From American Memory
African-American Experience in Ohio - This selection of manuscript and printed text and images drawn from the collections of the Ohio Historical Society illuminates the history of black Ohio from 1850 to 1920, a story of slavery and freedom, segregation and integration, religion and politics, migrations and restrictions, harmony and discord, and struggles and successes.
African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship - An online exhibition that showcases the incomparable African-American collections of the Library of Congress.
African-American Sheet Music from Brown University - This collection consists of 1,305 pieces of sheet music by and relating to African Americans, dating from 1850 through 1920. The collection includes many songs from the heyday of antebellum blackface minstrelsy in the 1850s and from the abolitionist movement of the same period.
African-American Pamphlet Collection - This collection from the Rare Book and Special Collections Division presents 397 pamphlets, published from 1824 through 1909, by African-American authors and others who wrote about slavery, African colonization, Emancipation, Reconstruction, and related topics. The materials range from personal accounts and public orations to organizational reports and legislative speeches. Among the authors represented are Frederick Douglass, Kelly Miller, Charles Sumner, Mary Church Terrell, and Booker T. Washington.
Frederick Douglass - This collection presents 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. The papers span the years 1841 to 1964, with the bulk of the material dating from 1862 to 1895.
Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938 - This collection contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and assembled and microfilmed in 1941 as the seventeen-volume Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves. This online collection is a joint presentation of the Manuscript and Prints and Photographs Divisions of the Library of Congress and includes more than 200 photographs from the Prints and Photographs Division that are available to the public for the first time.
Slaves and the Courts, 1740-1860 - This collection contains just over one hundred pamphlets and books (published between 1772 and 1889) concerning the difficult and troubling experiences of African and African-American slaves in the American colonies and the United States. The documents, most from the Law Library and the Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress, comprise an assortment of trials and cases, reports, arguments, accounts, examinations of cases and decisions, proceedings, journals, a letter, and other works of historical importance.
First-Person Narratives of the American South, 1860-1920 - This compilation of printed texts from the libraries of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill documents the culture of the nineteenth-century American South from the viewpoint of Southerners. It includes the diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, travel accounts, and ex-slave narratives of both prominent individuals and members of groups whose scant historical record has made them relatively inaccessible: women, African Americans, enlisted men, laborers, and Native Americans.
Liberia Maps - This collection of Liberia maps includes twenty examples from the American Colonization Society (ACS), organized in 1817 to resettle free black Americans in West Africa. These maps show early settlements in Liberia, indigenous political subdivisions, and some of the building lots that were assigned to settlers.
Additional Resources in the Library of Congress
African-American History and Culture - The Manuscript Division has one of the nation's most valuable collections for the study of African-American history and culture. The Library's holdings include information about slavery and the slave trade as well as other aspects of plantation life. Papers of slaveholders provide one view of slavery and slave narratives another.
The African-American Mosaic: A Library of Congress Resource Guide for the Study of Black History and Culture - This exhibit marks the publication of The African-American Mosaic: A Library of Congress Resource Guide for the Study of Black History and Culture, the first Library-wide resource guide to the institution's African- American collections.
American Treasures of the Library of Congress: Abolition & Suffrage - The American Treasures of the Library of Congress exhibition is an unprecedented permanent exhibition of the rarest, most interesting, or most significant items relating to America's past, drawn from every corner of the world's largest library.
Images of African-American Slavery and Freedom from the Collections of the Library of Congress - Photographs from Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Related External Web Sites
NOTE: The Library of Congress does not maintain these Internet sites. Users should direct concerns about these links to their respective site administrators or Web masters.
African-American Women: On-line Archival Collections - Durham, N.C.: The Digital Scriptorium, Special Collections Library, Duke University, 1997.
American Slave Narratives: An Online Anthology - Charlottesville: American Studies Hypertexts at the University of Virginia, University of Virginia, 1998.
American Slavery: A Composite Autobiography - Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2000.
The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record - Charlottesville: The Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and The Digital Media Lab at the University of Virginia Library.
"Been Here So Long": Selections from the WPA American Slave Narratives - New York: New Deal Network, Columbia University, 2000.
Missouri Slave Narratives - St. Louis: African Missouri, University of Missouri.
North American Slave Narratives, Beginnings to 1920 - Chapel Hill: Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1998.
Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk About Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation - Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1999.
Testimony of the Canadian Fugitives (ca. 1850) - Groningen, Netherlands: From Revolution to Reconstruction, University of Groningen, 1997.
Through the Lens of Time: Images of African Americans from the Cook Collection - Richmond: VCU Libraries' Online Exhibits, Virginia Commonwealth University, 2000.
Documenting the American South Main Page - Chapel Hill: Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1998.