Links

The advent of digitization has transformed the World Wide Web into a tremendous resource for all who teach history.  A substantial number of sites offer access to original sources, such as historic images, contemporary news articles, firsthand accounts by slaves, and reports on the Underground Railroad that can be useful in preparing lesson plans and assignments.

Several web-based primary source collections offer access to slave narratives, the personal testimonies of courageous individuals who successfully escaped the lash and spent the remainder of their lives using their own histories as a weapon against slavery.  In creating a public voice for “the American slave,” the authors of slave narratives challenged their readers’ assumptions about black intelligence, humanity, and desire for freedom and created rallying points for those whose own stories went unheard.  Two of the most extensive anthologies can be found at the University of North Carolina’s Documenting the American South site and Born in Slavery, a collection of stories of life in slavery, told in their own words by elderly African-American men and women looking back from the vantage point of the 1930s on the experiences that shaped their youth.  The Library of Congress’s American Memory site includes audio files - including stories, songs, and reflections – of Depression-era interviews with 23 former slaves.  The University of Virginia also maintains an online assortment of narratives at American Slave Narratives: An Online Anthology, and University of Houston historian Steven Mintz oversees an Excerpts from Slave Narratives site containing 46 first-person accounts of slavery and African life dating from 1682 to 1937.  The University of Virginia also offers e-book editions of three of the period’s most influential autobiographies: Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery, and the widely circulated Narrative of Sojourner Truth.   

Contemporary images, maps, and texts that personalize large-scale topics such as the transatlantic slave trade, the domestic slave trade, colonization and emigration, and the fugitive slave experience are available from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture’s In Motion: The African-American Migration Experiencewebsite.  The American Social History Project’s Doing As They Can documentary also offers a range of primary documents on fugitive slave life.  The Geography of Slavery in Virginia site contains an extensive digital collection of advertisements for runaway and captured slaves and servants from 18th- and 19th-century Virginia newspapers, notices that transform faceless “slaves” into specific people and offer tantalizing hints about the multiplicity of ways they challenged a society determined to keep them subordinate.

Maps, charts, and graphs documenting the specifics of Virginia’s domestic slave trade can be accessed through the Geographies of Family and Market site.  The massive Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, with its detailed information on captives, crew members, duration of voyages, and ships employed is currently available only as a CD-ROM collection published by Cambridge University Press, but will soon be launched as an open-access website.  Underground Railroad-related materials available online include Safe Passage, a multimedia curriculum on escape routes across Ohio, and the National Park Service’s National Underground Railroad: Network to Freedom website, both of which provide names, faces, and stories of specific incidents to enhance lessons on slave resistance, self-manumission, and antislavery activism.

HarpWeek, a treasure trove of slavery, Civil War, and Reconstruction-related text and imagery from the nation’s leading 19th century periodical, Harper’s Weekly, offers a window on mainstream white attitudes toward African Americans, as well as a Reconstruction Convention Simulation Game.  The Teaching American History document library contains many texts relating to slavery, abolition, and emancipation, including speeches by Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Alexander Stephens, and Martin Delany, while the online repository of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project includes a wide variety of documents such as letters, military proclamations, marriage certificates, and testimonies before the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission.  Making of America, a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through Reconstruction, also provides access to countless contemporary essays, editorials, and speeches that capture the individual voices – sometimes pleading, sometimes defiant, and sometimes prescient – of people whose choices literally made history.