Digital Resources for the Study of Global Slavery and the Slave Trade
This page compiles digital resources and projects related to the study of slavery. H-Slavery thanks our Network Editor Jorge Felipe for assembling these sources. If you believe there are other items that should be added to our list, please contact Jorge at: jfelipe195@gmail.com.
"The video follows the route of English painter Eyre Crowe's visit to the city in March 1853. He arrived along the the Fredericksburg and Potomac Railroad and stayed at the high-end American Hotel one block south of Capitol Square. On his first full day in the city, hoping to find "a possibly dramatic subject for pictoral illustration," Crowe set out into Shockoe Bottom to witness several slave auctions. Crowe recorded what he saw there in his powerful painting Slaves Waiting for Sale. Over a hundred and fifty years later many seek to understand more about the slave trade. The sites where people were bought and sold in Richmond have been obliterated by twentieth-century development, many of them under an interstate. This video is meant to help viewers imagine what the built environment of mid-nineteenth-century Richmond looked like and recognize the significant physical footprint of slave trading in its commercial district." ( last accessed, Oct. 6, 2016)
"African Origins contains information about the migration histories of Africans forcibly carried on slave ships into the Atlantic. Using the personal details of 91,491 Africans liberated by International Courts of Mixed Commission and British Vice Admiralty Courts, this resource makes possible new geographic, ethnic, and linguistic data on peoples captured in Africa and pulled into the slave trade. The African Origins project arose directly from the work of G. Ugo Nwokeji and David Eltis, who in 2002 used audio recordings of names found in Courts of Mixed Commission records for Havana, Cuba, and Freetown, Sierra Leone, to identify likely ethno-linguistic origins. The names in these recordings were pronounced by speakers of the same language and accent that the Courts of Mixed Commission registrars would likely have had (e.g., if the name was written in a Havana register, Eltis and Nwokeji had the name pronounced by a Spanish speaker with a Havana accent). This helped connect the sound of the name to its spelling and thus enabled a more accurate assessment of the name’s possible ethnic origins than provided by its written counterpart alone. Those with knowledge of African languages, cultural naming practices, and ethnic groups can assist in identifying these Africans' origins by drawing on their own expertise to identify the likely ethno-linguistic origin of an individual's name." (last accessed, Sept. 23, 2016)
"America's journey through slavery is presented in four parts. For each era, you'll find a historical Narrative, a Resource Bank of images, documents, stories, biographies, and commentaries, and a Teacher's Guide for using the content of the Web site and television series in U.S. history courses." (last accessed, Oct. 17, 2016)
"AfriGeneas is a site devoted to African American genealogy, to researching African Ancestry in the Americas in particular and to genealogical research and resources in general. It is also an African Ancestry research community featuring the AfriGeneas mail list, the AfriGeneas message boards and daily and weekly genealogy chats." (las accessed, Oct. 6, 2016)
"Starting in 1984 and over the next 15 years, Dr. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall uncovered the background of 100,000 slaves who were brought to Louisiana in the 18th and 19th centuries. Poring through documents from all over Louisiana, as well as archives in France, Spain and Texas, Dr. Hall designed and created a database into which she recorded and calculated the information she obtained from these documents about African slave names, genders, ages, occupations, illnesses, family relationships, ethnicity, places of origin, prices paid by slave owners, and slaves' testimony and emancipations. In March 2000, the Louisiana State University Press published Dr. Hall's databases on a CD-ROM. This data is also accessible on the Slave Biographies Project." (last accessed, Sept 23, 2016)
"A collection of digitized historical Massachusetts petitions relating to anti-slavery and anti-segregation activities." (last accessed, Oct. 17, 2016)
"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. In 2000-2001, with major support from the Citigroup Foundation, the Library digitized the narratives from the microfilm edition and scanned from the originals 500 photographs, including more than 200 that had never been microfilmed or made publicly available. This online collection is a joint presentation of the Manuscript and Prints and Photographs divisions of the Library of Congress." (last accessed, Oct. 6, 2016)
"The Digital Library on American Slavery is an expanding resource compiling various independent online collections focused upon race and slavery in the American South, made searchable through a single, simple interface. Although the current focus of DLAS is sources associated with North Carolina, there is considerable data contained herein relating to all 15 slave states and Washington, D.C., including detailed personal information about slaves, slaveholders, and free people of color." (last accessed, Oct. 6, 2016)
"Documenting the American South (DocSouth) includes sixteen thematic collections of primary sources for the study of southern history, literature, and culture. These are arranged below in alphabetical order. Click on any collection to access an index of materials limited to that collection. To view an index of all materials in this digital library choose "Authors," "Titles," or "Subjects" from the navigation bar at the top of this page. Some materials are cross-referenced in multiple collections." (last accessed, Oct. 6, 2016)
