Slavery & Freedom: Reconstruction into Jim Crow

Interactive online exhibition of primary source documents.

"African American Perspectives" gives a panoramic and eclectic review of African American history and culture and is primarily comprised of two collections in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division: the African American Pamphlet Collection and the Daniel A.P. Murray Collection with a date range of 1822 through 1909. The 800 + titles in the collection include sermons on racial pride and political activism; annual reports of charitable, educational, and political organizations; and college catalogs and graduation orations from the Hampton Institute, Morgan College, and Wilberforce University. Also included are biographies, slave narratives, speeches by members of Congress, legal documents, poetry, playbills, dramas, and librettos. Other materials focus on segregation, voting rights, violence against African Americans, the colonization of Africa by freed slaves, anti-slavery organizations and investigative reports. Several of the items are illustrated with portraits of the authors.

A selection of recorded oral history interviews chronicling African-American life during the age of legal segregation in the American South, from the 1890s to the 1950s.

From American Public Media: Includes excerpts from interviews and a sample of Jim Crow laws, among other materials.

Provides access to approximately 270 U.S. newspapers chronicling a century and a half of the African American experience. The collection features papers from more than 35 states and was in part created from the most extensive African American newspaper archives in the U.S.

Page-images from more than 1,100 historic American magazines, journals, and newspapers illuminating the development of American culture, politics, and society across 150 years. Articles can be searched by author, source, or words in the complete text.

This database provides full-text access to articles from a number of historic African American newspapers, beginning in 1827 with Freedom's Journal. The collection contains a wealth of information about cultural life and history during the 1800s and offers first-hand reports of the major events and issues of the day.

The Baltimore Afro-American (Historical), a prominent, historic African American newspaper, offers full page and article images with searchable full text back to the first issue.

Provides access to approximately 1.7 million pages of primary source newspaper content from the 19th century, featuring full-text content and images from numerous newspapers from a range of urban and rural regions throughout the U.S. The collection encompasses the entire 19th century, with an emphasis on such topics as the American Civil War, African-American culture and history, Western migration and Antebellum-era life among other subjects.