Voices of the Enslaved in Wilson Special Collections Library: Additional Resources
Additional Resources
This page includes information about other resources from Wilson Special Collections Library and beyond that are helpful in researching about the voices and experiences of people enslaved in the United States. These databases and websites include digitized material that anyone from the public can use. We also provide information on how to search our online catalog to find more material in our special collections library, and throughout the UNC Library System.
Digital Resources
Documenting the American South
"North American Slave Narratives"
"North American Slave Narratives" 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. This collection includes all the existing autobiographical narratives of fugitive and former enslaved people published as broadsides, pamphlets, or books in English up to 1920. Also included are many of the biographies of fugitive and enslaved and some significant fictionalized narratives of enslavement published in English before 1920.
Browse the collection here.
Duke University Libraries: Research Guides
"Slave Letters"
Letters written by people who were enslaved in the United States are rare. Enslaved people were generally prohibited from learning to read and/or write, often with severe consequences threatened. Some did learn on their own, persevering under extreme circumstances. Others were taught by enslavers or by missionaries wanting to teach the Bible. An enslaved person having these skills would frequently keep them secret. Some letters were actually written down or "transcribed" by sympathetic whites or by other enslaved people who could write. Under these conditions, it is no wonder that few letters exist. Those that do exist often reveal heart-felt sentiments toward family and human rights.
Browse the collection here.
Duke University Libraries: Digital Repository
"American Slavery Documents"
The "American Slavery Documents Collection" contains an assortment of legal and personal documents related to slavery in the United States. Nearly all of the documents are singular and otherwise unrelated to the other, but as a composite, the collection brings to light the details of the lives and deaths of free and enslaved African Americans during the Antebellum and early Reconstruction Eras. The type of materials include bills of sale, manumission papers, emancipation notes, bonds, auction notices and other assorted items. The documents represent nearly all of the states of the American south including: North Carolina, Virginia, Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi, but a few documents are from northern states like New York and New Jersey.
Browse the collection here.
Library of Congress
"Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938"
"Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938," contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of enslaved people collected as part of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration.
Browse the collection here.
Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Special Collections Library
"Federal Writers' Project Papers, 1936-1940"
W. T. Couch (1901), while director of the University of North Carolina Press, was also a part-time official of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration, as assistant and associate director for North Carolina, 1936-1937, and as director for the Southern region, 1938-1939. These papers include his correspondence relating to the project, and the life histories of about 1,200 individuals, written by about 60 members of the project after one or more interviews with the subjects. Persons interviewed, many of them African Americans, described life in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. There is a partial index to the many occupations of those interviewed. Also included, on microfilm, are ghost stories, local legends, etc., gathered in the project.
Browse the collection here.
UNC Library Catalog
Material Across the UNC Library System
Suggested Library of Congress Subject Headings
