American History Subject Guide

REFERENCE BOOKS IN THE STARR READING ROOM, SML:

Drescher, Seymour, ed. A Historical Guide to World Slavery ( Oxford, 1998)
   HT861 H59X 1998

Finkelman, Paul, ed. Macmillan Encyclopedia of World Slavery (Macmillan, 1998)
   HT861 M24X 1998 (LC)+ Oversize

Gates, Henry Louis and Henry Appiah, eds. Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience ( Oxford, 2005)
DT14 .A37435X 2005+ Oversize

Hogg, Peter. The African Slave Trade and Its Suppression (Frank Cass, 1973)  
Z7164 S6 H64 (LC)

Miller, Joseph, ed. Slavery and Slaving in World History: a Bibliography (Krause, 1993)
Z7164 S6 M543 1993 (LC)+ Oversize

Miller, Randall, ed. Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery (Greewood, 1988)
E441 .D53 1988

Rodriguez, Junius, ed. Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery  (ABC-CLIO, 1997);
HT861 H57X 1997 (LC)+ Oversize

PUBLISHED COLLECTIONS OF PRIMARY SOURCE MATERIAL:

Howard Bell, Minutes of the Proceedings of the National Negro Conventions, 1830-1864. New York: Arno Press, 1969.
Bass E184.5 B45

Ira Berlin, ed., Freedom, a documentary history of emancipation, 1861-1867. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1982-1993. 2 vols.

Ira Berlin and Leslie S. Rowland, ed., Families and freedom : a documentary history of African-American kinship in the Civil War. New York : New Press, 1997.

Ira Berlin et al, eds., Free at last : a documentary history of slavery, freedom, and the Civil War. New York : The New Press, c1992.

Ira Berlin et al, eds., Remembering slavery : African Americans talk about their personal    experiences of slavery and freedom. New York : New Press, 1998. 1 volume and 2 sound cassettes.

John W. Blassingame, ed., The Frederick Douglass papers. New Haven : Yale  University Press, 1979-1992. 5 vols.

John W. Blassingame, ed., Slave testimony : two centuries of letters, speeches, interviews, and autobiographies. Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, 1976.

Robert Conrad, ed. Children of God’s Fire: A Documentary History of Black Slavery in Brazil. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.
Bass HT1126 C455 1983

Vicki Lynn Eaklor. American Antislavery Songs: A Collection and Analysis. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988.
Music Library Stacks – ML3561 A62 E11

Paul D. Escott. Slavery Remembered: A Record of Twentieth-Century Slave Narratives. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1979.
Bass E443 E82

Walter M. Merrill, ed. The letters of William Lloyd Garrison. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1971-1981. 6 vols.

Windley, Lathan A., ed. Runaway slave advertisements : a documentary history from the 1730's to 1790. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983. 4 vols.

C. Peter Ripley, ed., The Black abolitionist papers. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985-. 5 vols.

George P. Rawick, ed., The American slave : a composite autobiography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1977. [Typescripts of the 1930s interviews with former slaves, a WPA project] 12 vols.

UNPUBLISHED PRIMARY SOURCE COLLECTIONS AT YALE:

Note: Orbis is the single best tool for locating primary source materials held in the various Yale repositories. To use Orbis to locate archival materials, perform keyword searches using terms related to your subject (ie. “slavery AND "united states",” “ "slave trade" AND "united states" ",” “abolition,” “ emancipation AND slave? AND "united States" .” Then, when viewing the results of these searches, click “post limit,” and limit your search results to materials located in “archives and manuscripts.” This will limit the search results to archival materials, and will generally include microform materials held in the microform room. The following list is a sample of primary source materials at Yale that such searches would reveal.

MICROFORM COLLECTIONS IN STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY:

Anti-Slavery Collection: 18th-19th Centuries, From the Library of the Society of Friends, 1760-1978. London: World Microfilms, 1978. (25 reels)

Anti-slavery Materials: Regional Records and Other Pamphlets, 18th-19th Centuries: the Collection at John Rylands University Library, Manchester. London, England: Great Britain, Foreign Office Records; General Correspondence Before 1906, Slave Trade, 1816-1892
(1,222 reels; FILM GB FO84)

Great Britain, Foreign Office Records: Confidential Print, slave trade, 1858-1892 (10 reels;)
FILM GB FO541

Federal Writer’s Project Slave Narratives; A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, 1936-1938 (11 reels)

Ira Berlin, ed., Records of southern plantations from emancipation to the great migration. Frederick, MD : University Publications of America, 2000-2003. Series A, 73 reels; Series B, 87 reels.

