HIS 179/365/373/375/460: Antebellum African American History: Primary Sources

"Chronicling a century and a half of the African American experience, African American Newspapers, Series 1, features 280 newspapers from 35 states, including many rare and historically significant 19th-century titles. These titles published for or by African Americans constitute valuable primary sources for researchers exploring such diverse disciplines as cultural, literary and social history; ethnic studies and more. Beginning with Freedom’s Journal (NY)—the first African American newspaper published in the United States—the titles in this groundbreaking series include The Colored Citizen (KS), Arkansas State Press, Rights of All (NY), Wisconsin Afro-American, New York Age, L'Union (LA), Northern Star and Freeman’s Advocate (NY), Richmond Planet, Cleveland Gazette, The Appeal (MN) and hundreds of others."

Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice — “Designed for teaching and research, this resource brings together [primary] documents from libraries and archives across the Atlantic World, covering an extensive time period from 1490” (database homepage).
Highlights include: African forts and the Gold Coast; Materials on Brazil; Education and social justice; Family Papers, Correspondence, Bills and Plantation Journals; Local court records relating to slavery; Resistance and Revolts; Testimony of enslaved people; Slavery in the Early Americas; Songs that recall the Transatlantic Slave Experience; Urban Slavery in New York and Philadelphia; The Underground Railroad in Pennsylvania; Zanzibar and the Indian Ocean Slave Trade

"This important primary source database is a collaboration between the American Antiquarian Society (founded 1812) and Gale. It contains the page images of more than 6,500 American magazines and journals.

"The periodicals focused on American concerns and were predominantly published in the United States or Canada, though some were published overseas by Americans living abroad. The collection offers multiple perspectives on the thought, culture, and society of North America through the eyes of those who lived it, showing how history affected citizens from all walks of life.” Topics covered in these periodicals include "colonial life and the growing tensions between colonists and their oversea rulers leading up to the American Revolution," as well as concerns such as rapid westward expansion, early industrialization, and regional differences reflected in the growing tension over slavery between North and South. "The Civil War and Reconstruction eras are well represented, documenting the conflict and its aftermath….

"Early twentieth century titles document the second Industrial Revolution, immigration, women’s rights, World War I, as well as fashion and music during the Roaring Twenties.”

Find here complimentary access to a selection of about 1,600 documents from modules in the "Black Freedom" series (History Vault). Documents cover the colonial, antebellum, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, Civil Rights, and Contemporary (1976-2000s) eras. Please note that this is not the paid product formerly licensed by the library titled Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century: Federal Government Records. The paid product includes FBI Files on Martin Luther King Jr., for example, only a small selection of which is available here.

Early American Newspapers (EAN), Series 1, 1690-1876 consists of 730 digitized historic American newspapers dating from the advent of the newspaper medium in 1690 through 1876. This critical primary source collection will be useful to anyone interested in researching, for example, the North American British colonies, the formation of the Atlantic World, the American Revolution, and the Early Republic including Antebellum slavery, among many other historical topics. Coverage is national, regional, and local; includes rural areas, small towns, and major urban centers (e.g., Philadelphia). The most frequent users of this database will be history and African American Studies majors as slavery and related themes were widely covered by the mainstream press of the day. Also of great interest to English majors looking for historical reviews and coverage of major literary figures, Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS) majors, and art students seeking early American newspaper illustrations. Finally, individual newspaper titles available from EAN, Series 1 can also be discovered by search the TCNJ Library catalog.

(1851-2008) Provides full text access to the New York Times up to three years ago. Historical New York Times provides information on a wide variety of topics including national and international news, biographies, social and economic issues, the arts, literature, music, the sciences, business, and much more. The database may be searched by author, dates, keywords, and title. Editorials, reviews, obituaries, photos, illustrations, and ads are included. Individual articles or the whole page may be viewed.

International in scope, this title contains primary source materials from the 19th, 20th, and 21st Centuries. Broad topics include the development of human rights, slavery and genocide, imprisonment, health and housing, labor and working conditions, civil and political rights, and others. Also included are a chronology and a bibliography.

Primary source material about personal and historical events written by women who lived in North America from 1675 to 1950. Materials include letters and diaries previously published in other sources as well as materials from unpublished manuscript sources. The collection includes approximately 150,000 pages of letters including 7,000 pages of previously unpublished manuscripts, from more than 1,000 sources, including journal articles, pamphlets, newsletters, monographs, and conference proceedings, Represented are all age groups and life stages, a wide range of ethnicities, many geographical regions, the famous, and the not-so-famous. More than 1,500 biographies enhance the use of the database.

"From the 1820s to the Civil War, African Americans assumed prominent roles in the transatlantic struggle to abolish slavery. The Black Abolitionist Digital Archive is a collection of over 800 speeches by antebellum blacks and approximately 1,000 editorials from the period."

A key primary source on American slavery

find full text American newspapers, North and South, published between 1836 and 1922

"Documenting the American South (DocSouth) is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture." Indeed, DocSouth is perhaps the finest repository of digitized primary sources relating to the Old South available on the open web. "Currently DocSouth includes sixteen thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs" that facilitate the study of African Americans in the Antebellum and Civil War South, as well as other collections that document the full range of the Southern experience. Highly recommended.

This collection "bring[s] together digitally the personal and family papers of free people of color and public records that relate to the group from the [various library] repositories’ collections."