Finding primary sources - HIS 400 - Dismantling Slavery: Black Activism in Latin America

The source-driven junior paper

Often, the best work arises from close engagement with a primary source. As you read, you'll think of questions or begin to shape an argument. The hard part is to find a primary source that addresses the broad general area of interest. Here are some strategies for finding primary sources:

Check the footnotes, endnotes and bibliography of a good academic book on your topic.
Use the word sources as a keyword when searching the Main Catalog.
Consult the subject guides at http://libguides.princeton.edu
Search the finding aids for collections in Special Collections and Mudd Manuscript Library.

Digitized Primary Sources—General

Caribbean Newspapers 1718-1876 This link opens in a new window
World Newspaper Archive - Latin American Newspapers This link opens in a new window
Provides full-text access to historical newspapers from Latin America.

Slave Societies Digital Archive
The SSDA’s largest and oldest collections were generated by the Catholic Church, which mandated the baptism of African slaves in the fifteenth century and later extended this requirement to the Iberian New World.
Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC)
A cooperative digital library for resources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean, dLOC provides access to digitized versions of Caribbean cultural, historical and research materials currently held in archives, libraries, and private collections.
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database
The most extensive database on the slave trade from 1514 to 1866. You can narrow searches by ship, nation, voyage dates, voyage outcome, voyage itinerary, owners, captain and crew, characteristics of slaves, number of slaves, or sources.
Medicine in the Americas: A Digital Library
A digital collection produced by the US National Library of Medicine’s History of Medicine Division, containing printed from works from the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean.
Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora
The website is a digital archive for hundreds of historical images, paintings, lithographs, and photographs illustrating enslaved Africans and their descendants before c. 1900. It is a two-part website created for teachers, researchers, students and the general public.
African Origins (use Internet Explorer for best performance)
African Origins contains information about the migration histories of Africans forcibly carried on slave ships into the Atlantic. Using the personal details of 93,605 Africans liberated by International Courts of Mixed Commission and British Vice Admiralty Courts, this resource makes possible new geographic, ethnic, and linguistic data on peoples captured in Africa and pulled into the slave trade. It documents the journeys of “liberated Africans,” revealing the backgrounds of the millions of Africans captured and sold into slavery during the suppression of transatlantic slave trading in the 19th century.
Slave Biographies: the Atlantic Database Network
An open access data repository of information on the identities of enslaved people in the Atlantic World. It includes the names, ethnicities, skills, occupations, and illnesses of individual slaves. Phase one of a multi-phase project is presented here. Users of the website can access data about slaves in colonial Louisiana and Maranhão, Brazil. They can download datasets, search for ancestors, and run statistical analysis.

Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice This link opens in a new window
Brings together original manuscript and rare printed material from dozens of libraries and archives across the Atlantic world. It includes significant coverage of slavery today, US court records from the local, regional and State Supreme Court level, documents on the Islamic slave trade, as well as sources on urban slavery, interracial education, the Day Law in Kentucky, desegregation and social justice. Also includes material examining European, Islamic and African involvement in the slave trade.
Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive This link opens in a new window
Collections on the transatlantic slave trade, the global movement for the abolition of slavery, the legal, personal, and economic aspects of the slavery system, and the dynamics of emancipation in the U.S. as well as in Latin America, the Caribbean, and other regions.

Slavery and Remembrance: a guide to sites, museums and memory
Slavery and Remembrance offers sites and museums across the globe the opportunity to represent their missions and collections to an international audience of museum-goers, students, scholars, and cultural heritage professionals. It embraces the distinctive voices of partnering sites and museums that represent history in ways that complement, augment, or perhaps even contradict one another. Sites and museums represent themselves on the website—through descriptions, images, and selected objects.
Slave Movement During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
This site provides access to the raw data and documentation which contains information on the following slave trade topics from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: records of slave ship movement between Africa and the Americas, slave ships of eighteenth century France, slave trade to Rio de Janeiro, Virginia slave trade in the eighteenth century, English slave trade (House of Lords Survey), Angola slave trade in the eighteenth century, internal slave trade to Rio de Janeiro, slave trade to Havana, Cuba, Nantes slave trade in the eighteenth century, and slave trade to Jamaica.

Afro-Americana Imprints This link opens in a new window
Full text of more than 12,000 printed works, including lesser known imprints published from the early 16th to the early 20th century.

Confidential Print: Latin America, 1833-1969. Records from the British Foreign Ofice in the UK National Archives
The documents of Confidential Print: Latin America cover the whole of South and Central America, plus the non-British islands of the Caribbean, from just after the final Spanish withdrawal from mainland America in the 1820s to the height of the Cold War in the 1960s. Topics covered include revolutions, territorial changes and political movements, foreign financial interests, industrial and infrastructural development, wars, slavery, immigration from Europe and relations with indigenous peoples.

