External Databases

This student-developed project begins with a database of around 1900 Beacon Hill/West End African-Americans from 1848-1855, using city directories, the 1850 federal census, and Boston city tax records. These names are then linked with almost 500 sources from The Liberator which have been cataloged and digitized.

A databse of information about African slave names, genders, ages, occupations, illnesses, family relationships, ethnicity, places of origin, prices paid by slave owners, and slaves’ testimony and emancipations. This material was compiled and organized by Dr. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, based on her research in Louisiana, France, Spain, and Texas.

The American slavery debate occurred during a time of increasing connections among the continents and islands of the Atlantic Ocean:  an area that includes Europe, the Caribbean, Central and South America and Africa.  As such, it is useful and illuminating for historians to consider the ways in which contemporary individuals, events and trends of the Atlantic region influenced this contentious and long-running dialogue.

The Martinique Digital Heritage Bank features a slave ancestry database with genealogical information. The database includes the 1848 register originally intended to establish the marital status of the liberated population and to assign family names to former slaves. There are also many archeological and architectural images from the island.

The Black Abolitionist Digital Archive is a collection of over 800 speeches by antebellum blacks and approximately 1,000 editorials from the period. These important documents provide a portrait of black involvement in the anti-slavery movement; scans of these documents are provided as images and PDF files. The University of Detroit Mercy Libraries/IDS has enhanced this collection by including readings of some of the works and an immersive site in Second Life.

This special resources site offers a snapshot of how historians and digital humanists have helped to build a new understanding of Abraham Lincoln with a series of innovative and powerful Web-based tools. Based on a partnership between the Journal of American History and the House Divided Project at Dickinson College.

Search America’s historic newspaper pages from 1836-1922 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present. The site includes digital copies of antislavery newspapers, such as the Freeman’s Championand the Anti-Slavery Bugle, and numerous papers covering the slaveholding South.

ColoredConventions.org endeavors to transform teaching and learning about this historic collective organizing effort—and about the many leaders and places involved in it—bringing them to digital life for a new generation of undergraduate and graduate students and researchers across disciplines, for high school teachers, and for community members interested in the history of church, educational and entrepreneurial engagement.

The Connecticut State Library Digital Collections include copies of the Charter Oak, Ultimatum, Free Soil Pioneer, and other rare antislavery newspapers. The library also maintains a database of African Americans and Native Americans listed in court cases between 1691 and 1855. Individuals can be the plaintiff, defendant, subject, or an individual mentioned in a lawsuit.

Explore the DAACS Website to learn more about enslaved Africans and their descendants, living in the Chesapeake, Carolinas, and Caribbean during the Colonial and Ante-Bellum Periods. Analyze and compare artifacts, deposits, and architectural plans from different sites at unprecedented levels of detail. Join researchers from different disciplines to discover the cultural dynamics of slave society in the early Atlantic World.

The Digital Library on American Slavery offers data on race and slavery extracted from eighteenth and nineteenth-century documents and processed over a period of eighteen years. The Digital Library contains detailed information on about 150,000 individuals, including slaves, free people of color, and whites. These data have been painstakingly extracted from 2,975 legislative petitions and 14,512 county court petitions, and from a wide range of related documents, including wills, inventories, deeds, bills of sale, depositions, court proceedings, amended petitions, among others.

The Documenting Runaway Slaves (DRS) research project is a collaborative effort to compile and make available newspaper advertisements placed by masters seeking the capture and return of runaway slaves. This project will gather these documents into a single text-based repository, from the U.S. South to the Caribbean and eventually to Brazil and beyond, and will organize them into standardized, full-text searchable online resources for academic researchers, genealogists and anyone who wants to learn more about the Atlantic world in the era of slavery.

Hosted by the Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library at Texas Tech University. The collection includes correspondence, sermons, lectures, newspapers, news clippings, and family memorabilia created by, or related to, Lovejoy and his family. The collection bulks with correspondence (1824-1853) and concerns abolition, temperance, religion, and theology.

Placed in the context of the Civil War and Reconstruction with the aid of original essays, the documents uncovered by the project’s editors are presented in Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867. A total of nine volumes of Freedom is projected. Sample documents from each published volume and a chronology of emancipation are available online.

This project is designing and beginning data collection for a database that will compile all North American slave runaway ads and make them available for statistical, geographical, textual, and other forms of analysis. Some elements of data collection will be crowdsourced, engendering a public sense of co-participation in the process of recording history, and producing a living pedagogical tool for instructors at all levels, in multiple disciplines.

Freedom’s Journal provided international, national, and regional information on current events and contained editorials declaiming slavery, lynching, and other injustices. The Journal also published biographies of prominent African-Americans and listings of births, deaths, and marriages in the African-American New York community.

In Motion: The African-American Migration Experiencepresents a new interpretation of African-American history, one that focuses on the self-motivated activities of peoples of African descent to remake themselves and their worlds. Of the thirteen defining migrations that formed and transformed African America, only the transatlantic slave trade and the domestic slave trades were coerced, the eleven others were voluntary movements of resourceful and creative men and women, risk-takers in an exploitative and hostile environment.

In December 1999, to commemorate the 140th anniversary of the hanging of John Brown in Charles Town, West Virginia, the West Virginia State Archives placed online a new electronic database of materials pertaining to Brown from the Boyd B. Stutler Collection. A recognized authority on the man, Boyd Stutler (1889-1970) created one of the most important John Brown collections in existence. The State of West Virginia acquired this body of material in 1977.

At the core of the completed project is this online Encyclopaedia of British Slave-ownership containing information about every slave-owner in the British Caribbean, Mauritius or the Cape at the moment of abolition in 1833. Entries include information about the activities, affiliations and legacies of these men and women, with a particular emphasis on the “absentee” owners based in Britain.

The Electronic Text Center’s Liberian Letters consists of two collections of letters written by former slaves from Virginia who settled in Liberia: Samson Ceasar’s letters to David S. Haselden and Henry F. Westfall, 1834-1835 and Letters from the former slaves of James Hunter Terrell, 1857-1866.

The Lincoln Archives Digital Project started in 2002 with a simple idea for a vast undertaking: to digitize all federal records that exist from the administration of Abraham Lincoln.  Over 6,000 documents are currently online and over half a million documents are scanned and in the process of being placed online.

Mapping Occupation, by Gregory P. Downs and Scott Nesbit, captures the regions where the United States Army could effectively act as an occupying force in the Reconstruction South. For the first time, it presents the basic nuts-and-bolts facts about the Army’s presence, movements that are central to understanding the occupation of the South. That data in turn reorients our understanding of the Reconstruction that followed Confederate surrender.

Founded in 1844, the Maryland Historical Society (MdHS) is the state’s oldest continuously operating cultural institution. Online collections include numerous documents and images pertaining to the history of slavery within the state. The site also includes a complete digital copy of the Maryland State Colonization Society Papers, 1827-1871.

This Research Guide offers an introduction to the history of the British transatlantic slave trade and its abolition. It gives an overview of the major original sources in British archive collections. The Guide is the first in a series covering different aspects of the complex history of the slave trade, slavery and unfree labour in the British Caribbean and American colonies in more detail. It will help researchers to identify which area of the subject they wish to focus on and where to look for more detailed information.