Find Primary Sources
- AM Explorer This link opens in a new windowSearch Adam Matthew's digitized arts and cultural heritage materials. Subjects include Area Studies, Cultural Studies, Empire and Globalism, Ethnic Studies, Gender and Sexuality, History, Politics, Literature, Theatre, and War and Conflict.
- Black Abolitionist Papers This link opens in a new window
This collection searches 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 from libraries and archives in England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, and the United States.
- Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database This link opens in a new windowContains records of trans-Atlantic slave ship voyages made between 1595 and 1866. Format allows users to track information by time period and geographic region, and includes interactive maps that allow viewers to chart the trans-Atlantic connections. The accompanying data contains materials about people on board, owners and captains, ships' characteristics, and the geographic trajectory of each voyage.
- Black Drama: African, African American, and Diaspora This link opens in a new window
Black Drama: Second Edition contains plays, including previously unpublished or unperformed ones, by more than 200 playwrights from North America, English-speaking Africa, the Caribbean, and other African diaspora countries.
- HistoryMakers: African American Video Oral History Collection This link opens in a new windowHistoryMakers is a collection of video oral history interviews with historically significant African Americans. Transcripts are included with the interviews.
- ArchiveGrid This link opens in a new windowArchiveGrid includes over 5 million records describing archival materials, including information about historical documents, personal papers, family histories, and more. Over 1,000 different archival institutions are represented. ArchiveGrid helps researchers looking for primary source materials held in archives, libraries, museums and historical societies.
- Accessible Archives This link opens in a new windowEyewitness accounts of historical events, ads and genealogical records published in popular 19th century newspapers including African-American publications.
- Periodicals Archive Online This link opens in a new window
A full text archive of millions of articles published in more 700 magazines, and journals in the humanities and social sciences, in English and other Western European languages.
Digital Collections
- African American Perspectives: From the Rare Book Collection of the Library of Congress"African American Perspectives" gives a panoramic review of African American history and culture and is primarily comprised of materials from the African American Pamphlet Collection and the Daniel A.P. Murray Collection with a date range of 1822 through 1909. Among the authors represented are Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Benjamin W. Arnett, Alexander Crummel, Lydia Maria Child, Charles Sumner, Mary Church Terrell, and Booker T. Washington.
- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Archive (Boston University)The Martin Luther King, Jr. collection, donated in 1964, consists of manuscripts, notebooks, correspondence, printed material, financial and legal papers, a small number of photographs and other items dating from 1947 to 1963.
- Howard Thurman & Sue Bailey Thurman Collections (Boston University)The Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University welcomes you to explore the words and wisdom of one of the twentieth century's most extraordinary public theologians, educators, and civil rights figures, Dr. Howard Thurman (1899-1981), and his wife, Sue Bailey Thurman (1903-1996). This site is the portal to the searchable inventories of their archival collections and to hundreds of digital audio recordings of Dr. Thurman's sermons, lectures, meditations, and speeches.
- W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, 1803-1999 (UMass Amherst)Includes over 100,000 items of correspondence, speeches, articles, newspaper columns, nonfiction books, research materials, book reviews, pamphlets and leaflets, petitions, novels, essays, forewords, student papers, manuscripts of pageants, plays, short stories and fables, poetry, photographs, newspaper clippings, memorabilia, videotapes, audiotapes, and miscellaneous materials.
- Black Women's Suffrage Digital Collection (DPLA)The Black Women’s Suffrage Digital Collection is a collaborative project to provide digital access to materials documenting the roles and experiences of Black Women in the Women’s Suffrage Movement and, more broadly, women’s rights, voting rights, and civic activism between the 1850s and 1960. The materials in this collection include photographs, correspondence, speeches, event programs, publications, oral histories, and other artifacts.
- Uncle Tom's Cabin & American CultureThis website from the University of Virginia presents a vast multimedia archive of primary material, 1830 to 1930, organized around Harriet Beecher Stowe's seminal work.
- Antislavery Literature ProjectThe goal of the Antislavery Literature Project is to increase public access to a body of literature crucial to understanding African American experience, US and hemispheric histories of slavery, and early human rights philosophies. These multilingual collections contribute to an educational consciousness of the role of many antislavery writers in creating contemporary concepts of freedom.
- UMBRA: African American HistoryUmbra Search African American History makes African American history more broadly accessible through a freely available widget and search tool, umbrasearch.org. The site brings together hundreds of thousands digitized materials from over 1,000 libraries and archives across the country.
Libraries and Archives
- National Museum of African American History & CultureThe National Museum of African American History and Culture is the only national museum devoted exclusively to the documentation of African American life, history, and culture. The NMAAHC is a public institution open to all, where anyone is welcome to participate, collaborate, and learn more about African American history and culture.
- Schomburg Center for Research in Black CultureThe Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, one of The New York Public Library’s renowned research libraries, is a world-leading cultural institution devoted to the research, preservation, and exhibition of materials focused on African American, African Diaspora, and African experiences.
- The Royall House & Slave QuartersIn the eighteenth century, the Royall House and Slave Quarters was home to the largest slaveholding family in Massachusetts and the enslaved Africans who made their lavish way of life possible. Today, the Royall House and Slave Quarters is a museum whose architecture, household items, archaeological artifacts, and programs bear witness to intertwined stories of wealth and bondage, set against the backdrop of America’s quest for independence.
- The Mitchell Collection of African American HistoryWide-ranging collection documenting the struggles and contributions of African American over five centuries.
- American Radicalism Collection in the MSU Special Collections LibraryAvailable collections include Black Panthers and Scottsboro Boys.
- John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and CultureThe John Hope Franklin Research Center in the Rubenstein Library collects, preserves and promotes the use of published and unpublished primary sources for the exploration, understanding and advancement of scholarship of the history and culture of Africa and people of the African Diaspora in the Americas.
