) This link opens in a new window
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Covers: 1470 - 1700. Offers page images of almost every work printed in the British Isles and North America, as well as works in English printed elsewhere from the beginning of printing through the 17th century. Fully searchable texts are available for more than 60,000 titles.

Documenting the American South: North American Slave Narratives
Collects "books and articles that document the individual and collective story of African Americans struggling for freedom and human rights in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. This collection includes all the existing autobiographical narratives of fugitive and former slaves published as broadsides, pamphlets, or books in English up to 1920."
Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writer's Project, 1936‐1938
Offers "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."
WPA Early Settlers' Personal Histories of African Americans in Arkansas
Presents a dozen interview transcripts or brief forms for persons who were enslaved in Arkansas or who migrated to Arkansas after the war
Slavery and Manumission Documents from Timbuktu
This Center for Research Libraries collection consists of Arabic documents on Africans in slavery in Muslim societies.

Music Online: Listening This link opens in a new window
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Provides streaming access to classical, jazz, world, American roots and folk, and popular music. Includes content from labels such as EMI ,Blue Note, Capital, Verve, Motown, Decca, Smithsonian, Rounder, and the Library of Congress' American Folklife Center.
Times Digital Archive, 1785-Onwards This link opens in a new window
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Covers: 1785-[5 years ago]. Provides a fully searchable archive of this major world newspaper back to the 18th century, including both page images and search text transcription.

Early Caribbean Slave Narratives
This online exhibit hosted at Northeastern University features the full text of a dozen published narratives.

Primary Sources in the Libraries

Try to add terms such as "sources" or "personal narratives" to your search terms to locate published sources, for example:

slavery history sources	slave trade sources
antislavery britain sources	west africa history sources

American Colonization Society. Records, 1792‐1964
The American Colonization Society was formed in 1816 with the aim of helping freed people to emigrate from the United States to Africa. While attempting to remain neutral during the abolition debate, the Society drew support and attacks from both pro- and anti-slavery factions.
Early English Newspapers
A large collection of 17th and 18th century papers; more info at: https://libraries.uark.edu/multimedia/Microformdetails.asp?ID=24.
Early British Periodicals
This collection includes popular magazines, literary reviews, and assorted journals on politics, law, economics, and the British social scene. More info at: https://libraries.uark.edu/multimedia/Microformdetails.asp?ID=5.

Primary Source Bibliographies

The African Slave Trade and Its Suppression: A Classified and Annotated Bibliography of Books, Periodicals...
Peter C. Hogg. London: Frank Cass, 1973. MAIN Z 7164 S6 H63 1973.
Lists original publications by place, time period, and topic. Most of these sources can be borrowed on Interlibrary Loan, if we do not own them.