Topic: Transatlantic Slavery and the Slave Trade — Primary Resources

The Frederick Douglass Papers at the Library of Congress presents the papers of the nineteenth-century African American abolitionist who escaped from slavery and then risked his freedom by becoming an outspoken antislavery lecturer, writer, and publisher.

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.

This collection of life histories consists of approximately 2,900 documents, compiled and transcribed by more than 300 writers from 24 states, working on the Folklore Project of the Federal Writers’ Project, a New Deal jobs program that was part of the U.S. Works Progress (later Work Projects) Administration (WPA) from 1936 to 1940.

American Memory provides free and open access through the Internet to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience.

Documenting the American South (DocSouth) is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes sixteen thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs.

Making of America (MoA) is a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction.

Travelogues of European visitors to the United States; focus on women's experiences