A collection of primary source materials on African American history. Much of it is about slavery and racism. There are many slave narratives here, letters, essays, and biographical materials, and some of the names are well known ones,...

[Free Registration/Login Required] Students will examine African American slave spirituals, a painting, and a personal narrative to analyze the underlying messages of these materials.

A detailed presentation illustrating the history of Africans migrating to the Americas from as early as 1500 through the late 1860's. Review the distribution of Africans in North and South America, the initial settlements, escaped and...

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...

A collection of narratives taken from autobiographies, letters and diaries of slaves. Read the text or listen to the haunting stories.

Find the goals of the American Anti-Slavery Society, founded in 1833 by abolitionists in Philadelphia. The object of the group was the immediate abolition of slavery.

Some of the African-American writers and poets who spoke out eloquently about their experiences of slavery in the 1700s and 1800s are featured in this section of Literature & Life. Read powerful first-person accounts of Harriet...

Interactive and animated maps and timelines of historical events and time periods in American history from pre-European times until post-World War II.

Confederate defeat and the end of slavery brought far-reaching changes in the lives of all Southerners. The destruction of slavery led inevitably to conflict between blacks seeking to breathe substantive meaning into their freedom by...

From the Library of Congress American Memory project, this extensive online archive contains first-person narratives of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves that were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal...

The Antislavery Literature Project is a collaborative electronic publishing venture that provides educational access to the literature and history of the antislavery movement in the United States that is crucial to understanding African...

An in-depth scholarly investigation on the differences slavery made in the shaping of societies in the North and South by using two similar communities, one north and one south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

An exhibition on African-American history that is inspired by the work of John Hope Franklin (1915-2009), an African-American scholar who studied the historical roots of racial prejudice. The exhibit presents primary documents, texts,...

American Memory, online exhibits and other areas of the Library's Web site provide a broad range of digitized materials pertaining to the African American experience.

Read this detailed narrative to learn about the mistreatment of African Americans long after people thought slavery had ended after the Civil War, but actually persisted into the twentieth century. Based on original documents, photos,...

UNC's resource provides links to download the entire text of "Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave," which was published in 1838. Included are 1838 articles from "The Liberator," in which the authenticity of this narrative is...

This virtual tour of the slave quarters of the Hermitage Plantation tells of the family life of slaves, their skills, and their resistance to the institution of slavery.

MAAP lessons, developed at Teachers College, Columbia University, help teachers at all levels engage in content through stories about building community, resisting slavery, and contributing to New York City's development. Lessons are...

This is the text of Abraham Lincoln's famous speech, "A House Divided" concerning the issue of slavery it was delivered on June 16, 1858, in Springfield, Illinois. It includes his famous quote: "A house divided against itself cannot...

The history of the American Revolution is the focus of this article. Divided into topics and time periods, it makes understanding this historical time easier for students for follow.

A digital collection of some 52 published works by 19th-century black women writers. This collection provides access to the thought, perspectives and creative abilities of black women as captured in books and pamphlets published prior to...

An online version of the exhibit, "The African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship", on the struggle of African Americans from Slavery to Civil Rights. Information about voting issues can be found under Reconstruction and the...

Five primary source materials on African American history: I Have a Dream by Martin Luther King, Jr., My Bondage and Freedom by Frederick Douglass, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois, Up From...

Sixteen texts-historical documents, literary texts, visual images, audio, and video material-that explore the political, social, and cultural state of African Americans at the beginning of the twentieth century.