Twentieth Century

120 High Street | Reading Room Home | Hours

Anti-Slavery International

The collection includes annual reports, 1883-2000, submissions to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) and other related bodies, 1965-2000, ephemera & publications of Anti-Slavery International, 1980-2000, and publications and reports of Anti-Slavery International and its predecessors, 1880-1979.

Tags: Antislavery Movements, Microfilm, Nineteenth Century, Twentieth Century

Slave narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, 1936-1938

Typewritten records prepared by the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938, of slave narratives from seventeen southern, border, and midwestern states. Arranged alphabetically by state. The bulk of these records are now available online.

Tags: Emancipation, Microfilm, Slavery, Twentieth Century, United States

120 High Street | Library Home | Hours

Historical Sound Recordings

Highlights include recordings by the Fisk University Jubilee Singers and the Tuskegee Institute Singers as well as excerpts from Booker T. Washington’s famous “Atlanta Compromise” speech. The Beinecke Library holds complementary material related to blackface minstrelsy and spirtuals, including sheet music for the original “Jim Crow.”

Tags: Emancipation, Nineteenth Century, Twentieth Century, United States

121 Wall Street | Library Home | Hours

James Weldon Johnson Collection

Although not focused primarily on slavery and abolition, this collection is a key resource for understanding the history of race in America. In addition to Johnson’s papers, there are significant manuscript materials from W. E. B. DuBois, Walter White, Poppy Cannon White, Dorothy Peterson, Chester Himes, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Jean Toomer, Arna Bontemps, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Wallace Thurman.

Tags: Manuscripts, Racism, Twentieth Century, United States

Land of Zenj Photograph Collection

The collection, assembled by the rare book dealers Jenny Allsworth and Humphrey Winterton, brings together photographs, photograph albums, glass lantern slides, and a lantern projector, which document the Sultanate of Zanzibar and European colonial expansion in East and Central Africa from 1870 to 1914. Also documented are early Arab and Portuguese coastal settlements at Kilwa, Mafia, Pemba, Sofala, and Zanzibar and the work of photographers who operated in different parts of the region.

Tags: Africa, Indian Ocean, Nineteenth Century, Photographs, Slave Trade, Twentieth Century

128 Wall Street | Archives Home | Hours

John Wesley Blassingame Papers

John W. Blassingame served as the acting chairman of Afro-American studies at Yale (1971-1972, 1976-1977) and as chairman (1981-1989). In the mid-1970s, he also became the editor and publisher of the papers of Frederick Douglass. He wrote and edited numerous works on the history of slavery in America. The papers consist of electrostatic copies of reseach materials and note cards used in the preparation of Blassingame’s 1971 Yale University Ph.D., A Social and Economic History of the Negro in New Orleans, 1860-1880.

Tags: Historiography, Nineteenth Century, Twentieth Century, United States

Katherine Mayo Papers

Correspondence, diaries, writings, photographs, scrapbooks, research materials, and miscellanea documenting the personal life and literary career of Katherine Mayo, an author of several historical and investigative articles, essays, and books from 1896 to 1940. Prior to Mayo’s success as a literary figure she was employed by Oswald Garrison Villard to conduct extensive field research for his biography of John Brown. The collection includes a piece of the rope allegedly used to hang Brown.

Tags: Historiography, Material Culture, Twentieth Century, United States

409 Prospect Street | Library Home | Hours

Records of Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, 1760-1972

Established in Philadelphia in the 1700s by Richard Allen, the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church was the first black church to expand on a national level in the United States. These extensive records of the first AME church detail the establishment and daily operation of the church. The collection also contains committee meeting minutes, records of marriages and baptisms, financial records, receipts, lists of church officers, class roll books, records of committee activities, and other items. More information is available online.

Tags: Antislavery Movements, Eighteenth Century, Microfilm, Nineteenth Century, Religion, Twentieth Century, United States

1111 Chapel Street | Gallery Home | Hours

Ross Archive of African Images

RAAI aspires to reproduce all the illustrations of figurative African objects published between 1800 and 1920 in books, periodicals, catalogues, newspapers, and other publications. It does not include postcards or pamphlets of very limited distribution. More than 95% of the material is contained in the James J. Ross library, the remainder has been recorded from copies in other libraries. Many of the items pertain in some way to slavery or its legacies.

Tags: Africa, Drawings and Images, Material Culture, Nineteenth Century, Religion, Twentieth Century