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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. by Sixteen individual slave narratives.Call Number: E-BOOK -
Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers Project by More than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves - from the Library of Congress. -
The Civitas Anthology of African American Slave Narratives by 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 by Autobiographical narratives of fugitive and former slaves published as broadsides, pamphlets, or books in English up to 1920. -
A Slave no More: Two Men Who Escapted to Freedom by Includes biographies and unpublished manuscripts of Wallace Turnage and John Washington.Call Number: E450.W325 B58 2007 Lesley Sherrill stacks -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 by Call Number: PS366.A35 C36 2007 Lesley Sherrill stacks -
The Trickster Comes West: Pan-African Influence in Early Black Diasporan Narratives by 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 FLO 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 by 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.