Black History and Literature

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Digital Collections

Many published texts, datasets, manuscripts, and other videos and images on the Atlantic slave trade, slave narratives, Black writers, and other related themes are available in various digital collections. Most of the ones listed below are freely accessible on the internet. For more extensive lists of digital primary source collections, see the Library of Congress's African American History Online: A Resource Guide, the University of Washington's African American: Primary Sources, and the Black Past's Digital Archives.

Atlantic World

Adam Matthew Digital
Digital publisher of primary source collections like Slavery, Abolition, and Social Justice, Empire Online, and Colonial America.
Black Drama
Contains roughly 1200 plays from the mid-1800s to the present by more than 200 playwrights from North America, English-speaking Africa, the Caribbean, and other African diaspora countries.

Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora
Over 1,200 images related to the African slave trade in the Atlantic.

Southern African Films & Documentaries
Provides streaming access to African history, politics, and culture from the 1900s to the early 2000s. Five film types are represented— propaganda, newsreels, documentaries, feature films, and interviews.

Canada

African Nova Scotians (Nova Scotia Archives)
Digitized archival records related to people of African descent in Nova Scotia, whose history spans more than 400 years.
Black Loyalists: Our History, Our People (Canada’s Digital Collections)
Provides transcribed documents of first-hand accounts of life in Nova Scotia for Black loyalists. Documents range from 1775-1794 and consist of nine personal accounts, 16 letters, and 25 official documents and proclamations.

Canadiana Online
Contains over 19 million pages (96,000 titles) of digitized historical publications, including monographs, serials, and government publications.

Latin America/Caribbean

Caribbean Literature
Collection of poetry and fiction produced in the Caribbean during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Early Caribbean Digital Archive (Northeastern University)
Contains 57 different downloadable and searchable Caribbean texts such as Olaudah Equiano’s narrative, travel narratives by colonists, and other legal documents.
France in the Americas (BnF)
A collaborative bilingual digital library dedicated to the French presence in North America between the 1600s and 1900.
Sources about Slavery (National Archives of the Netherlands)
Access to 1.9 million scans from institutions in the Netherlands, England, Guyana, and Suriname. Most documents are in Dutch.

United States

Africana and Black History (New York Public Library)
Collection of more than 11,000 images related to African American history.
African American History: Primary Documents (Black Past)
Contains documents that have shaped African American history in the United States from 1724 to 2010.
Black Self-Publishing (American Antiquarian Society)
List of over 575 publications from the nineteenth century by more than 250 Black authors in North America that were most likely self-published.

Black Thought and Culture
Offers full text of approximately 100,000 pages of non-fiction writing by leading figures in African American life and culture.

Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936 to 1938 (Library of Congress)
Provides access to “more than 2,300 first-person account of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves.”
Digital Library on American Slavery
Database that brings together freely accessible public records related to enslavement in the United States. Includes documents and datasets from People Not Property: Slave Deeds, North Carolina Slave Notices, 1750–1865, and the Race and Slavery Petitions Project.
Documenting the American South (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Archive of digitized materials related to southern history, literature, and culture. Collections on Black history and literature include The Church in the Southern Black Community and North American Slave Narratives.
Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade (Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation)
A growing archive of 600,000 people records and 5 million data points that help to reconstruct the lives and experiences of enslaved people during the Atlantic slave trade.
The Great Migration: Primary Source Sets (Digital Public Library of America)
Digitized sources on the Great Migration, an exodus of African Americans from the South to Northern and Midwestern states between 1910 and 1930.