"The ESSSS project, directed by Jane Landers and administered at Vanderbilt University, digitally preserves endangered ecclesiastical and secular documents related to Africans and Afro-descended peoples in the Americas. Other non-European groups, such as Chinese and indigenous groups are also represented. This website provides information about the project and its history and tools that allow researchers to search the ESSSS database containing over 600,000 documents from diverse archives in four countries (for image counts by country, click here). While most of the documents contained here date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there are documents from Cuba and Spanish Florida from the sixteenth century and Brazilian documents from the seventeenth." (las accessed, Oct. 6, 2016)
"This site provides access to the raw data and documentation which contains information on English slave trade from 1791-1799. Specifically, the data file contains information on the ship's name, tonnage, home port, departure date from England, African port of arrival, date of African arrival, slaves taken on board (total actually purchased), slave mortality, number of slaves transported, date of departure from Africa, date of arrival in New World, number of slaves landed in America, and date ship left America." (last accessed, Oct. 6, 2016)
"Throughout the 250-year history of slavery in North America, enslaved people tried to escape. Once newspapers were common, enslavers posted “runaway ads” to try to locate these fugitives. Such ads provide significant quantities of individual and collective information about the economic, demographic, social, and cultural history of slavery, but they have never been systematically collected. Freedom on the Move project will compile all North American slave runaway ads and make them available for statistical, geographical, textual, and other forms of analysis. Some elements of data collection will be crowdsourced, engendering a public sense of co-participation in the process of recording history, and producing a living pedagogical tool for instructors at all levels, in multiple disciplines." (last accessed, Sept. 23, 2016)
"From Slavery to Freedom: The African-American Pamphlet Collection, 1822-1909 presents 396 pamphlets from the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, published from 1822 through 1909, by African-American authors and others who wrote about slavery, African colonization, Emancipation, Reconstruction, and related topics. The materials range from personal accounts and public orations to organizational reports and legislative speeches. Among the authors represented are Frederick Douglass, Kelly Miller, Charles Sumner, Mary Church Terrell, and Booker T. Washington. From Slavery to Freedom was made possible by a major gift from the Citigroup Foundation and complements African American Perspectives: Pamphlets from the Daniel A. P. Murray Collection, 1818-1907." (last accessed, Oct. 6, 2016)
"Colonial slavery shaped modern Britain and we all still live with its legacies. The slave-owners were one very important means by which the fruits of slavery were transmitted to metropolitan Britain. We believe that research and analysis of this group are key to understanding the extent and the limits of slavery's role in shaping British history and leaving lasting legacies that reach into the present. The stories of enslaved men and women, however, are no less important than those of slave-owners, and we hope that the database produced in the first two phases of the project, while at present primarily a resource for studying slave-owners, will also provide information of value to those researching enslaved people." (Last accessed, Oct. 31, 2016)
This program seeks to preserve and promote the vast universe of experiences that have shaped the lives of Maryland's African American population. From the day that Mathias de Sousa and Francisco landed in St. Mary's county aboard the Ark and the Dove in 1634, Black Marylanders have made significant contributions to both the state and nation in the political, economic, agricultural, legal, and domestic arenas. Despite what often seemed like insurmountable odds, Marylanders of Color have adapted, evolved, and prevailed. The Maryland State Archives' Study of the Legacy of Slavery Staff invites researchers to explore all of these elements and more within its numerous source documents, exhibits, and interactive online presentations. (last accessed, Oct. 11, 2016)
"This prototype allows searches against the 1,204,141 individual life-event records we currently hold on Liverpool residents from 1704 to 1944 as well as searches against the 32,917 voyages from and/or to Liverpool we currently hold from 1759 to 1809." (last accessed, Nov. 28, 2016)
"Lowcountry Africana, sponsored by the Magnolia Plantation Foundation of Charleston, South Carolina, is a free website dedicated to African American genealogy and history in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida, home to the rich Gullah-Geechee cultural heritage." (last accessed, Oct. 6, 2016)
"The Lowcountry Digital History Initiative (LDHI) is a digital public history project hosted by the Lowcountry Digital Library (LCDL) at the College of Charleston. Funded through a pilot project grant from the Humanities Council of South Carolina and a major grant award from the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, LDHI began development in 2013 and launched in 2014 as a digital consultation service, scholarly editorial resource, and online platform for partner institutions and collaborative scholars to translate multi-institutional archival materials, historic landscape features and structures, and scholarly research into digital public history exhibition projects." (last accessed, Oct. 6, 2016)
"An original project supported by the French Atlantic History Group (McGill University, Mellon Foundation) in collaboration with the Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines of the Université de Sherbrooke, « Marronnage in Saint-Domingue (Haïti) » is an electronic interface meant to decompartementalise the archives of slavery in the French Atlantic world." (last accessed, November 28, 2016)
"This website contains information about people who lived in slavery on Thomas Jefferson's Virginia plantations. It provides access to a database of information on over six hundred individuals--details of life span, family structure, occupation, and transactions like purchases and sales." (last accessed, Oct. 6, 2016)
