Research Guides: HIST 221: Slavery, Agency and Ideologies (HC): Primary Sources

Printed Primary Sources

Afro-Latino voices: narratives from the early modern Ibero-Atlantic world, 1550-1812
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Provides a broad and rich sampling of documents recording the early modern voices of the African diaspora. Includes translations of wills, testaments, letters, and historical chronicles.

Primary sources can take many different forms. Letters, accounts and other kinds of documents written at the time of an event or era allow a nuanced and detailed understanding of historical issues. Material below explains ways to locate primary sources in Tripod and Worldcat. To find additional primary sources, historical studies in books and journal articles will often offer the best recommendations. Check footnotes and bibliographies for references to specific titles.

Finding Primary Sources

Primary source translations that are in the Tricollege libraries will often be listed in Tripod under subject words combined with such terms as "sources" "early works to 1800" "correspondence" "interviews" or "personal narratives"

For example, the search Subject: slave* sources ("united states" OR america*) produces such books as:

Pioneers of the Black Atlantic: Five Slave Narratives from the Enlightenment, 1772-1815.

While the search Subject: latin america sources AND Keyword:colon* results in books including:

Colonial Spanish America: a documentary history
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The book is meant to enrich, not repeat, the work of existing texts on this period, and its focus is on people. This text provides a detailed look at the cultural development of colonial Latin America using readings, documents, historical analysis, and visual materials, including photographs, drawings, and paintings.

Document and Image Collections

ARTstor
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A digital library that provides access to hundreds of thousands of digital images from a variety of museum, library and archival collections. Images are searchable by artist, time period, and subject. Once you register on the site, you can download images to a personal folder.

The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record
Scholars at the University of Virginia assembled this collection of over 1200 images of objects and documents to demonstrate the multiplicity of issues involved.
Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies
See sections for Maps and Media (including photos pf churches and videos of present day parallels) under the tabs for individual Latin American countries. The website also has a database of over 300,000 transcribed Church documents concerning people of color. Sponsored by Vanderbilt University.
Negros & Esclavos
The Archivo General de la Nacion in Bogota, Colombia presents a collection of documents, images, and first-person narratives by and about African slaves in the colonial period.
Trans Atlantic Slave Trade Database
Includes data, images, and analysis of more than 35, 000 slave voyages to the Americas from the 16th through the 19th centuries. Sponsored by Emory University.
World Scholar: Latin America and the Caribbean
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This database unites primary and secondary sources with an emphasis on social history. The search slave* retrieves a wide variety of full text materials including images, historical newspaper articles, and scholarly analysis.

Image

Portrait of Joanna, an emancipated slave of Surinam

Illustrating a biography by J. Stedman, 1838 (Wikimedia Commons)