Research Guides: AFR/HIS 342: Harper: Other Online Resources

Online Collections of Documents

These online collections contain sets of documents related to slavery and the slave trade. Some contain modern day transcriptions, while others contain scans of the original objects. While you might have to search these collections to find a document that interests you, simply browsing these collections can help you find primary sources for your research paper.

Databases and Digital Libraries

All of these digital libraries will require you to do keyword searches to find their resources. While they are all different, they do have many similarities and typically, using the "Advanced Search" option will allow you to target your search to the subject and time period that you are looking for. Each resource below contains suggestions for how to do this effectively.

Hathi Trust
This digital library contains millions of scanned books and documents. A good option for searching would be to do a "Subject" search for "Slave Trade" (you want to use the quotation marks in the search) and then setting "Year of Publication" to be "Before or During 1865." The search can then be narrowed down further by location, language, and format and by adding other keywords.
Digital Public Library of America
The DPLA combines digital resources form many participating institutions, so there will be overlap with some of these other digital archives. Searching the DPLA can be done effectively with simple keywords and then using the sidebar filters to narrow it down. One suggestion would be to select different organizations, as their collections are often centered on a specific theme.
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division (NYPL Digital Collections)
The NYPL Digital Collections is a contributor to the DPLA, but their website is particularly useful for browsing their subject specific collections and some items and documents are not found in other platforms. They have many relevant international records, from books and magazines to letters and plantation records.
Library of Congress Digital Collections
The LOC has a search function, but it will also be helpful to browse the "African American History" collections first and then search within the chosen collection for primary resources.
Europeana
Has a large set of contributors from European countries, meaning that they have a diverse set of items in their database, from works of art and artifacts to books and manuscripts. As with similar international databases, non-English materials will not be translated.
The National Archives (UK)
This website has more than just online documents, meaning that a search will find many materials which will be unavailable. To narrow this down, click on the "Find Online Collections." Additionally, they have created a research guide for finding "British transatlantic slave trade records" which will be extremely helpful for identifying relevant resources.
Biblioteca Digital del Patrimonio Iberoamericano
Contains digitized materials from national libraries in the Caribbean and Central and South America. While you can search in English, this will only produce a portion of available resources as most of the primary resources will be in Spanish or Portuguese.
EuroDocs
Organized by country and by date with its interface as in intermediate step to going to relevant digital archives. This means that the search will only search descriptions about the links, but not the documents themselves. Consequently, you want to find a country that was involved in the Atlantic Slave Trade that you are interested in and then browse the links to find archives with relevant documents. Many non-English documents will be in their original languages.
Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade
Explore or reconstruct the lives of individuals who were enslaved, owned slaves, or participated in the historical trade.
Omar Ibn Said Collection
The Omar Ibn Said Collection consists of 42 digitized documents in both English and Arabic, including an 1831 manuscript in Arabic on "The Life of Omar Ibn Said," a West African slave in America, which is the centerpiece of this unique collection of texts. Some of the manuscripts in this collection include texts in Arabic by another West African slave in Panama, and others from individuals located in West Africa.
Recovered Histories
The Recovered Histories website gives an insight into the history of enslavement and those who fought to maintain and abolish it.
Slave Biographies: The Atlantic Database Network
An open access data repository of information on the identities of enslaved people in the Atlantic World. It includes the names, ethnicities, skills, occupations, and illnesses of individual slaves. Phase one of a multi-phase project is presented here. Users of the website can access three data sets: one about slaves in Maranhão, Brazil, one about slaves in colonial Louisiana, and another about freed slaves in Antebellum Louisiana.
Slave Societies Digital Archive
The Slave Societies Digital Archive (formerly Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies) is dedicated to identifying, cataloguing, and digitally preserving endangered archival materials documenting the history of Africans and Afro-descended peoples in the Iberian colonies.