United States

The papers consist of personal correspondence of Joshua Reed Giddings, Ohio abolitionist and politician, while he was serving as Abraham Lincoln’s consul-general in Canada. There is one microfilm reel, covering the years 1861-1864.

The papers consist of correspondence, minutes, financial records, records of manumission and emigration, reports of colonial agents, pamphlets and books on the colonization movement, copies of the Maryland Colonization Journal and the Liberia Herald, and census records of Maryland in Liberia. The materials shed light on race relations and socioeconomic conditions in antebellum America and are a source of information on the founding of Liberia. The complete collection is available online.

Papers of the American Slave Trade, provides scholars with access to primary source material on the business aspect of the trade in human beings. The collection documents the international slave trade in Britain’s New World colonies and the United States from 1718 to the trade’s demise after 1808. There are multiple series accompanied by printed guides. The printed guides are also available online.

Reproduces a collection of nearly 3,000 petitions assembled over a period of ten years by the Race and Slavery Petitions Project, University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Documents were drawn from state archives in Alabama, Delaware, Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. The digital compliment to this project is now availableonline.

The collection includes about 73 microfilm reels and several printed guides. Documents cover plantations in Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Also included are the Albert A . Batchelor papers, Weeks Family Papers, Hammond Family Papers, 1866 - 1907, and Hammond Bryan Cummings Papers, 1866-1920.

Emancipation papers resulting from the Act of April 16, 1862 and July 12, 1862; and manumission papers, 1857-1863, and fugitive slave case papers, 1851-1863. There are 3 reels, accompanied by a printed guide.

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.

The papers document the life of Southern women through diaries, correspondence with family and friends, and business correspondence and records. The primary focus of the papers and diaries is on home life. Among the frequently discussed topics are courtship, education, child rearing, marriage, and religion. Discussions of family business dealings and women’s thoughts on temperance, slavery, and women’s rights also appear in the collection. Printed guides are available online.

The papers include correspondence, journal extracts, newspaper clippings, and printed material relating to Susan Walker’s activities as a teacher for the New England Freedmen’s Aid Society in Port Royal, South Carolina. Originals are in the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio, Cincinnati, Ohio.

Correspondence, sermons, speeches, missionary reports, writings, and printed matter of approximately three hundred nineteenth-century black abolitionists, documenting their activities in the United States, Canada, England, Ireland, and Scotland. The collection consists of 17 microfilm reels, drawn from numerous international archives. This collection is also available online.

The records include seven volumes compiled for publication by the Colored Troops Division of the Adjutant General’s Office. Material includes published and unpublished primary source documents. Originals at the National Archives and Records Service, Washington, D.C.

The papers consist of the personal correspondence, financial and legal papers, plantation and slave records, and writings of the Allston, Blythe, and Pringle families of Georgetown County, South Carolina. The bulk of the material relates to the Allston family and, in particular, to Robert F. W. Allston, planter and governor of South Carolina from 1856-1858. Among the subjects discussed are plantations, slaves, rice planting, politics, and the Civil War.

Fourteen autograph letters, signed, by members of the extended Junken family, primarily to Noble and Maria Junken. Margaret Junken and Richard Conkling both write on the subject of African Americans: Margaret describes what she sees as the happy lives of Louisiana slaves and Richard describes a hired African American girl’s attempted murder of her child in 1837.

Amassed by Frederick Hill Meserve with the help of his daughter Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt, the collection contains more than 73,000 items, including 57,000 photographic prints, as well as thousands of books, pamphlets, maps, and theater broadsides. These materials document American history from the Civil War through the end of the 19th century and record the emergence of photography as a distinctive cultural practice. The collection’s significance also lies in the tens of thousands of portraits of American politicians, army officers (of both the Union and Confederate forces), writers, actors, singers, scientists, African Americans, and Native Americans.

The collection documents black life and American racial attitudes from the 1850’s to the 1940’s, and includes about 2500 items, chiefly historical photographs, accompanied by slave manifests, military medals, and civic trophies. The collection includes albumen photographs of Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. DuBois, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Photographic formats include daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, and cabinet card photographs.

New Haven resident William H. Townsend made pen-and-ink sketches of the Amistad captives while they were awaiting trial. Twenty-two of these drawings were given to Yale in 1934 by Asa G. Dickerman, whose grandmother was the artist’s cousin. Townsend, who was about 18 years old when he made the drawings, is buried in the Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven, Connecticut, beside the Yale University campus.

Bound holograph draft, revised, of a fictional or semi-fictional autobiography of a former slave. It details her experiences as a maid in several households in Virginia, Washington, D.C., and North Carolina, and her subsequent escape to the North, where she settled in New Jersey. The narrator also tells the stories of other slaves she knows or comes into contact with, and to some extent the histories of the families she works for, identified as the De Vincents, the Henrys, and the Wheelers. An edited editionof this manuscript was published by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

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.

The collection consists of photoduplicates of original Mary Chesnut manuscripts, from the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina and from private owners, collected by C. Vann Woodward for the preparation of his book, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War.

Includes seven scrapbooks titled “Tracts on Slavery in the United States, and on the U.S. Constitution and Organic Laws.” Also includes a manuscript book containing records of punishments administered to slaves in a South American mining camp between 1836 and 1847, numerous deeds for slaves dating from 1783 to 1848, newspaper clippings from the 1840s through the 1860s relating to the anti-slavery movement in Kansas, New Hampshire, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia, and a manuscript census of slaves in Chester County, Pennsylvania, from 1780 to 1815.