British Library Newspapers This link opens in a new window
Consists of major collections from the British Library which span over 300 years of newspaper publishing in the U.K.—17th and 18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers and 19th Century Newspapers provides a representative selection of papers from 17th-19th century Britain and includes national, regional and local newspapers from England, Scotland, Ireland & Wales. (1732-1950)

Yale Slavery and Abolition Portal
Links to numerous sites with primary sources about slavery and emancipation
Early Caribbean Digital Archive
Pre-twentieth-century Caribbean texts, maps, and images. Texts include travel narratives, novels, poetry, natural histories, and diaries.
The materials in the archive are primarily authored and published by Europeans, but the ECDA aims to use digital tools to "remix" the archive and foreground the centrality and creativity of enslaved and free African, Afro-creole, and Indigenous peoples in the Caribbean world.

Digitized Primary Sources—Brazil

Tráfico de Escravos no Brasil
Primary sources about slavery in Brazil. (In Portuguese).
Biblioteca Digital de Obras Raras USP
Digitized rare books from the University of São Paulo.
Hemeroteca Digital
Digital repository of Brazilian periodicals.
Biblioteca Brasiliana Guita e José Mindlin
Digital archive containing periodicals, pamphlets, books, and iconography from Brazil. An interesting feature is a digital atlas of foreign travelers to Brazil in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Brazilian and Portuguese History and Culture: The Oliveira Lima Library
Extensive searchable database of books and pamphlets from the personal library of the Brazilian diplomat, historian, and journalist Manoel de Oliveira Lima, covering a wide spectrum of topics in Brazilian history from the early colonial period to the early decades of the 20th century.
Brazilian Government Documents, 1821-1993 - Center for Research Libraries
Over 670,000 Brazilian government documents selected because of their scarcity, importance, and volume. It includes Provincial Presidential reports and Ministerial Reports from the 1820s to the 1930s. (In Portuguese).
Brasiliana Fotográfica
A digital portal for Brazilian photographic archives. It includes holdings from several research institutions in Brazil, especially the ones headquartered in Rio de Janeiro.

Digitized Primary Sources—Spanish-speaking Caribbean/South America

Archivo General de la Nación, Fondo Negros & Esclavos (Colombia)
Contains extensive testimonial information about the development of the African slave trade in the ‘Neogranadino’ territory. The collection is composed of 55 files, equivalent to approximately 55,000 sheets of paper, that refer not only to the history of Colombia, but also that of Ecuador, Panama and Venezuela.
Cuban Heritage Collection
Selected archival and manuscript materials, books, and periodicals held by the Cuban Heritage Collection have been digitized and are available online through the University of Miami.
Biblioteca Digital Hispánica
Digital documents from Spain.

Digitized Primary Sources—French-speaking Caribbean/South America

Le Marronnage dans le Monde Atlantique: Sources et Trajectoires de Vie
An electronic interface focused on the French Atlantic world. The website is devoted to the study of fugitive slaves from 1765 to 1833 in Haiti, Canada, French Guiana, Louisiana, Guadeloupe, Jamaica, and South Carolina.
Haiti Digital Library
A portal that offers access to several digital repositories containing Haitian historical sources.
La Gazetter Royale d’Hayti
The division of early nineteenth-century Haiti into two separately governed states led to the creation of competing printing presses under Henry Christophe in the north and Alexandre Pétion in the south and west. On this website, you can journey through the northern government of Haiti’s official newspapers and explore its yearly almanacs. Remnants of a robust culture of print, these rare documents, collected from archives across Europe, the Caribbean, and North America, are presented together and in full text for the first time.
Banque Numérique des Patrimoines Martiniquais
The Martinique Digital Heritage Bank features a slave ancestry database with genealogical information. The database includes the 1848 register originally intended to establish the marital status of the liberated population and to assign family names to former slaves. There are also many archeological and architectural images from the island,
Gallica (France)
The digital library of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, is home to tens of thousands of documents and images pertaining to slavery, the slave trade, and abolition. The database hosts an especially strong collection of material related to French Saint-Domingue and the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804.
Memoires St Barth
Resources dedicated to the history of Saint-Barthelemy: slave trade, slavery, their abolition and impact on this island of the Lesser Antilles. (In English, French, and Swedish).