"The North Carolina Runaway Slave Advertisements project provides online access to all known runaway slave advertisements (more than 2300 items) published in North Carolina newspapers from 1751 to 1840. These brief ads provide a glimpse into the social, economic, and cultural world of the American slave system and the specific experience within North Carolina. Working from microfilmed copies of these rare publications, the project team scanned the ads to provide digital images, create full-text transcripts and descriptive metadata, and develop a searchable database. TheNCRSA website includes digital scans of the ads, contextual essays to address their historical research value, full text transcripts, an annotated bibliography to aid researchers, and a searchable database." (last accessed, Oct. 6, 2016)
"This Project offers a searchable database of detailed personal information about slaves, slaveholders, and free people of color. Designed as a tool for scholars, historians, teachers, students, genealogists, and interested citizens, the site provides access to information gathered and analyzed over an eighteen-year period from petitions to southern legislatures and country courts filed between 1775 and 1867 in the fifteen slaveholding states in the United States and the District of Columbia." (last accessed, Oct. 6, 2016)
"Slave Biographies: The Atlantic Database Network is an open access data repository of information on the identities of enslaved people in the Atlantic World hosted at MATRIX, the Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences at Michigan State University. It includes the names, ethnicities, skills, occupations, and illnesses of individual slaves. Currently, users of the website can access data about slaves in colonial Louisiana and Maranhão, Brazil resulting from the research of Gwendolyn Midlo Hall and Walter Hawthorne. Users can download datasets, search for ancestors, and run statistical analysis." (last accessed Sept 13, 2016)
"This site provides access to the raw data and documentation which contains information on the following slave trade topics from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: records of slave ship movement between Africa and the Americas, slave ships of eighteenth century France, slave trade to Rio de Janeiro, Virginia slave trade in the eighteenth century, English slave trade (House of Lords Survey), Angola slave trade in the eighteenth century, internal slave trade to Rio de Janeiro, slave trade to Havana, Cuba, Nantes slave trade in the eighteenth century, and slave trade to Jamaica." (last accessed, Oct. 6, 2016)
"Centered on a database of slave and slaveholder populations in Texas during the Republic era (1837-45), the Texas Slavery Project offers a window into the role slavery played in the development of Texas in the years before the region became part of the United States.Dynamic interactive maps show the changing flows of enslaved and slaveholder populations in Texas over time. The population database search engine allows users to discover the growth of slave and slaveholder populations in the region. Digitized original documents from the era provide an opportunity to hear the voices of those who lived with slavery in early Texas." (last accessed, Oct. 6, 2016)
"The 1,280 images in this collection have been selected from a wide range of sources, most of them dating from the period of slavery. This collection is envisioned as a tool and a resource that can be used by teachers, researchers, students, and the general public - in brief, anyone interested in the experiences of Africans who were enslaved and transported to the Americas and the lives of their descendants in the slave societies of the New World." (last accessed, Oct. 6, 2016)
"The Bibliography of Slavery is a searchable database containing verified references (except as noted) to approximately 25,000 scholarly works in all academic disciplines and in all western European languages on slavery and slaving, worldwide and throughout human history, including modern times. It includes all known print materials published since 1900 in scholarly formats, as well as digital scholarly journals, recent unpublished presentations at academic conferences, professional historical sites, and major museum exhibitions and catalogs." (last accessed, Oct. 6, 2016)
"The Geography of Slavery in Virginia is a digital collection of advertisements for runaway and captured slaves and servants in 18th- and 19th-century Virginia newspapers. Building on the rich descriptions of individual slaves and servants in the ads, the project offers a personal, geographical and documentary context for the study of slavery in Virginia, from colonial times to the Civil War." (last accessed, Oct. 6, 2016)
"The Hidden Atlantic contains a comprehensive list of archival and bibliographical sources for the study of slavery and the slave trade from different archives and libraries in the Americas, Africa, and Europe gathered by Dr. Michael Zeuske." (Last accessed, Sept. 7, 2016)
"The Liberated Africans Project contains information of Africans liberated by Mixed Commissions located in Brazil, Cuba, and Sierra Leone as part of the international efforts to abolish the Atlantic slave trade. This project, hosted at MATRIX, the Center for Digital Humanities at MSU and authored my Henry Lovejoy, gathers different type of data regarding individual life of liberated Africans, and also documents from legal cases resulting from captured slave ships." (last accessed, Sept 23, 2016)
"This is an educational website dedicated to provide resources and information for teachers, scholars and the general public on role that enslaved Africans played in the making of America through their struggles and sacrifices for freedom. Also included in the Slave Rebellion Website is the slavery database, which contains the complete slave population records on slavery from earliest times to the Civil War and beyond slavery. The population data is broken down by state, county, and district and includes such categories as free and enslaved population along with white and other populations in a given area." (last accessed, Oct. 6, 2016)
This interactive map shows the expansion of the slavery in the U.S. from 1790 until 1860 based on censuses.