John W. Blassingame, ed., Frederick Douglass papers, 1841-1964 (inclusive), 1862-1895 (bulk), 34 reels.

Carter, George E., ed., The Black abolitionist papers, 1830-1865. 17 reels.

Muriel and William Peters Collection, 1817-1968. 16 reels [Capture, trial and release of the African captives of the slave ship Amistad]

Papers of the American Slave Trade Series A, Selections from the Rhode Island Historical Society. Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, c1996. (55 reels)

Papers of the Company of Scotland trading to Africa and the Indies, 1696-1707 (3 reels)

Records of Ante-bellum Southern Plantations: From the Revolution through the Civil War. Bethesda : University Publications of America. 639 reels.

Records of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia relating to slaves, 1851-1863 (3 reels; LSF)

Records of the Office of the Secretary of the Interior relating to the suppression of the African slave trade and Negro colonization, 1854-1872 (10 reels; LSF)

Rhodes House Library, Oxford, anti-slavery collection, 1795-1880 (inclusive), [microform] Description: 59 reels; Call Number: FILM MISC 1139

Rhodes House selected anti-slavery papers, 1836-1868 (inclusive), [microform] Description: 2 reels;
FILM MISC 134

Slavery in Ante-bellum Southern Industries. Bethesda, MD : University Publications of   America, 1996. 134 reels.

Slavery Tracts & Pamphlets from the West India Committee Collection Now at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies. London, England : World Microfilms Publications, 1982. (28 reels).

State slavery statutes, 1789-1865. 354 microfiches [Slavery and the law.]

Wilberforce, Slavery, Religion and Politics: Series One: The Wilberforce papers from the   Bodleian Library, Oxford. Marlborough, Wiltshire, England : Adam Matthew Publications, 1998. 50 reels. [British abolitionist William Wilberforce]

ARCHIVAL COLLECTIONS IN MANUSCRIPTS AND ARCHIVES, SML:

Liverpool Emancipation Society Records, 1863-1865 .25 linear ft. (1 box)
Finding aid

Ulrich Bonnell Phillips Papers, 1712-1933 inclusive, 1800-1861 (bulk). 18.75 linear feet (47 boxes).
Finding aid

ARCHIVAL COLLECTIONS IN BEINECKE LIBRARY:

Documents Concerning Slavery and Manumission in Delaware, 1783-1910. (1 box)

Documents Relating to J.D. Fondren & Bro., Richmond, VA, 1788-1863 (80 items)

ARCHIVAL COLLECTIONS AT THE DIVINITY LIBRARY:

Hartwell Family Papers, 1849-1975 (inclusive) 5 Linear Feet (17 boxes)
Finding aid

Freedmen’s Aid Society Records, 1866-1932. Microform, 120 reels.

Records of Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, 1760-1972 (Mircroform, 8 reels)

ELECTRONIC COLLECTIONS (through Yale):

CD-ROM (use in the computer cluster across from the reference desk in SML nave):

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: a database on CD-ROM. Published: Cambridge, UK : Cambridge University Press, 1999. Use in computer cluster across from reference desk in the SML Nave.

Accessible Archives: provides a searchable collection of American newspapers from the 18th & 19th Centuries. Eras covered include the Colonial Period, the French & Indian War, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, African-American History, Industrial Revolution, and Genealogy.

American Periodical Series: contains 1000 magazines published between 1741 and 1900. Titles include Benjamin Franklin's General Magazine, the first American professional journals, and several consumer magazines still in publication, such as Vanity Fair, Harper's, and Ladies' Home Journal. The search interface allows you to search the complete text, including tables of contents, by boolean and keyword operators. Articles are linked to the corresponding page images, downloadable in PDF format.

