Research Librarian
What is a primary source?
A primary source is a record or artifact from a given era that provides original documentary evidence of the time—like a snapshot of an experience, taken by someone who was there.
The video below, "What are Primary Sources?" from the University of Guelph Library, offers a quick overview.
Digital Primary Sources in Black Studies
This guide highlights digital collections. For tips and resources on finding non-digital primary source collections, visit the Primary Sources Research Guide.
Multi-subject collections
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Amherst College Digital Collections This link opens in a new windowDigitized art works, photographs, manuscripts, books, and other media from Amherst College Archives & Special Collections and the library's Art & Architecture Collection.
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Black Digital Humanities Projects and ResourcesExtensive list of links to Black DH projects, many of which engage primary sources.
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Credo: Special Collections and University Archives at UMassIncludes: W. E. B. DuBois papers, Horace Mann papers, and the Antislavery Pamphlet Collection.
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DIgital Black Historya free, searchable directory for online history projects that can help further Black History research. This ongoing project was created to collect information about these digital Black History projects in order to benefit historians, genealogists, and family historians who are researching the lives of Black individuals and families.
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Digital Public Library of AmericaCatalog of public domain and openly licensed images and other digitized materials from archives, libraries, museums, and other U.S. cultural heritage institutions
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Digital SchomburgDigital exhibitions, e-books, oral histories, event and lecture videos, podcasts and more from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
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Umbra Search: African American HistoryCollection of over 400,000 digitized sources in African American history, from more than 1,000 libraries, museums and archives.
Collections organized around events, experiences or social identities
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HistoryMakers Digital Archive This link opens in a new windowStreaming oral histories documenting African American contributions to American culture, social movements & organizations, and history. Interviewees speak about life in the arts, business, civics, education, entertainment, law, media, medicine, the military, politics, religion, science, sports & style.
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African American AIDS History ProjectA crowd-contributed archive of African American responses to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. It includes printed matter, posters, oral histories, and archival video.
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America Revisited: The African American Migration ExperienceDocumentation of a 500-year historical narrative from the transatlantic slave trade to the Western migration, the colonization movement, the Great Migration, and the contemporary immigration of Caribbeans, Haitians, and sub-Saharan Africans.
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Black Feminist Digital ArchiveThe Black Feminist Digital Archive collects and describes materials related to black feminist organizations active in the U.S. from 1968 to roughly 1980.
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Cornell Hip Hop CollectionThe Cornell Hip Hop Collection documents the origins of Hip Hop culture and its spread around the globe.
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Detroit Revolutionary Movements RecordsThe Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement was formed in May, 1968 at the Chrysler Dodge Main Plant in Hamtramck, Michigan. Use the links under the "Collections organization" area of the page to access particular items in the collection.
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Digital Transgender Archive: Black PeopleMaterials and oral hiistories by and about Black people in the Digital Transgender Archive.
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Documenting FergusonA community-sourced collection of "digital media captured and created by community members following the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014."
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A People's Archive of Police Violence in ClevelandA collaboration between Cleveland residents and professional archivists, this site collects, preserves, and shares the stories, memories, and accounts of police violence as experienced or observed by Cleveland citizens.
Abolition and Enslavement
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American Slavery Collection (1820-1922) This link opens in a new windowDigital edition of the American Antiquarian Society's holdings of slavery and abolition materials, with more than 3,500 works.
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Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938Over 2,000 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former enslaved people, collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project. When using these sources, consult the contextualizing note "The Limitations of the Slave Narrative Collection" on the site.
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Frederick Douglass PapersThe Frederick Douglass Papers at the Library of Congress presents the papers of the nineteenth-century African-American abolitionist who escaped from slavery and then risked his own freedom by becoming an outspoken antislavery lecturer, writer, and publisher.
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Freedom on the MoveDatabase of over 30,000 ads seeking fugitive enslaved people. Searchable by geography, personal descriptors, date, and enslaver. Transcribed data may be downloaded.
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Last Seen: Finding Family After SlaveryLast Seen: Finding Family After Slavery aims to identify, digitize, transcribe, and publish ads placed in newspapers across the United States (and beyond) by formerly enslaved people searching for family members and loved ones after emancipation.
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Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery CollectionThis collection from Cornell University includes pamphlets and leaflets documenting the anti-slavery struggle at local, regional, and national levels.
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Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice (1490-2007) This link opens in a new windowThousands of pamphlets, books, paintings, maps and images documenting the varieties and legacy of slavery, the social justice perspective, and the continued existence of slavery today.
U.S. Civil Rights Movement
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Black Women's SuffrageThis collection explores linkages between women’s suffrage and other social causes of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (anti-slavery, anti-lynching, education reform and civil rights) as well as racism within the Suffrage Movement.
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Civil Rights Digital LibraryThe CRDL features a collection of unedited news film from the WSB (Atlanta) and WALB (Albany, Ga.) television archives held by the Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia Libraries.
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Civil Rights Resource GuideDigital collections and a curated list of more specific websites from the Library of Congress.
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Colored ConventionsFrom 1830 until the 1890s, already free and once captive Black people came together in state and national political meetings called "Colored Conventions." This project brings together digitized versions of proceedings, newspaper coverage, and petitions related to the Conventions.
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Freedom Summer Digital ArchiveMore than 25,000 pages from the Freedom Summer manuscripts, including "official records of organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE); the personal papers of movement leaders and activists such as Amzie Moore, Mary King and Howard Zinn, letters and diaries of northern college students who went South to volunteer for the summer; newsletters produced in Freedom Schools; racist propaganda, newspaper clippings, pamphlets and brochures, magazine articles, telephone call logs, candid snapshots, internal memos, press releases and much more."
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The Long Civil Rights Movement InitiativeOral history interviews focused on the Long Civil Rights Movement in the South, exploring three main issues: race and the public schools, economic justice, and gender and sexuality.
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Mapping American Social MovementsInteractive maps showing the historical geography of dozens of social movements that have influenced American life and politics since the late 19th century, including radical movements, civil rights movements, labor movements, women's movements, and more. This information can help you contextualize sources in archival and digital collections.
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SNCC Digital GatewayHistoric materials including documents, photographs, oral history interviews, and audiovisual material hosted in digital collections at repositories across the country. Created with the participation of SNCC veterans.
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Who Speaks for the Negro?: An Archival CollectionDigital archive of the original reel-to-reel recordings that Warren compiled for each of his interviewees, as well as print materials related to the book of the same name, published in 1965.
Caribbean History
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dLOC: Digital Library of the CaribbeanMaps, oral histories, legal documents, books and other sources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean.
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DIrectory of Caribbean Digital Scholarship (CariDiScho2020)Browse or search an open-source bibliography of digital resources resulting from—and meant for—the study of the Caribbean.
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Digital Archive of Latin American and Caribbean EphemeraThe Digital Archive of Latin American and Caribbean Ephemera is a steadily growing repository containing a previously unavailable subset of Princeton’s Latin American Ephemera Collection as well as newly acquired materials being digitized and added on an ongoing basis.
How do I start searching for primary sources?
The video below, "Finding Primary Sources: Background Research" from the University of Guelph Library, can help you connect what you already know about your topic to your search.