Finding primary sources - HIS 400 - Slavery and Identity in the British Empire

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

Early English Books Online This link opens in a new window
Contains page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473–1700. Based upon the Pollard and Redgrave Short Title Catalogue (1475-1640) and the Wing Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700).
Eighteenth Century Collections Online This link opens in a new window
Partially searchable digital images of books, primarily British, printed in the eighteenth century. Based on the Eighteenth-Century Short-Title Catalogue. Also see the alternative interface Artemis Primary Sources that allows users to analyze content using frequency and term-relationship tools.
America's Historical Newspapers This link opens in a new window
Searchable full-text of historical newspapers including titles from all 50 states. Now includes select coverage of some major papers after 1922 through the mid 1990s.
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

East India Company This link opens in a new window
Offers access to India Office Records from the British Library. Contains royal charters, correspondence, trading diaries, minutes of council meetings and reports of expeditions, among other document types. Charts the history of British trade and rule in the Indian subcontinent and beyond from 1599 to 1947. 1599-1947

Digitized Primary Sources—English-speaking Caribbean/South America

Colonial Caribbean This link opens in a new window
Stretching from Jamaica and the Bahamas to Trinidad and Tobago, Colonial Caribbean makes available materials from 27 Colonial Office file classes from The National Archives, UK. Covering the history of the various territories under British colonial governance from 1624 to 1870, this extensive resource 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.
Colonial State Papers This link opens in a new window
Digital edition of material from the British National Archives, CO1 and other collections, from 1574-1759, including images of many original manuscript documents. Also includes a digital edition of The Calendar of State Papers, Colonial: North America and the West Indies 1574-1739.
Colonial America This link opens in a new window
Digital edition of the documents in Colonial Office (CO) 5 at the UK National Archives. CO 5 constitutes the original correspondence of the colonial governments with 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.
U.K. Parliamentary Papers This link opens in a new window
Includes the House of Commons Parliamentary Papers from 1715 to the present (with supplementary material back to 1688) and the House of Lords Papers from 1715-1910. Includes searchable full text and subject indexing. The Parliamentary Papers are an essential primary source for Britain, its colonies, and the wider world. They are the working documents of government for all areas of social, political, economic, and foreign policy. 1688+

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.
Thistlewood Papers
Thomas Thistlewood Papers document the daily life of British plantation overseer and slave owner, Thomas Thistlewood (1721-1786) from the period just before his arrival in 1750 in Jamaica through his death

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. Wilberforce, William

To find the records of an organization or government body, use the name of the organization as an author e.g. Great Britain. Colonial Office

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

sources
diaries
correspondence
[place name]—Description and travel
personal narrative
biography (includes autobiography)

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:

Slavery--Jamaica--Sources
Enslaved persons--West Indies--Personal narratives
Enslaved persons--West Indies--Biography

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.