A primary source (also called original source) is an information-bearing document, recording, artifact, or other item that was created or produced during the time under study. It is an original source and is distinguished from a secondary source, which cite, comment on, interpret, or incorporate primary source material. Examples of primary sources include original autobiographies, diaries, film footage, speeches, letters, minutes, e-mail, photographs, artwork, relics, jewelry, paintings, etc.
The Abolition of Slavery - A National Archives website providing resources on the abolition of slavery in the United States.
African American Perspectives - This American Memory website comprises the Daniel A.P. Murray Pamphlet Collection. The collection presents a panoramic and eclectic review of African-American history and culture, spanning almost 100 years from the early nineteenth through early twentieth-centuries.
African-American Sheet Music, 1850-1920 - A Library of Congress collection consisting of 1,305 pieces of African-American sheet music dating from 1850 through 1920. The collection includes many songs from the heyday of antebellum black face minstrelsy in the 1850s and from the abolitionist movement of the same period.
African American Women Writers of the 19th Century - A digital collection of 52 published works by 19th-century black women writers. A part of the Digital Schomburg, this collection provides access to the thought, perspectives and creative abilities of black women as captured in books and pamphlets published prior to 1920.
Anti-Slavery Collection - This collection from the Boston Public Library contains about 40,000 pieces of correspondence, broadsides, newspapers, pamphlets, books, and realia spanning from 1832 until after the American Civil War.
ArchiveGrid - ArchiveGrid is an online repository of archival institutions. It does not provide access to documents; rather, it helps identify institutions (archives, libraries, museums, historical societies) that hold archival material and the nature of the resources they preserve.
The Avalon Project - Made available by the Lillian Goldman Law Library at the Yale Law School, the Avalon Project is a compilation of digitalized documents in law, history, and diplomacy from Ancient to Modern times.
Behind the Veil : Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South - A selection of 100 oral history interviews, with transcripts, chronicling African American life during the age of legal segregation in the American South, from the 1890s to the 1950s. Interviews are browsable by state, interviewee name, gender and occupation.
Black Abolitionist Archive - The Black Abolitionist Digital Archive is a collection of over 800 speeches by antebellum blacks and approximately 1,000 editorials from the period by African Americans who assumed prominent roles in the transatlantic struggle to abolish slavery.
Blues, Gospel, and the Fort Valley Music Festivals, 1938-1943 - Online collection consists of approximately 100 sound recordings, primarily blues and gospel songs, and related documentation from the folk festival at Fort Valley State College.
Born In Slavery - Contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves.
Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive - Mississippi was a focal point in the struggle for civil rights in America. The digital archives a selection of digitized photographs, letters, diaries, and other documents. Oral history transcripts are also available, as well as finding aids for manuscript collections.
Frederick Douglas Papers - A Library of Congress resource presenting the papers of the nineteenth-century African-American abolitionist who escaped from slavery and then risked his own freedom by becoming an outspoken antislavery lecturer, writer, and publisher.
First-Person Narratives of the American South, 1860-1920 - A compilation of printed texts from the libraries at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that document the culture of the nineteenth-century American South from the viewpoint of Southerners.
Harper's Weekly Reports, 1857-1874 - For over a quarter of a century Harper’s Weekly captured the lion’s share of the national newspaper audience. Materials from the magazine are presented in order to give a true historical picture of the leading 19th-century newspaper’s view of black Americans.
New York Slavery Records Index -- A searchable compilation of records that identify individual enslaved persons and their owners, beginning as early as 1525 and ending during the Civil War.
North American Slave Narratives - A collection of books and articles that document the individual and collective story of African Americans struggling for freedom and human rights in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth-centuries.
Slavery Images - This educational resource is a two-part website created for teachers, researchers, students and the general public. It exists to assist anyone interested in visualizing the experiences of Africans and their descendants who were enslaved and transported to slave societies around the world.
Slavery, Law and Power - This digital collection brings together original documents to help explain the long history of slavery and its connection to struggles over power in early America.
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade - This unique website offers researchers, students, and the general public a chance to rediscover the reality of one of the largest forced movements of peoples in world history by providing access to slave voyage records.
Yale Slavery and Abolition Portal - This site is designed to help researchers and students find primary sources pertaining to slavery, abolition, and resistance.