Augusta Chronicle Newspapers: a searchable internet database of The Augusta Chronicle newspapers dating from 1792 to 2000, including editions of Daily Chronicle & Sentinel, The Augusta Chronicle and Gazette of the State, and The Daily Chronicle & Constitution. The archive shows the page as it was originally published - with stories, photos and advertising.

Early American Imprints (Evans), Series I

6,000 text editions from among the 40,000 titles available in the Evans Early American Imprints Collection. Evans Digital consists of works issued in America from 1639 to 1800. The collection is comprised of the non-serial titles recorded by Charles Evans in his American Bibliography and additional items identified by Roger Pattrell Bristol in Supplement to Charles Evans' American Bibliography.

Early American Imprints (Shaw-Shoemaker), Series II

Early American Imprints, Series II (1801-1819) provides full-text access to the 36,000 American books, pamphlets and broadsides published in the first nineteen years of the nineteenth century. It is the continuation of Readex's Early American Imprints: Series I, this primary source database, based on the bibliography by Ralph B. Shaw and Richard H. Shoemaker and has been supplemented by thousands of new items.

Early American Newspapers: features cover-to-cover reproductions of hundreds of historic newspapers, providing more than one million pages as fully text-searchable facsimile images. This collection is based largely on Clarence Brigham's History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690-1820.

Gilder Lehrman Center Online Document Library

A collection contains over 200 individual items, including speeches, letters, cartoons and graphics, interviews, and articles.

HarpWeek: The Civil War Era and Reconstruction (1857-1877): Searchable full-text database of all the pages of Harper's Weekly during the Civil War Era, Reconstruction I and Reconstruction II with scanned images, together with a series of indexes.

New York Times: Online access to articles from the New York Times, currently covering from 1851 to the present.

Times of London: complete digital edition of The Times ( London) from 1785 to 1985. The entire newspaper is captured, with all articles, advertisements and illustrations/photos divided into categories to facilitate searching. Palmer's Index to the ( London) Times available through Historical Newspapers Online.

ONLINE COLLECTIONS OUTSIDE OF YALE:

The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record

The approximately 1,235 images in this collection have been selected from a wide range of sources, most of them dating from the period of slavery. This collection is envisioned as a tool and a resource that can be used by teachers, researchers, students, and the general public - in brief, anyone interested in the experiences of Africans who were enslaved and transported to the Americas and the lives of their descendants in the slave societies of the New World.

Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy

A database on the approximately 100,000 slaves who were brought to Louisiana in the 18th and 19th centuries, including African slave names, genders, ages, occupations, illnesses, family relationships, ethnicity, places of origin, prices paid by slave owners, and slave testimonials and emancipations. Created by Dr. Gwendolyn Hall, a professor emerita of history at Rutgers University.

Memories of Slavery - Trauma and representation in European and African art and visual culture 16th –21th century.

The database puts together images and objects, sites and gestures related to the cultural memories of slavery in Europe and West-Africa. As the transatlantic slavesystem was a traumatizing experience for enslaved Africans as well as for the European slaveholder-societies only few images show the social practices, which both groups were unable to integrate in a positive  self-concept. The material does not illustrate the history of slavery itself, but documents the complex visual strategies of its cultural legitimation, interpretation and integration in national and ethnical identities, which are formed not only by a cultural heritage shared, but also by oblivion and suppression, denial and disavowel of unbidden memories.

Slave Movement During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

This site provides access to the raw data and documentation which contains information on the following slave trade topics from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: records of slave ship movement between Africa and the Americas, slave ships of eighteenth century France, slave trade to Rio de Janeiro, Virginia slave trade in the eighteenth century, English slave trade (House of Lords Survey), Angola slave trade in the eighteenth century, internal slave trade to Rio de Janeiro, slave trade to Havana, Cuba, Nantes slave trade in the eighteenth century, and slave trade to Jamaica.  

The Valley of the Shadow

The Valley of the Shadow is an electronic archive of two communities in the American Civil War—Augusta County, Va. and Franklin Co., Pa. The Valley Web site includes searchable newspapers, population census data, agricultural census data, manufacturing census data, slaveowner census data, and tax records. The Valley Web site also contains letters and diaries, images, maps, church records, and military rosters.