External Databases

Norton Strange Townshend (1815-1895) had a long and multi-faceted career in politics, medicine, social reform, and agricultural education. His accomplishments included antislavery activism, political involvement at the local level and in the U.S. House of Representatives, work on the Underground Railroad, a role as a Medical Inspector in the Civil War, and advocacy of scientific training for farmers. This online exhibit illuminates many aspects of Townshend’s career and life through biographical information and digitally scanned manuscripts, images, and printed materials.

The PAS Papers contain the records of the Society general meeting and various committees, financial papers, minutes, and legal papers related to cases taken on by the PAS, papers related to the documentation and education of the free black community, and the records of numerous anti-slavery societies.

The goal is to make an original contribution to U.S. history by documenting, for scholars and general audiences alike, the accomplishments of John Horse and the Black Seminoles. These maroon warriors, descendants of free blacks and fugitive slaves in the American South, led the largest slave revolt in American history, influenced Abraham Lincoln and the emancipation movement, and were the most successful black freedom fighters in the U.S. prior to the Civil War.

The collection consists of items related to the British administration of Sierra Leone, including public and private papers of British officials in the colony of Sierra Leone, 1792-1825. Drawn from the Sierra Leone Collection at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Slave Biographies: The Atlantic Database Network is an open access data repository of information on the identities of enslaved people in the Atlantic World. It includes the names, ethnicities, skills, occupations, and illnesses of individual slaves. Phase one of a multi-phase project is presented here. Users of the website can access data about slaves in colonial Louisiana and Maranhão, Brazil. They can download datasets, search for ancestors, and run statistical analysis.

This animated thematic map narrates the spatial history of the greatest slave insurrection in the eighteenth century British Empire.  To teachers and researchers, the presentation offers a carefully curated archive of key documentary evidence.  To all viewers, the map suggests an argument about the strategies of the rebels and the tactics of counterinsurgency, about the importance of the landscape to the course of the uprising, and about the difficulty of representing such events cartographically with available sources.

This site uses a blogging format to showcase excerpts from letters written by Simon Taylor (1738-1813), a slaveholder and plantation owner who lived in Jamaica during a period characterised by revolution, war, and imperial reform. ‘Slavery and Revolution’ is a free resource and open to anyone. The material on the site is intended for use by academics, students, and others to use in their research, teaching, and learning.

This portal is an open site providing an online digital textbook and a full collection of resources for the study of slavery in Canadian history. Although designed for primary and secondary students, the site is open to researchers of all ages.

The Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina encourages the study and appreciation of the history and culture of the American South by collecting, preserving and promoting the use of unique documentary materials of enduring historical value. Digitized material includes the Sarah Frances Hicks Williams Letters, Slavery Papers, and Slavery Justification Essays.

Centered on a database of slave and slaveholder populations in Texas during the Republic era (1837-45), the Texas Slavery Project offers a window into the role slavery played in the development of Texas in the years before the region became part of the United States. Dynamic interactive maps show the changing flows of enslaved and slaveholder populations in Texas over time. The population database search engine allows users to discover the growth of slave and slaveholder populations in the region. Digitized original documents from the era provide an opportunity to hear the voices of those who lived with slavery in early Texas.

This site looks at those who fought for the ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the emancipation of enslaved Africans in the British colonies. The site has been designed to provide background information, lesson ideas and tools for teachers and learners.

The approximately 1,235 images in this collection have been selected from a wide range of sources, most of them dating from the period of slavery. This collection is envisioned as a tool and a resource that can be used by teachers, researchers, students, and the general public - in brief, anyone interested in the experiences of Africans who were enslaved and transported to the Americas and the lives of their descendants in the slave societies of the New World.

The David Livingstone Spectral Imaging Project is a collaborative, international effort to use spectral imaging technology and digital publishing to make available a series of faded, illegible texts produced by the famous Victorian explorer when stranded without ink or writing paper in Central Africa. Livingstone’s 1871 Field Diary: A Multispectral Critical Edition offers new evidence of a massacre perpetrated by Zanzibari slave traders in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Friend of Man is one of the most significant and little studied newspapers documenting early anti-slavery and other reform movements. The periodical is of special significance because with the exception of religion, scholars know little about the resources of social movements in rural areas such as Central New York, whereFriend of Man was published.

The Harriet Tubman Resource Centre Digital Archive is an initiative of the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on the Global Migrations of African Peoples at York University. It includes manuscripts, photographs, maps, and other material pertaining to the African diaspora drawn from Africa, the Caribbean, Canada, and the United States.

This is a complete online archive of full issues of William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper The Liberator (1831-1865), the most prominent periodical of radical Abolitionism in the united states of America. You can find scanned PDF documents of full issues of The Liberator, as well as a number of individual articles, columns and departments from the magazine that have been transcribed in HTML for ease of reading, searching, and linking.

This collection is an expanded and updated version of the original Dred Scott Case Collection. The collection was expanded from eighty-five to one hundred and eleven documents, over 400 pages of text. In addition, the collection is now a full-text, searchable resource that represents the full case history of the Dred Scott Case.

Lincoln Mullen created an interactive map of the spread of slavery in the United States from 1790 to 1860. Using Census data available from the NHGIS, the visualization shows the population of slaves, of free African Americans, of all free people, and of the entire United States. It also shows those subjects as population densities and percentages of the population. For any given variable, the scales are held constant from year to year so that the user can see change over time.

The Valley of the Shadow is an electronic archive of two communities in the American Civil War - Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennyslvania. The Valley Web site includes searchable newspapers, population census data, agricultural census data, manufacturing census data, slaveowner census data, and tax records. The site also contains letters and diaries, images, maps, church records, and military rosters.

This website displays research into the lives of 431 enslaved people in seven multi-generational families at Mesopotamia plantation in Jamaica and Mount Airy plantation in Virginia.

A pioneering collection of digital material providing literary, cultural, and historical context on Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), possibly the most significant antislavery novel of all time. Although the site remains active, the interface is somewhat dated.

The website now includes a searchable database of nearly 3700 Virginia emigrants to Liberia and nearly 250 Virginia emancipators, a timeline of relevant events and documents between 1787 and 1866, a compilation of important related sources, links to related research websites and news of Liberia today.