Slavery & Abolition Resources Online
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Slavery, Abolition, and Social Justice
Includes primary source documents on key aspects of the history of slavery worldwide over six centuries covering slavery in the early Americas; African coast; urban and domestic slavery; resistance and revolts; the abolition movement and the slavery debate; legislation and politics; freedmen and free Black settlements; experiences of enslaved people; and the legacy of slavery.
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Slavery and Anti-Slavery
Includes books, pamphlets, newspapers, periodicals, legal documents, court records, monographs, manuscripts, and maps documenting the historical conflict over slavery in the United States. Includes Part I: Debates over Slavery and Abolition, part II: Slave Trade in the Atlantic World, part III: The Institution of Slavery, and part IV: The Age of Emancipation.
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Sidney Lapidus Slavery and Abolition CollectionClose to one hundred books and documents from the Lapidus Collection are now available online. Among the manuscripts are a 1699 “Epistle from the yearly meeting of Friends Brethren in Philadelphia”; and a 1789 ship’s cargo invoice of merchandise on the voyage of the Brig Dauphin, among many other resources.
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Slave VoyagesThe 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 African Names Database records details of enslaved people, including their African names, who were swept up in the last 60 years of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
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The Free Womb ProjectThe Free Womb Project—a bilingual (English and Spanish-language), digital collection of laws legislating the gradual abolition of slavery (which, in some cases, were referred to as “Free Womb” laws) in sixteen different governments across the Atlantic World during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
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Race and Slavery Petitions ProjectThe Project offers a searchable database of detailed personal information about slaves, slaveholders, and free people of color. 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.
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North Carolina Runaway Slave AdvertisementsThe 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.
Sojourner Truth, Abolitionist
Caption: "I sell the shadow to support the substance, Sojourner Truth." Still Image from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.