HY 430: Slavery, Emancipation, and Memory in the United States

This database offers interviews conducted with thousands of former slaves in the 1930s by the Works Progress Administration. Read primary accounts of slave family life, religion, music, art, and work. However, Gorgas Library also offers many, many more former WPA slave interviews in print. The official title of the collection is The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography.

collects books and articles that document the individual and collective story of African Americans struggling for freedom and human rights in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries.

a variety of slave interviews, petitions, letters, military documents, testimonies, and other materials related to the freedmen.

This Duke University collection includes letters from African-American women who lived on Southern plantations in the 1800s.

presents 396 pamphlets from the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, published from 1822 through 1909, by African-American authors and others who wrote about slavery, African colonization, Emancipation, Reconstruction, and related topics

Created by Congress in 1865, the Freedmen's Bureau aimed to improved the lives of former slaves.