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AFR/HIS 342: Harper

Introduction

This guide will help to find a primary source for your research paper. The primary source you select should be written by someone connected to either:

  1. Slave trading (e.g. a slave born in Africa who experienced the passage to the Americas, a slave ship captain or trader or auctioneer or financier or ship-surgeon or abolitionist working to end international slave trading, etc.) or
  2. African slavery outside the United States (e.g. Brazil, Jamaica, Barbados, Peru, Europe, African coasts, etc.).

However, you CANNOT analyze a source that is about slavery solely within North America. There MUST be an international component to your research. 

Full-Text Online Memoirs or Autobiographies

These works are all available for free online:

Two shorter narratives could also be analyzed together:

OPTION 1

Autobiography of Omar ibn Said, Slave in North Carolina, 1831 by Omar ibn Said (b.1770?)
Washington, D. C.: American Historical Association, 1925.

From The American Historical Review, 30, No. 4. (July 1925), 787-795. Edited by John Franklin Jameson (1859-1937)

A Statement with Regard to the Moorish Prince, Abduhl Rahhahman by T. H. Gallaudet (1787-1851)
New York: D. Fanshaw, 1828.

OPTION 2

Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade by John Newton (1725-1807)
London: Printed for J. Buckland, in Pater-Noster Row; and J. Johnson, in St. Paul's Church-yard, [1788]

John Newton: Letters of a Slave Trader Freed by God's Grace by John Newton and paraphrased by Dick Bohrer
Chicago: Moody Press, 1983

 

Primary Sources or Collections of Sources within Tarver Library

These books can be found in the Mercer University Library catalog. There is a mix of both physical and electronic books available:


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