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Africana Studies

Primary Source Databases & Archives

  • 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. Through contributions to this website by Africans, members of the African Diaspora, and others, we hope to set in motion the rediscovery of the backgrounds of the millions of Africans captured and sold into slavery during suppression of transatlantic slave trading in the 19th century.
  • Caribbean Histories Revealed
    The history of the British Caribbean is explored in this online exhibition through government documents, photographs and maps dating from the 17th century to the 1920s and discovered during a cataloguing project at The National Archives of the United Kingdom.
  • Former British Colonial Dependencies, Slave Registers, 1813-1834
  • Liberated Africans
    After 1807, over 250,000 people were involved in an international effort to abolish the Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades. This resource is dedicated to their memories.
  • Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution
  • Recovered Histories
    Anti-Slavery International has digitized its collection of 18th and 19th century literature on the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Recovered Histories captures the narratives of the enslaved, enslavers, slave ship surgeons, abolitionists, parliamentarians, clergy, planters and rebels.Use the themed narratives as starting points or "Search Collection" to explore over 40,000 pages in the collection.
  • Slave Biographies: The Atlantic Database Network
    An open access data repository of information on the identities of enslaved people in the Atlantic World. It includes the names, ethnicities, skills, occupations, and illnesses of individual slaves. Phase one of a multi-phase project is presented here. Users of the website can access three data sets: one about slaves in Maranhão, Brazil, one about slaves in colonial Louisiana, and another about freed slaves in Antebellum Louisiana.
  • Slavery Images
    A visual record of the African slave trade and slave life in the early African Diaspora.
  • Slave Societies Digital Archive
    The Slave Societies Digital Archive (formerly Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies), directed by Jane Landers and hosted at Vanderbilt University, preserves endangered ecclesiastical and secular documents related to Africans and African-descended peoples in slave societies. SSDA holdings include more than 700,000 digital images drawn close to 2,000 unique volumes dating from the sixteenth through twentieth centuries that document the lives of an estimated four to six million individuals.
  • Slave Voyages
    This digital memorial raises questions about the largest slave trades in history and offers access to the documentation available to answer them. European colonizers turned to Africa for enslaved laborers to build the cities and extract the resources of the Americas. They forced millions of mostly unnamed Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas, and from one part of the Americas to another. Analyze these slave trades and view interactive maps, timelines, and animations to see the dispersal in action.
  • Slavery in America and the World
    A collection of legal materials on slavery in the English-speaking world.
  • UK Parliament

Music

  • African American Sheet Music: Brown University Library Center
    "The sheet music in this digital collection has been selected from the Sheet Music Collection at the John Hay Library at Brown University. The full collection consists of approximately 500,000 items, of which perhaps 250,000 are currently available for use. It is one of the largest collections of sheet music in any library in the United States. The sheet music, primarily vocal music of American imprint, dates from the 18th century to the present day, with the largest concentration of titles in the period 1840-1950."