Digitized Primary Sources—English-speaking Caribbean/South America

Caribbean Views
This website offers over 1,200 images, maps and texts from the former British colonies in the 18th and 19th centuries. Slavery is a recurring theme in many of the extracts and images. Material relating to the English slave trade are particularly strong. Plans of slave ships reveal the conditions in which Africans were transported from Africa to the Caribbean.
Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery
Explore the DAACS Website to learn more about enslaved Africans and their descendants, living in the Chesapeake, Carolinas, and Caribbean during the Colonial and Ante-Bellum Periods. Analyze and compare artifacts, deposits, and architectural plans from different sites at unprecedented levels of detail. Join researchers from different disciplines to discover the cultural dynamics of slave society in the early Atlantic World.
Legacies of British Slavery
At the core of the completed project is this online Encyclopaedia of British Slave-ownership containing information about every slave-owner in the British Caribbean, Mauritius or the Cape at the moment of abolition in 1833. Entries include information about the activities, affiliations and legacies of these men and women, with a particular emphasis on the “absentee” owners based in Britain.
Slavery and the British transatlantic slave trade - British National Archives
This Research Guide offers an introduction to the history of the British transatlantic slave trade and its abolition. It gives an overview of the major original sources in British archive collections. The Guide is the first in a series covering different aspects of the complex history of the slave trade, slavery and unfree labour in the British Caribbean and American colonies in more detail.
British Online Archives
This site hosts over 3 million records drawn from both private and public archives. Records are organized thematically, from politics and warfare to slavery and medicine.
Runaway Slaves in Britain: bondage, freedom and race in the eighteenth century
A searchable database of well over eight hundred newspaper advertisements placed by masters and owners seeking the capture and return of enslaved and bound people who had escaped. Many were of African descent, though a small number were from the Indian sub-continent and a few were Indigenous Americans. The project database contains well over eight hundred runaway advertisements published in English and Scottish newspapers between 1700 and 1780, and more advertisements will be added as they become available.
Sierra Leone Collection
The collection consists of items related to the British administration of Sierra Leone, including public and private papers of British officials in the colony of Sierra Leone, 1792-1825.
Jamaican Material in the Slebech Papers
This collection comprises a selection of documents from the extensive Slebech Estate archives now held in the National Library of Wales and the Pembrokeshire Record Office. They relate chiefly to the interests of Nathaniel Phillips, 1756?-1832, in the West Indies. The collection represents a major resource for research into the social and economic history of West Indies, slavery, plantations and trade.
Papers relating to the Jamaican estates of the Goulburn family of Betchworth House.
These documents deal with the history of Amity Hall plantation, a sugar estate in Vere Parish, Jamaica, and some associated properties while they were in the hands of the Goulburn family. The papers provide a guide to the operation of the properties over a period which spans both the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807 and the subsequent Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which led to the emancipation of all slaves across the British Empire, including the West Indies.
Plantation Life in the Caribbean. Pt. 1, Jamaica, c. 1765-1848 : the Taylor and Vanneck-Arcedeckne papers
This partially digitized archival collection offers materials for the study of plantation life and slavery in Jamaica including correspondence, letter-books, and other papers of Simon Taylor and family as well as papers of the Arcedekne family relating to Jamaica.

Digitized Primary Sources—Dutch-speaking Caribbean/South America

The Dutch in the Caribbean World
This project offers a research tool in two parts: a) a guide to archival sources on the Dutch colonies in the Caribbean World and b) a summary of the relevant laws and regulations of the period. The guide to archival sources covers collections in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Curaçao, Suriname and Guyana, especially those that might contain information about slavery and multicultural relations.

Finding Primary Sources in Books

Some primary sources are collected in books, which you can find the library catalog.

To find the papers of an individual, search for that person as an author, e.g. jackson, andrew

To find the records of an organization or government body, use the name of the organization as an author e.g. United States. Dept. of State

Include one of these words as a keyword or a subject:

sources
diaries
correspondence
[place name]—Description and travel
personal narrative

If you find something that looks useful, look at the detailed view of the catalog record and try to identify the "subject" assigned. For many topics in history, there's an official term used in all Anglo-American library catalogs, like:

Cuba--History--Revolution, 1959--Sources.
Argentina --History--Sources.
United States--Foreign relations--Cuba--Sources.
Coups d'état--Venezuela--History--Sources.

To find works published in a particular time and place, explore the search options. It is usually possible to limit your search by date, language, or location of publication.

Other resources to locate primary sources

Princeton University Library Finding Aids This link opens in a new window
Provides access to finding aids or descriptive inventories for archival records and manuscript collections held within the University Library. Approximately 1,300 finding aids from the Department of Special Collections are now available online and include the Manuscripts Division, Public Policy Papers, and University Archives.
Archive Finder This link opens in a new window
Contains the entire holdings in the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC). Current directory of thousands of repositories and over 220,000 collections of primary source materials across the United States, United Kingdom, and Ireland. 1959+
ArchiveGrid This link opens in a new window
Index to finding aids and other descriptive information about the holdings of manuscript and archival collections in libraries and research institutions throughout the world.