Africana Studies Subject Guide — Slavery & Abolition Resources Online

Close 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.

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 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.

The 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.

The 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.

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.