1619: 400 Years of History

A website that contains resources related to the history of slavery at Princeton University. The project contains interactive timelines and maps, but also links to more than 400 primary source materials including letters, drawings, business documents, photographs, and newspaper clippings.

Freedom's Journal was the first African-American owned and operated newspaper published in the United States. Founded by Rev. Peter Williams, Jr. and other free black men in New York City, it was published weekly as a four-page, four-column newspaper, starting with the March 16, 1827 issue. Freedom's Journal circulated in 11 states, the District of Columbia, Haiti, Europe, and Canada.

All issues are available online through the Wisconsin Historical Society.

The often quoted text from John Rolfe regarding the 1619 arrival of the enslaved Africans in Point Comfort, Virginia, appears in this record. The text reads, “He brought not anything but 20. and odd Negroes, w[hich] the governo[r] and Cape Marchant bought for victualle (whereof he was in greate need as he pretended) at the best and easyest rate they could.”

As a source for finding names and locations of individuals, this resource includes the Race and Slavery Petitions Project. This project holds information from legislative documents extracted from 2,975 legislative petitions and 14,512 county court petitions, as well as from a wide range of related documents, including wills, inventories, deeds, bills of sale, depositions, court proceedings, and amended petitions, among others.

The North Carolina Runaway Slave Advertisements project provides online access to all known runaway slave advertisements (more than 2300 items) published in North Carolina newspapers between 1751 and 1840. These brief ads provide a glimpse into the social, economic, and cultural world of the American slave system and the specific experience within North Carolina. Working from microfilmed copies of these rare publications, the project team scanned the ads to provide digital images, create full-text transcripts and descriptive metadata, and develop a searchable database. The NCRSA website includes digital scans of the ads, contextual essays to address their historical research value, full-text transcripts, an annotated bibliography to aid researchers, and a searchable database.

The New York Slavery Records Index is a searchable compilation of records that identify individual enslaved persons and their owners, beginning as early as 1525 and ending during the Civil War.

Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries millions of Africans were forced to become enslaved people in the American colonies. This guide provides access to Library of Congress digitized primary sources, links to related websites, and a print bibliography.

This 1624/25 muster database includes information about household members, including in many cases their age, when they arrived in Virginia, and which ship they arrived on. This muster records the names of the first Africans present in Jamestown.

The Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division at the New York Public Library collects, preserves, and makes available for research purposes rare, unique, and primary materials that document the history and culture of people of African descent throughout the world, with a concentration on the Americas and the Caribbean.

Explore information on more than 35,000 slave voyages that forcibly transported over 12 million Africans to the Americas, including North America, the Caribbean, and Brazil, between the 16th and 19th centuries.

The databases include documentation of various voyages and searchable lists by African names. There are also associated essays, interactive features, and digitized manuscripts, maps, and newspaper illustrations pulled from various digital collections. The datasets forming the databases are also downloadable.

This database contains searchable lists of names, origins, records, and images of original documents found in New Orleans.

The Virginia Museum of History & Culture launched Unknown No Longer in 2011 to make accessible biographical details of enslaved Virginians from unpublished historical records in its collections.

The Texas Runaway Slave Project is a database of runaway slave advertisements, articles and notices from newspapers published in Texas.

This resource is an exhibition, but it contains browsable digital images and transcripts of a variety of original documents in the Freedom Papers section of the site.

The Buncombe County Register of Deeds office has kept property records since the late 1700’s. In the records one can find a wealth of information about the history of the community. On this page, they have compiled a list of the documents that record the trade of people as slaves in Buncombe County.

A database containing slave deeds filed in Iredell, North Carolina.

Resources such as runaway slave ads and other newspaper content containing legal notices of court ordered sales of enslaved people.

Legal and insurance databases can provide names and other information about enslaved people and slaveholders. This link is from the state of Illinois, but many other states have similar databases.

Don’t overlook the Library of Congress Map Collections. A quick search will yield results showing geographical notations of slave trade ports, underground railroad routes, and distributions of enslaved populations based on census data.

This listing shows a variety of collections holding primary sources.

Collection of images from the Prints and Photographs Division.

Images from the Prints and Photographs Division.

Slaves and the Courts, 1740 – 1860, presents pamphlets and books documenting legal cases argued in courts in the United States and Great Britain on the issue of slavery. Included are accounts and analyses of cases and the court decisions for these cases, arguments from cases, and proceedings. Of special interest are copies of the slave code of the District of Columbia, material on the Dred Scott case, and material documenting the activities of John Brown, John Quincy Adams, and William Lloyd Garrison.