African Studies Home: Primary Sources

Contains the publications and archives (1920-2010) of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), the independent international affairs policy institute founded in 1920 following the Paris Peace Conference.

“Provides scholars with unprecedented electronic access to the United Kingdom’s Colonial, Dominion and Foreign Offices’ confidential correspondence relating to Africa between 1834 and 1966. This resource provides researchers with a searchable collection of scores of official documents covering almost the entire period of European conquest and colonisation of Africa. The early stages of imperial expansion and indigenous resistance in the interior of western and southern Africa, the European scramble for the continent in the late nineteenth century and the expansion of settler colonialism in southern and eastern Africa are all covered.”

Covers 500 years of the rise and fall of empires, this features a wide variety of material, including exploration journals & logs; correspondence; periodicals; diaries; government papers; missionary papers; travel writing; slave papers; memoirs; fiction; children's adventure stories; folk tales; exhibition catalogs; maps; marketing posters; photographs; and illustrations, with many in color.

Presents 397 pamphlets from the Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division, published from 1824 through 1909, by African-American authors and others who wrote about slavery, African colonization, Emancipation, Reconstruction, and related topics. The materials range from personal accounts and public orations to organizational reports and legislative speeches. Among the authors represented are Frederick Douglass, Kelly Miller, Charles Sumner, Mary Church Terrell, and Booker T. Washington. From Slavery to Freedom complements African-American Perspectives: Pamphlets from the Daniel A.P. Murray Collection, 1818-1907.

Working documents of the British government for all areas of social, political, economic and foreign policy, showing how issues were explored and legislation was formed. With all collections available, HCPP includes over 200,000 House of Commons sessional papers from 1715 to the present, with supplementary material back to 1688. HCPP delivers page images and searchable full text for each paper, along with detailed indexing.

Composed of FBI surveillance files on the activities of the African Liberation Support Committee and All African Peoples Revolutionary Party; this collection provides two unique views on African American support for liberation struggles in Africa, the issue of Pan-Africanism, and the role of African independence movements as political leverage for domestic Black struggles.

LLMC is a non-profit cooperative of libraries dedicated to preserving legal titles and government documents, and making copies inexpensively available digitally. It provides an archive of scanned copies of a variety of documents published by federal and state governments, donated by member libraries. Coverage varies. Some foreign and international jurisdiction documents are included.

Designed as an important portal for slavery and abolition studies, brings together documents and collections covering an extensive time period 1490-2007, from libraries and archives across the Atlantic world. Close attention is being given to the varieties of slavery, the legacy of slavery, the social justice perspective and the continued existence of slavery today.

Provides data on over 35,000 slave ship voyages which forcibly carried over 10 million Africans to the Americas from the early 16th to the mid-19th centuries. You can search for particular voyages, use the African name database of 67,000 names, view and even create maps, retrieve numerical data, read explanatory essays, and find and use lesson plans.