Encyclopedia of African American Society
[SAGE eReference], SAGE, 2005.
A reliable initial reference for learning basic facts and ideas about African American society and for guidance on where to obtain more information.

Encyclopedia of Black America, McGraw-Hill, 1981.
Main Level, Reference: R 973.0496073 En19E. 
See specifically section titled  “Slavery in Selected States.”

ThomCat

Use the online catalog to locate books in Thomason Library. You can search by author, title, word, or subject.

• Search for a person, as AUTHOR or SUBJECT, with last name, first name:              

• SUBJECT searching requires use of Library of Congress subject headings. The terms below are examples of subject headings related to slavery and freedom:
             

• Materials relevant to the study of slavery may also be found by specifying the era or dates, geographic area, or the material type in which you are interested:

Subject searching is an effective and precise method of searching the catalog, however, KEYWORD searching has benefits, also.

• If you are unsure of the exact title or the correct subject heading to use, try a KEYWORD search using two or three of the most significant words from the title or subject you are trying to find. Place phrases in "quotation marks."
  
  
• Connect words with AND, OR, NOT to focus your search.

• Try truncation at the end of a word stem to retrieve singular, plural, and other variations of the word.  Use an asterisk (*) to truncate from 1 to 5 characters. Use a double asterisk (**) to include word endings with an unlimited number of characters.

PASCALCAT - Now available! If you need books in addition to those found at Thomason Library, try your search here for books in other academic libraries in SC. Through PASCAL Delivers, you can order books online for delivery within 3-4 working days. This service for current PC students, faculty, and staff is a project of PASCAL- Partnership Among SC Academic Libraries. Borrowers will be notified by e-mail when requested items arrive at Thomason Library. Click here for searching and ordering tips.

WorldCat – A catalog of books and materials at libraries worldwide. Try searching here to find ALL books available on a topic. Materials available at Thomason Library are highlighted and others can be borrowed through ILL or searched in PASCALCAT.

The following journal databases are available to PC students, faculty, and staff from on- and off-campus locations.  Search using terms dealing with your topic.

 America’s Historical Newspapers, 1690-1876 [NewsBank Archive of Americana]
A searchable database with issues from over 700 historical American newspapers from 23 states and the District of Columbia focusing largely on the 18th and early 19th centuries. Select specific titles or search publications by state.

JSTOR A searchable archive of full-text journals covering all disciplines while providing more full-text access in the library's electronic databases

Project MUSE Basic Undergraduate Collection Current and recent volumes of 111 core journals in the humanities and social sciences

Oxford African American Studies Center A comprehensive online collection focusing on the lives and events which have shaped African American and African history and culture from Oxford Press.
Reference titles in this collection include:

Academic Search Premier [EBSCOhost] 
Approximately 550 of the more than 8000 periodicals indexed are history-related journals and magazines, with full-text articles for many of them.

The Atlanta Constitution Archive [ProQuest Historical Newspapers]
Full-text & full-image articles from 1868-1929.

The New York Times Archive [ProQuest Historical Newspapers]
Full-text & full-image of NYT articles with coverage from 1851 up to three years ago.

History Resource Center: US [Thomson Gale]
Events, issues and current information in U.S. history from journal articles, reference, and primary source materials.  Relevant reference sources in this collection include:

Click on links to view availability online and in print:

American Historical Review
View online availability, 1895–current issue
Lower level, periodical collection: 1933–current issue

American Quarterly
View online availability, 1949–current issue
Lower level, periodical collection: 1995-2004

The Journal of African American History (continues The Journal of Negro History)
View online availability, 2004–current issue
Lower level, periodical collection: current issue plus previous 4 years

The Journal of American History
View online availability, 1964–current issue
Lower level, periodical collection: 1964–current issue

The Journal of Negro History (continued by The Journal of African American History)
View online availability, 1916–2001

The Journal of Southern History
View online availability, 1935–current issue
Lower level, periodical collection: 1935–current issue

New England Quarterly
View online availability, 1928–4 years ago
Lower level, periodical collection: current issue plus previous 4 years

North Carolina Historical Review
View online availability, 2001–current issue
Lower level, periodical collection: 1924–current issue

South Carolina Historical Magazine
Lower level, periodical collection: 1952–current issue

William and Mary Quarterly
View online availability, 1944–current issue
Lower level, periodical collection: current issue plus previous 5 years

The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record [Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and by the Digital Media Lab at the University of Virginia]
This site provides a collection of images related to American slave trade and slave societies. The images were compiled from a variety of sources and are comprised primarily of visual documents dating to the period of slavery.

The African American: A Journey from Slavery to Freedom [B. Davis Schwartz Memorial Library, Long Island University]
Provides excellent overview of slavery in the U.S.  Includes a timeline, with hyperlinked entries.

Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture [College of Charleston]
This site presents the Avery Center's archival and museum collections of primary documents relating to the history and culture of African Americans in Charleston and South Carolina. The site also offers a schedule of center programs, including conferences, lectures, and exhibits.

Exploring Amistad  [The Museum of America and the Sea]
Mystic Seaport’s site features information about the Amistad Revolt of 1839-1842. Includes a history of the Revolt, a timeline, and access to excerpts from court hearings, testimony, the popular media, government papers, and diaries (including those of John Quincy Adams). Provides information about American politics and political culture in the 19th century and the people who were part of the Amistad Revolt and the trial.

Sonja Haynes Stone Center Library for Black Culture and History  [UNC Libraries]
Over 900 sites are available in the searchable guide which is also browseable by subjects. The topics covered range from the underground railroad to hip hop music.

Slave Movement During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries [Data & Information Services Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison]
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. For information about the data sets, read the study descriptions for each set.

Slavery in America  [PBS]
Site originally created in support of the PBS series Slavery and the Making of America. Includes history essays (“Scholars and historians contribute original essays on the latest scholarship regarding the issues and events in the history of slavery in America.”), lesson plans (“Teachers contribute their best lessons on the events and issues that they think are the most important in the history of slavery in America.”), and an Image Gallery.  Also includes an “encyclopedia” (glossary) with brief entries. Also note section on Geography/Slave laws, especially South Carolina Slave Laws Summary and Record

Slavery in America  [Dr. Chris Lewis, University of Colorado]
Categories include African-American Views on Slavery, The Geography of Slavery, 1600-1860, The Debate Over Slavery in America, and The American Civil War.

USA History: Slavery in the United States  [John Simkin, Spartacus Educational]
Categories include: Slave Accounts; The Slave System; Slave Life; Events & Issues; Campaigners Against Slavery; Political Organizations; British Campaigners.

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African-American Mosaic:  A Library of Congress Resource Guide for the Study of Black History & Culture   [Library of Congress]
Online resource guide/exhibit covering only four areas --Colonization, Abolition, Migrations, and the WPA, illustrating the depth, breadth, and richness of the Library's black history collections.

African-American Newspapers and Periodicals: Freedom's Journal [Wisconsin Historical Society]
Freedom's Journal, the first African-American owned and operated newspaper published in the United States, was published weekly in New York City from 1827 to 1829. John B. Russworm edited the journal alone between March 16, 1827 and March 28, 1829. Later,Samuel Cornish served as co-editor  provided international, national, and regional information on current events and contained editorials declaiming slavery, lynching, and other injustices. The Journal also published biographies of prominent African-Americans and listings of births, deaths, and marriages in the African-American New York community. Freedom's Journal circulated in 11 states, the District of Columbia, Haiti, Europe, and Canada.

American Abolitionism  [Prof. John R. McKivigan, Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis]
Categories include: Abolition, Slavery, Geography, Biography, Documents, Bibliography, Societies.  “Documents” section includes slave narratives, government documents, newspapers & magazines, pamphlets, speeches, correspondence, and organizational documents.

From Slavery to Freedom: The African-American Pamphlet Collection, 1822-1909 [American Memory Project, Library of Congress]
Presents 396 pamphlets from the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, published from 1822 through 1909, by African-American authors and others who wrote about slavery, African colonization, Emancipation, Reconstruction, and related topics. The materials range from personal accounts and public orations to organizational reports and legislative speeches

The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition: Online Documents  [The MacMillan Center, Yale University]
Contains over 200 individual items, including speeches, letters, cartoons and graphics, interviews, and articles. The documents are organized by author, date, subject, and document type. Includes category “History by State,” for resources by geographic areas.

Freedmen’s Bureau Online  [Christine's Genealogy]
Established in March, 1865,The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands  supervised all relief & educational activities relating to refugees and freedmen, including issuing rations, clothing, & medicine. The Bureau also assumed custody of confiscated lands or property in the former Confederate States, border states, District of Columbia, and Indian Territory.  Records include “Records Relating to Murders and Outrages,” “Records Relating to Freedmen’s Labor,”  and “Marriage Records “

Samuel J. May Antislavery Collection [Cornell University Library]
In 1870, the University’s first President, Andrew Dickson White, acquired the complete library of his friend Samuel J. May, an abolitionist minister from Syracuse, New York. Numbering over 10,000 titles, May's pamphlets and leaflets document the anti-slavery struggle at the local, regional, and national levels  Much of the May Anti-Slavery Collection was considered ephemeral or fugitive, and today many of these pamphlets are scarce. Sermons, position papers, offprints, local Anti-Slavery Society newsletters, poetry anthologies, freedmen's testimonies, broadsides, and Anti-Slavery Fair keepsakes all document the social and political implications of the abolitionist movement. 