"The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database has information on almost 36,000 slaving voyages that forcibly embarked over 10 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The actual number is estimated to have been as high as 12.5 million. The database and the separate estimates interface offer researchers, students and the general public a chance to rediscover the reality of one of the largest forced movements of peoples in world history." (last accessed, Sept. 23, 2016)
"This database is the latest step by the Virginia Historical Society to increase access to its varied collections relating to Virginians of African descent. Since its founding in 1831, the VHS has collected unpublished manuscripts, a collection that now numbers more than 8 million processed items." (las accessed, Oct. 11, 2016)
"The Library’s African American Narrative project aims to provide greater accessibility to pre-1865 African American history and genealogy found in the rich primary sources in its holdings. Traditional description, indexing, transcription, and digitization are major parts of this effort. However, and perhaps more importantly, this project seeks to encourage conversation and engagement around the records, providing opportunities for a more grassroots and diverse narrative of the history of Virginia’s African American people." (last accessed, Oct. 11, 2016)
"Visualizing Emancipation is a map of slavery’s end during the American Civil War. It finds patterns in the collapse of southern slavery, mapping the interactions between federal policies, armies in the field, and the actions of enslaved men and women on countless farms and city blocks. It encourages scholars, students, and the public to examine the wartime end of slavery in place, allowing a rigorously geographic perspective on emancipation in the United States." (last accessed, Oct. 6, 2016)
"The almost seven hours of recorded interviews presented here took place between 1932 and 1975 in nine Southern states. Twenty-three interviewees, born between 1823 and the early 1860s, discuss how they felt about slavery, slaveholders, coercion of slaves, their families, and freedom. Several individuals sing songs, many of which were learned during the time of their enslavement. It is important to note that all of the interviewees spoke sixty or more years after the end of their enslavement, and it is their full lives that are reflected in these recordings. The individuals documented in this presentation have much to say about living as African Americans from the 1870s to the 1930s, and beyond." (last accessed, Oct. 6, 2016)
Slave Trade Resources
"African Origins contains information about the migration histories of Africans forcibly carried on slave ships into the Atlantic. Using the personal details of 91,491 Africans liberated by International Courts of Mixed Commission and British Vice Admiralty Courts, this resource makes possible new geographic, ethnic, and linguistic data on peoples captured in Africa and pulled into the slave trade. The African Origins project arose directly from the work of G. Ugo Nwokeji and David Eltis, who in 2002 used audio recordings of names found in Courts of Mixed Commission records for Havana, Cuba, and Freetown, Sierra Leone, to identify likely ethno-linguistic origins. The names in these recordings were pronounced by speakers of the same language and accent that the Courts of Mixed Commission registrars would likely have had (e.g., if the name was written in a Havana register, Eltis and Nwokeji had the name pronounced by a Spanish speaker with a Havana accent). This helped connect the sound of the name to its spelling and thus enabled a more accurate assessment of the name’s possible ethnic origins than provided by its written counterpart alone. Those with knowledge of African languages, cultural naming practices, and ethnic groups can assist in identifying these Africans' origins by drawing on their own expertise to identify the likely ethno-linguistic origin of an individual's name." (last accessed, Sept. 23, 2016)
"This site provides access to the raw data and documentation which contains information on English slave trade from 1791-1799. Specifically, the data file contains information on the ship's name, tonnage, home port, departure date from England, African port of arrival, date of African arrival, slaves taken on board (total actually purchased), slave mortality, number of slaves transported, date of departure from Africa, date of arrival in New World, number of slaves landed in America, and date ship left America." (last accessed, Oct. 6, 2016)