Primary Sources
- History Vault This link opens in a new windowSouthern Life, Slavery, and the Civil War module contains records of legal challenges by enslaved peoples, plantation records, and more. Civil Rights and the Black Freedom Struggle includes records of organizations (like SNCC) and individuals.
- Archives Unbound This link opens in a new windowIncludes city directories for 19th and early 20th century Nashville. Also includes African American primary sources.
- Gale Primary Sources This link opens in a new windowNewspapers, books, manuscripts, maps, and photographs. Simultaneously search: 17th-18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers, 19th Century U.S. Newspapers, Sunday Times (London), Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), Making of the Modern World, Times Literary Supplement, and Times Digital Archive, Financial Times (London).
- African American Communities This link opens in a new windowPamphlets, newspapers and periodicals, correspondence, official records, reports, and in-depth oral histories reveal the prevalent challenges of racism, discrimination and integration, and a unique African American culture and identity. Focuses predominantly on Atlanta, Chicago, St. Louis, New York, and towns and cities in North Carolina.
- American Memory This link opens in a new windowWritten and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience.
- Freedom on the MoveCompiles newspapers advertisements and other historical evidence of the self-liberation of enslaved peoples in North America.
- Proquest Congressional Publications This link opens in a new windowU.S. Congressional materials (hearings, bills, Congressional Record and compiled legislative histories) and Executive Branch documents.
- Race Relations in America This link opens in a new windowSpeeches, reports, surveys, and analyses produced by the Race Relations Department of the United Church Board for Homeland Ministries based at Fisk University.
- Sabin Americana This link opens in a new windowBooks, pamphlets, serials and other works about the Americas, through the early 1900s. Original accounts of exploration, trade, colonialism, slavery and abolition, the western movement, Native Americans, military actions, etc.
- Slavery, Abolition & Social Justice This link opens in a new windowPrimary source documents on key aspects of the history of slavery. The African Coast, the Middle Passage, the varieties of slave experience, religion, revolts, abolition, and legislation. Case studies from America, the Caribbean, Brazil, and Cuba.
- Slavery and Anti-Slavery This link opens in a new windowBooks and pamphlets, US Supreme Court records, newspapers and periodicals, manuscripts, and reference materials for the scholarly study and understanding of slavery from a multinational perspective.
- HathiTrust This link opens in a new window
Digitized collections of some of the nation’s great research libraries, established in this repository to archive and share their digital content.
American Slave: A Composite AutobiographyISBN: 9780837163147Slave narratives from Tennessee linked here as compiled by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s.
- HistoryMakers Digital Archive This link opens in a new windowOral history interviews with both well-known and unsung African American artists, business leaders, scientists, athletes, and intellectuals.
- Academic Video Online This link opens in a new windowDocumentaries, interviews, performances, news programs and newsreels, field recordings, commercials, raw footage, and thousands of award-winning films.
- Kanopy This link opens in a new windowOn-demand streaming video service for documentaries, training films, and theatrical releases. Films under a current license agreement are available for immediate viewing. Other films may require a request through the Kanopy site. Viewing films in a group forum is permitted as long as the viewing is by Vanderbilt authorized viewers only (current faculty, staff, or students) and it is not for commercial benefit (i.e. no admission costs are charged and no profit is made from the screening).
