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What Are Primary Sources?
Primary sources are original records created at the time historical events occurred - or well after events in the case of memoirs and oral histories. Primary sources may include:
- letters, journals, memoirs and diaries
- manuscripts, speeches, handbills and interviews
- photographs, audio recordings, moving pictures or videos
- research data, objects or artifacts
These sources serve as the raw material to interpret the past. (Learn more: Primary Sources).
Slave Narratives
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Narratives -
African American Slave Narratives: Anthology in 3 vols.
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Sixteen individual slave narratives.
Call Number: E-BOOK -
Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers Project
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More than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves - from the Library of Congress.
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The Civitas Anthology of African American Slave Narratives
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Texts include Mary Prince, Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass, William W. Brown, Henry Bibb, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, and Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl.
Call Number: E444 .C44 1999 Lesley Sherrill stacks -
North American Slave Narratives
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Autobiographical narratives of fugitive and former slaves published as broadsides, pamphlets, or books in English up to 1920.
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A Slave no More: Two Men Who Escapted to Freedom
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Includes biographies and unpublished manuscripts of Wallace Turnage and John Washington.
Call Number: E450.W325 B58 2007 Lesley Sherrill stacks -
Analysis -
The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative
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Call Number: PS366.A35 C36 2007 Lesley Sherrill stacks -
The Trickster Comes West: Pan-African Influence in Early Black Diasporan Narratives
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Literary and cultural analysis of narratives by Phillis Wheatley, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, Elizabeth Hart Thwaites, Anne Hart Gilbert, and Mary Prince.
Call Number: E-BOOK
Books With Primary Sources
Find primary sources in the Lesley Library Catalog for by searching for "African Americans AND sources". Some great starting points include:
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Say it loud : great speeches on civil rights and African American identity
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With sound recordings made widely available here for the first time, Say It Loud includes powerful speeches by Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, Angela Davis, Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King Jr., James Cone, Toni Morrison, Cornel West, and many others.
Call Number: E185.615 .S255 2010 Lesley Sherrill stacks
Primary Sources On The Web
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African American Mosaicfrom the Library of Congress
The Internet puts primary sources right at your fingertips. These websites are wonderful places to gather materials from all eras of history, and on all subjects.
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African Americans and the End of Slavery in Massachusetts The Massachusetts Historical Society brings together historical manuscripts and rare published works that serve as a window upon the lives of African Americans in Mass. from the late 17th century through the abolition of slavery under the Mass. Constitution in the 1780s.
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Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record The approximately 1,235 images in this collection have been selected from a wide range of sources, most of them dating from the period of slavery.
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Brown v. Board of Education Digital Archive Documents and images which chronicle events surrounding this historically significant case up to the present.
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Civil Rights Digital Project The CRDP promotes an enhanced understanding of the Movement through its three principal components: 1) a digital video archive of historical news film, 2) a civil rights portal providing a seamless virtual library on the Movement, and 3) a learning objects component delivering secondary Web-based resources.
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In Motion - The African-American Migration Experience The African-American Migration Experience presents texts, illustrations and maps to describe the migrations that have formed and transformed African America and the nation.
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Malcolm X Project The Malcolm X Project has been gathering and illuminating new research about Malcolm X. The website includes interviews, archival footage and documents.
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Rise and Fall of Jim Crow Listen to first-hand accounts of the Jim Crow era from this PBS series.
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Rosa Parks: A Primary Source Gallery This gallery showcases a selection of items from the Rosa Parks Collection at the Library of Congress, which is on loan to the Library for 10 years from the Howard G. Buffett Foundation. This collection contains thousands of items that document the life, work, and legacy of this civil-rights legend.
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Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture Exhibitions, books, articles, photographs, prints, audio and video streams, and selected external links for research in the history and cultures of the peoples of Africa and the African Diaspora.
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Television News of the Civil Rights Era Films from the nightly news from two local television stations in Virginia. Rare footage includes speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon, the governors of the Commonwealth of Virginia, as well as original footage of school desegregation, public meetings, local debates over civil rights matters, and interviews with citizens.
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Digital Public Library of America A collection of primary source items that relate to the African American Experience. Topics include Invisible Man; Ida B. Wells and anti-lynching activism; The poetry of Maya Angelou; Beloved Toni Morrison; The Black Power Movement; The Transatlantic slave trade and Women and the blues.