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Primary Source Databases
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African Diaspora, 1860-Present (Alexander Street) This link opens in a new window
- What’s included? Primary source documents, including books, government documents, personal papers, organizational papers, journals, newsletters, court documents, letters, and ephemera from the Caribbean, Brazil, India, United Kingdom, and France as well as video content. Focuses on the migrations, communities, and ideologies of people of African descent.
- What dates are covered? 1860-Present
- What’s included? Primary source documents, including books, government documents, personal papers, organizational papers, journals, newsletters, court documents, letters, and ephemera from the Caribbean, Brazil, India, United Kingdom, and France as well as video content. Focuses on the migrations, communities, and ideologies of people of African descent.
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Colonial America (AM) This link opens in a new window
- What's included? Files from the National Archives, UK's CO 5 file class. Consists of the original correspondence and entry books of the Board of Trade, the Secretary of State for the Southern Department and the Secretary of State for the Colonies, together holding responsibility for the British possessions in mainland North America and the Caribbean. Made up of letters, charters and commissions, instructions to officials, military documents (including war diaries), newspapers, printed pamphlets, public notices, maps and many other material types, the documents shed light on all aspects of life in colonial America – political, economic, military, cultural and social.
- What dates are covered? 1606-1822
- What's included? Files from the National Archives, UK's CO 5 file class. Consists of the original correspondence and entry books of the Board of Trade, the Secretary of State for the Southern Department and the Secretary of State for the Colonies, together holding responsibility for the British possessions in mainland North America and the Caribbean. Made up of letters, charters and commissions, instructions to officials, military documents (including war diaries), newspapers, printed pamphlets, public notices, maps and many other material types, the documents shed light on all aspects of life in colonial America – political, economic, military, cultural and social.
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Colonial Caribbean (AM) This link opens in a new window
- What's included? Primary sources covering British governance of 25 islands in the Caribbean, drawn from the Colonial Office Files from the National Archives of the UK. Includes administrative documentation, trade and shipping records, minutes of council meetings, and details of plantation life, colonial settlement, imperial rivalries across the region, and the growing concern of absentee landlords.
- What dates are covered? 1624-1870
- What's included? Primary sources covering British governance of 25 islands in the Caribbean, drawn from the Colonial Office Files from the National Archives of the UK. Includes administrative documentation, trade and shipping records, minutes of council meetings, and details of plantation life, colonial settlement, imperial rivalries across the region, and the growing concern of absentee landlords.
Web Resources
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African Caribbean Institute of Jamaica/Jamaica Memory BankRelates the "African cultural retention to the Jamaican social ethos through the documentation, preservation, presentation and display of information on all aspects of Jamaica’s folk culture, with a particular emphasis on the African heritage."*
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Caribbean Links (Society for Caribbean Studies)Academic, historical, and cultural links provided by the Society for Caribbean Studies.
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Caribbean Resources (LANIC)From the Latin American Network Information Center at the University of Texas, this page links to sources about Caribbean countries. The links are organized alphabetically by country and are selected by academic researchers.
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Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies: Latin American Travelogues digital collection (Brown University)Affiliated with Brown University, this collection includes travel accounts written between the 16th and 19th centuries.
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Digital Library of the Caribbean (University of Florida)Provides digital access to Caribbean cultural, historical and research materials held by dLOC partner archives, libraries and private collections.
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Handbook of Latin American Studies Online (Library of Congress)Edited by the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress, HLAS is a bibliography of scholarly works on Latin America.
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Latin American Network Information Center (University of Texas at Austin)Affiliated with the University of Texas at Austin, LANIC creates easy access to internet resources relating to or originating from Latin America.
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National Archives- UK- Caribbean History RevealedThe history of the British Caribbean is explored in this exhibition through government documents, photographs and maps dating from the 17th century to the 1920s and discovered during a cataloguing project at The National Archives of the United Kingdom.*
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The National Library of JamaicaIncludes a wealth of primary source material, including several collections highlighted by biographies, digital images, and documents pertaining to the slave trade.
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Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761 A Cartographic Narrative (Harvard University)An "animated thematic map narrates the spatial history of the greatest slave insurrection in the eighteenth century British Empire....the map suggests an argument about the strategies of the rebels and the tactics of counterinsurgency, about the importance of the landscape to the course of the uprising, and about the difficulty of representing such events cartographically with available sources."*
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Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora (University of Colorado - Boulder)A project affiliated with University of Colorado Boulder, University of Virgina and UNESCO it includes nearly 1,300 images selected from a various sources, most dating from the period of slavery.
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Slave Societies Digital Archive (Vanderbilt University)Strives to preserve endangered archival materials, the majority of which were generated by the Catholic Church in the form of baptismal and other sacramental documents. Also included are bills of sale, property registries and disputes, dowries, and letters of manumission.
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Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade (Emory University)A database revealing nearly 36,000 slave ship voyages, transporting anywhere from 10 million to 12.5 million Africans to the Americas between the 16th and 19th centuries. Also sponsored by Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
