Standish Library: Colonial America: Primary Sources

Voyages : The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database

Voyages : The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database has information on more than 35,000 slaving voyages

that forcibly embarked over 10 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. It offers researchers, students, and the general public a chance to rediscover the reality of one of the largest forced movements of peoples in world history.

Primary Sources related to the Slave Trade

New-York Historical Society Manuscript Collections Relating to Slavery
The library of the New-York Historical Society holds among its many resources a substantial collection of manuscript materials documenting American slavery and the slave trade in the Atlantic world. The fourteen collections on this web site are among the most important of these manuscript collections. They consist of diaries, account books, letter books, ships’ logs, indentures, bills of sale, personal papers, and records of institutions.
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database
Information on more than 35,000 slaving voyages that forcibly embarked over 10 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.
New York Slavery Records Index
Records of Enslaved Persons and Slave Holders in New York from 1525 though the Civil War.
Unknown No Longer
A database of Virginia slave names from primary source documents.
Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery & Justice Repository of Historical Documents
Includes records of slaving voyages.
North American Slave Narratives
This collection includes all the existing autobiographical narratives of fugitive and former slaves published as broadsides, pamphlets, or books in English up to 1920. Also included are many of the biographies of fugitive and former slaves and some significant fictionalized slave narratives published in English before 1920.
Voyage of the Slave Ship Sally 1764-1765
In 1764, a one-hundred ton brigantine called the Sally embarked from Providence, Rhode Island, to West Africa on a slaving voyage. All known records are displayed on this website, offering a unique opportunity to retrace the journey of a single slave ship, from its initial preparation through the long months on the African coast, to the auctioning of surviving captives on the West Indian island of Antigua.
From Africa To Medford: The Untold Story
An exhibit presented at the Medford Historical Society on the slave trade, the lives of both slaves and free Blacks in New England, and the untold story of the 27 slaves owned by Medford’s Royall family in the 18 century.
Captive Passage - The Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Making of the Americas
This exhibition examines the transatlantic slave trade and seeks to increase understanding of this maritime epic and its legacies in the modern world.

Massachusetts Colonial History

Resources from Siena College
Search results for the subject "Massachusetts -- History -- Colonial period -- Sources" in the library catalog.
Resources from Libraries around the World
Use your interlibrary loan account to request materials.

Primary Sources related to Colonial America

Archive of Early American Images
A database of graphic representations of the colonial Americas, from Hudson Bay to Tierra del Fuego, drawn entirely from primary sources printed or created between 1492 and ca. 1825.
Avalon Project - 17th Century Documents : 1600-1699
Includes colonial charters, grants and related documents.
Capital and the Bay: Narratives of Washington and the Chesapeake Bay Region, 1600-1925
First-person narratives, early histories, historical biographies, promotional brochures, and books of photographs in an attempt to capture in words and pictures a distinctive region as it developed between the onset of European settlement and the first quarter of the twentieth century.
Colonial North America at Harvard University
Makes available to the world digitized images of all known archival and manuscript materials in the Harvard Library that relate to 17th and 18th century North America.
Digital Witchcraft Collection
Contains more than 3,000 books, manuscripts, and related materials.
Early Americas Digital Archive
Collection of electronic texts and links to texts originally written in or about the Americas from 1492 to approximately 1820.
Pilgrim Hall Museum
Biographical information, wills, inventories and other 17th century documents.
Plymouth Colony Archive Project
collection of fully searchable texts, including: court records, colony laws, seventeenth century journals and memoirs, probate inventories, wills, town plans, maps, and fort plans; research and seminar analyses of numerous topics; biographical profiles of selected colonists; and architectural, archaeological and material culture studies.
Religion and the Founding of the American Republic
This exhibition demonstrates that many of the colonies that in 1776 became the United States of America were settled by men and women of deep religious convictions who in the seventeenth century crossed the Atlantic Ocean to practice their faith freely.
Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project
Includes 17th century documents.
Trial Pamphlets Collection
The Trial Pamphlets collection at the Cornell University Law Library consists of pamphlets ranging in date from the late 1600s to the late 1800s. Trial pamphlets are contemporary accounts of trials that involved prominent citizens or that dealt with especially controversial or lurid topics. These pamphlets were produced quickly and inexpensively, and then sold on the street soon after the trial to a mass audience.
Virtual Jamestown
The Virtual Jamestown Archive is a digital research, teaching, and learning project that explores the legacies of the Jamestown settlement and "the Virginia experiment."
Written in Bone
Forensic Anthropology has literally uncovered previously unknown information about the first European settlers and Africans in Jamestown, Virginia, Maryland's St. Mary's City, and other early colonial sites around the Chesapeake Bay. Gravesites and land nearby can tell us how they lived and died.
Hanover Historical Texts Collection
17th Century Colonial History texts.

Primary Sources Help

What are Primary Sources?

"Primary sources are the evidence of history, original records or objects created by participants or observers at the time historical events occurred or well after events in the form of memoirs and oral histories. Primary sources may include letters, manuscripts, diaries, journals, newspapers, speeches, interviews, memoirs, documents produced by government agencies such as Congress or the Office of the President, photographs, audio recordings, moving pictures or video recordings, research data, and objects or artifacts such as works of art or ancient roads, buildings, tools, and weapons. These sources serve as the raw material to interpret the past, and when they are used along with previous interpretations by historians, they provide the resources necessary for historical research" -- American Library Association.

Learning to Do Historical Research
Step-by-step instructions and techniques for conducting research in history from the noted environmental historian, William Cronon.
Making Sense of Evidence
Provides strategies for analyzing online primary materials.