Word of Cornell’s acquisition spread among prominent abolitionists, many of whom responded to the call to contribute their personal papers and documents to the Cornell Library. In 1874 the abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Gerrit Smith, wrote, signed, and circulated an appeal to their friends and supporters in America and Great Britain, urging that it was of "great importance that the literature of the Anti-Slavery movement...be preserved and handed down, that the purposes and the spirit, the methods and the aims of the Abolitionists should be clearly known and understood by future generations." The effort was successful, bringing in further scarce and original manuscripts and publications, allowing the Cornell Library to develop an Anti-Slavery collection that is unique for its depth and coverage.

White supplemented May’s collection with an extensive Civil War collection of his own. Housed in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections in the Carl A. Kroch Library, both collections form part of Cornell's vast holdings documenting ante-bellum and Civil War America.

ALSO OF NOTE: This web site includes an online exhibit, “I Will Be Heard: Abolitionism in America,” which provides an excellent overview of the abolitionist movement.

Slaves and the Courts, 1740-1860 [American Memory Project, Library of Congress]
Contains just over a hundred pamphlets and books (published between 1772 and 1889) concerning the difficult and troubling experiences of African and African-American slaves in the American colonies and the United States. The documents, most from the Law Library and the Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress, comprise an assortment of trials and cases, reports, arguments, accounts, examinations of cases and decisions, proceedings, journals, a letter, and other works of historical importance. Of the cases presented here, most took place in America and a few in Great Britain. Among the voices heard are those of some of the defendants and plaintiffs themselves as well as those of abolitionists, presidents, politicians, slave owners, fugitive and free territory slaves, lawyers and judges, and justices of the U.S. Supreme Court. Significant names include John Quincy Adams, Roger B. Taney, John C. Calhoun, Salmon P. Chase, Dred Scott, William H. Seward, Prudence Crandall, Theodore Parker, Jonathan Walker, Daniel Drayton, Castner Hanway, Francis Scott Key, William L. Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Denmark Vesey, and John Brown.

Lysander Spooner's Works [Randy E Barnett, Georgetown University Law Center]
The Unconstitutionality of Slavery  Text of document by Lysander Spooner, a 19th century lawyer, abolitionist, and legal theorist, published in 1845, (rev.1860?).

Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938 [American Memory Project, Library of Congress]
This online collection contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and assembled and microfilmed in 1941 as the seventeen-volume Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves.

North American Slave Narratives [Documenting the American South, UNC-Chapel Hill] 
Includes full-text of books and articles that document the individual and collective story of African Americans struggling for freedom and human rights in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. This collection includes all the existing autobiographical narratives of fugitive and former slaves published as broadsides, pamphlets, or books in English up to 1920. Also included are many of the biographies of fugitive and former slaves and some significant fictionalized slave narratives published in English before 1920.

Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War [Virginia Center for Digital History, UVA]
The Valley Project details life in two American communities, one Northern and one Southern, from the time of John Brown’s raid through the era of Reconstruction. In this digital archive you may explore thousands of original letters and diaries, newspapers and speeches, census and church records, left by men and women in Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania. Giving voice to hundreds of individual people, the Valley Project tells forgotten stories of life during the era of the Civil War.

America’s Reconstruction: People and Politics After the Civil War [University of Houston]
Noteworthy sections include  A New Birth of Freedom: Reconstruction During the Civil War. and The Meaning of Freedom.  Contents of the latter section include: ”Black and White Responses to the End of Slavery,” “From Slave Labor to Free Labor,”  “Rights and Power: The Politics of Reconstruction,” “The Ending of Reconstruction,” and  “Epilogue: The Unfinished Revolution.”

Reconstruction: The Second Civil War [PBS]
This site serves as a companion to the PBS series THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE on the reconstruction period in America. The site's features include a map detailing post-war developments in diverse regions of the country, an examination of African American participation in government. Contents include: Forty Acres and a Mule, Plantations in Ruins, Black Legislators, Northerners in the South, Access to Learning, Slave to Sharecropper, the Negro Question, In God We Trust, White Men Unite, and State by State.

Statutes of the United States Concerning Slavery : Chronological [The Avalon Project, Yale Law School]

A Visual Timeline of Reconstruction: 1863-1877  [University of Houston]
Page from “America’s Reconstruction: People and Politics After the Civil War” website.

Slavery and the Making of America: Time and Place  [PBS]
Move cursor over dates to see key events; click on date to see more events for that date.

Reconstruction Timeline [HarpWeek]
Toward Racial Equality:Harper’s Weekly Reports on Black America, 1857-1874.

U.S. National Timeline Kentucky’s Underground Railroad [Kentucky Educational Television]

African-American World. Timeline: Early Days and Slavery (1400s-1865) [PBS]