External Institutions

As the nation’s largest independent archives specializing in the history of African Americans and other ethnic groups, the Amistad Research Center is dedicated to preserving America’s ethnic heritage by providing a home to the manuscripts, photographs, oral histories, books, periodicals and works of art that contain the history of peoples, of nations, of beliefs and dreams, of a past worth sharing with the future.

The Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice (CSSJ) is a scholarly research center with a public educational mission. Recognizing that racial and chattel slavery were central to the historical formation of the Americas, the CSSJ will create a space for the interdisciplinary study of: historical forms of slavery, how the legacies of slavery shape our contemporary world, and contemporary forms of human bondage.

The Frederick Douglass Family Foundation’s vision is to end human trafficking in communities all over the world and our mission is to educate and inspire young people to take collective action against human trafficking and modern-day slavery using modern communications and social networking technologies. Since slavery is so deeply woven into the human fabric, something as transformative as a sustained social movement is needed to achieve our mission – a youth-led, anti-trafficking revolution.

Founded in 1994, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History promotes the study and love of American history. The Institute serves teachers, students, scholars, and the general public. It helps create history-centered schools, organizes seminars and programs for educators, produces print and electronic publications and traveling exhibitions, sponsors lectures by eminent historians, and administers a History Teacher of the Year Award in every state through its partnership with Preserve America.

Established in 1998 by the late Thomas Wiedemann as the ’International Centre for the History of Slavery’, ISOS now pursues research on both historical and contemporary slavery and forced labour in all parts of the globe and through all periods.

The Center’s mission is to generate and disseminate scholarly knowledge on the slave trade, slavery, and anti-slavery pertaining to the Atlantic World. The Center supports the work of researchers with long-term and short-term fellowships. Given the centrality of Atlantic slavery to the making of the modern world, the Lapidus fellowships ensure that slavery studies are a cornerstone of the Schomburg Center’s broader research community and provide a counterbalance to the contemporary direction of scholarship in African American and African Diaspora studies.

The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center opened in August 2004 on the banks of the Ohio River in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio. Our purpose is to tell the story of the struggle for freedom in the United States through exhibits and programs that focus on America’s battle to rid itself of the ugly scourge of slavery and treat all its citizens with respect and dignity.

The Slave Societies Digital Archive (formerly Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies), directed by Jane Landers and hosted at Vanderbilt University, preserves endangered ecclesiastical and secular documents related to Africans and African-descended peoples in slave societies. SSDA holdings include more than 700,000 digital images drawn close to 2,000 unique volumes dating from the sixteenth through twentieth centuries that document the lives of an estimated four to six million individuals. This collection contains the most extensive serial records for the history of Africans in the Atlantic World, and also includes valuable information about the indigenous, European, and Asian populations who lived alongside them.

On this website you will find areas dedicated to each geographic entity where SSDA has worked and additional resources to assist in your research. We welcome feedback and encourage researchers to share any work that they develop using the Slave Societies Digital Archive.

The Law in Slavery and Freedom Project is a curricular and research initiative that has been developed in collaboration with The Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, France; the University of Cologne, Germany; the University of Campinas, Brazil; the University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada; and the Centro Juan Marinello in Havana, Cuba. Students from these institutions have participated in seminars taught by faculty from all sites and continue to exchange ideas through online discussions of readings on the topic of law and slavery in the Atlantic world.