National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Entrepreneurs, Making of African American Identity: V. 1
Six mid-nineteenth century accounts by free-born black entrepreneurs about their economic activities and struggles. Links to documents describing each trade are provided within this well-developed resource.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Emancipation: Death as Freedom
A poem, narratives, and newspaper selections that examine black suicide and death generally as the only dependable source of freedom for slaves. This grim resource provides links to two separate accounts of these experiences.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Emancipation: Liberia, Making of African American Identity: V. 1
Primary resource provides letters, statements, and photographs of free and enslaved African Americans who journeyed to Liberia to establish new lives and identities. Also includes questions for class discussion.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Civil War I: Slaves, Making of African American Identity: V. 1
Photographs of slaves during the Civil War and war memories of former slaves during that conflict. Links to two separate resources can be found here, each focusing on the war memories of former slaves.
National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: The Institution, Making of African American Identity: V. 1
Interviews from the 1930s that reflect on African Americans' experience of the institution of slavery. A narrative with firsthands accounts is linked within this resource.
Library of Congress
Loc: The African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship
Online exhibit from the Library of Congress explores black America's quest for equality from the early national period through the twentieth century. Exhibit contains a wealth of items including books, government documents, manuscripts,...
Georgia Humanities Council and the University of Georgia Press.
New Georgia Encyclopedia: The Butler Family
An entry on the Butler family who owned large plantations on the Sea Islands. The "patriarch" was Pierce Butler who also served as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention.
Georgia Humanities Council and the University of Georgia Press.
New Georgia Encyclopedia: Atlantic Slave Trade to Savannah
Encyclopedia article describing slavery in Colonial Georgia and the role that Savannah played in slave trade from 1755 to as late as 1858.
Duke University
Duke University Libraries: Digitized Collections: African American Women
Access Civil War-era documents that give us a rare first-hand glimpse into the lives of African American women at the time: letters of two slave women from the 1830s and 1850s and a hand-written memoir of another woman born shortly after...
PBS
Wnet: Thirteen: Slavery & Making of America: The Slave Experience: Men, Women & Gender
Learn about issues related to slave gender roles at this PBS series site that features illustrations and documents dating back to the Colonial, Antebellum, and Reconstruction periods in American history.
CommonLit
Common Lit: Text Sets: Slavery in America
People enslaved Africans for their enforced labor from before America's founding until the end of the Civil War. Learn about the history of slavery, its effects on a budding nation, and the fight to abolish it. This collection includes...
Penguin Publishing
Penguin Random House: Anthony Burns: The Defeat & Triumph of a Fugitive Slave
Discussion ideas and interdisicplinary connections are the most useful parts of this teachers' guide for Virigina Hamilton's biography of escaped slave, Anthony Burns. It includes a brief summary of the book and information about the...
Curated OER
Loc: For Teachers: From Slavery to Civil Rights: Male Slave in Chains
"Large, bold woodcut image of a supplicant male slave in chains appears on the 1837 broadside publication of John Greenleaf Whittier's antislavery poem, 'Our Countrymen in Chains.'"