Search for rare books by limiting publication date, and or selecting "Special Collections" for Library.
This collection contains over 200 printed maps and small atlases, from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries, relating to the geographic areas of Latin America, including the Caribbean, and Spain and Portugal. Most are not widely held by other libraries, and some are unique to USC.
Primary source research requires a slightly different approach. Here are a few tips/strategies:
Start by doing some background reading or "pre-research": The more you know about key events, people, laws, and especially common terminology used during the time period you are researching the more successful your research will be. You can use Wikipedia or the libraries' online encyclopedia collections to do this.
Limit to specific time periods: When searching for primary sources online always remember to use date ranges (usually on the advanced search page) to focus your search.
Use primary source keywords to find primary sources: Use search terms that reflect the types of primary sources you’re looking for, such as: diaries, pamphlets, correspondence, speeches, manuscripts, personal narratives, interviews, firsthand, eyewitness, sources, etc.
For example: slave AND diary | abolitionist AND pamphlets | Jamaica AND "slave trade" AND sources
Archival Finding Aids: are descriptive inventories of archival collections that help users find relevant materials. These can be very detailed or if the collection has been only marginally processed, can be very bare bones. It is important to remember that when searching for primary sources in the physical archive that you are not searching for their full text as you are when searching many other online sources. It sometimes helps to do broad searchers for general topics or names, places.
The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection is the digitization of the Burney Newspaper Collection, the largest single collection of seventeenth and eighteenth century English news media available from the British Library, alongside the Burney Additional Newspapers collection, and includes pamphlets, proclamations, newsbooks, and newspapers from across the period.
Offers access to over 7,000 hand-written documents and more than 40,000 bibliographic records with this incredible resource on Colonial History. In addition to Britain's colonial relations with the Americas and other European rivals for power, this collection also covers the Caribbean and Atlantic world. It is an invaluable resource for scholars of early American history, British colonial history, Caribbean history, maritime history, Atlantic trade, plantations, and slavery. Coverage: 1574 - 1757. Provided by ProQuest.
The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) was established in 2004 with nine (9) founding partners, five from the Caribbean and four from the United States. Today, twenty years later, dLOC has grown to over ninety (90) Partners and over forty (40) Associate Partners, who are based in the Caribbean, Canada, Europe, and the United States.
Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America
Uing both printed and manuscript sources, this work documents the closely interwoven trafficking in enslaved African people to the thirteen U.S. colonies, the West Indies, and to Spanish America.
Archives Unbound presents topically-focused digital collections of historical documents that support the research and study needs of scholars, researchers, and students at the college and university level. A multi-disciplinary resource, collections cover a broad range of topics from the Middle Ages forward-from Witchcraft to World War II to twentieth-century political history. Particular strengths include U.S. foreign policy; U.S. civil rights; global affairs and colonial studies; and modern history. Collections are chosen based on requests from scholars, archivists, and students.
Sabin Americana: History of the Americas, 1500–1926 is drawn from Joseph Sabin's famed nineteenth century bibliography Bibliotheca Americana: A Dictionary of Book relating to America from its Discovery to the Present Time. This digital collection offers a perspective on life in the western hemisphere, encompassing the arrival of the Europeans on the shores of North America in the late fifteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth century.
We have access to Part II-IV: (2) Slave Trade in the Atlantic World, (3)The Institution of Slavery (1492-1888), (4) The Age of Emancipation. Provided by Gale-Cengage.
- The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database is the culmination of several decades of independent and collaborative research by scholars drawing upon data in libraries and archives around the Atlantic world that documents almost 36000 voyages.
More than 285 Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Latin American Newspapers. Featuring titles from: Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Columbia, Costa Rica, Cuba, El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru, Venezuela.
The Archives of Latin American and Caribbean History, Sixteenth to Twentieth Century offer a range of content for the region, providing opportunities for research into issues and events in contemporary Latin American and Caribbean history, as well as historical perspective back to the colonial period. Coverage extends from the 15th to 20th century, providing information about the indigenous peoples of the region, the Conquest (la Conquista), colonial rule, religion, struggles for independence, and political, economic, and social progress and issues in newly independent nations.
an open access collection of pre-twentieth-century Caribbean texts, maps, and images. Texts include travel narratives, novels, poetry, natural histories, and diaries that have not been brought together before as a single collection focused on the Caribbean.
The Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) facilitates the digitisation of archives around the world that are in danger of destruction, neglect or physical deterioration. Thanks to generous funding from Arcadia, a charitable foundation that works to preserve cultural heritage and promote open access to knowledge, we have provided grants to almost 500 projects in over ninety countries worldwide, in more than a hundred languages and scripts.
A web portal created by the European Union containing digitized cultural heritage collections of more than 3,000 institutions across Europe. It includes over 50 million records, brought together on a single platform and presented in a variety of ways relevant to user needs. The items come from institutions located in countries which are members of the Council of Europe and include catalog records of full-text books, magazines, journals, and audio recordings. Thirty five different languages are represented among the searchable objects.
The Huntington Library is home to extensive collections documenting the history of slavery and abolition in the Americas, the British Isles, and the Atlantic World. This collection contains materials selected from those holdings, including financial records, correspondence, and supporting documents.
The New-York Historical Society holds important collections relating to Black history, slavery in the United States, and the Atlantic slave trade. Dating from the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, they constitute a rich archive of primary source materials that will be of value to anyone researching the history of African Americans, slavery, the slave trade, emancipation, and the abolitionist movement.
In collaboration with partners around the globe, the Slave Societies Digital Archive is dedicated to the preservation and free dissemination of endangered records documenting the history of Africans and their descendants across the Atlantic World.
One of the leading UK collections of archives, manuscripts and rare books on Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.
Caribbean Collections at SOAS
Linked below are selective national museums that may contain digital archives related to the Atlantic slave trade.
The collection of Cuban slavery documents range from circa 1816-1890s and contains death certificates, labor contracts, identification documents (cédula), enslaved bills of sale, relocation permits, two sets of documents describing emancipation cases, legal documents, correspondence, and governmental reports.
The papers of American abolitionists and clergymen George Bourne and Theodore Bourne, including correspondence, sermons, essays, notes, ephemera and copies of genealogical materials.
This collection contains 210 pieces of correspondence, manuscripts, and documents of English abolitionist Thomas Clarkson (1760-1846), chiefly dating from 1787 to 1847 and related to slavery and the slave trade in the United States and Africa, including the Sierra Leone colony; activities of the British and Foreign Anti- Slavery Society; and the private affairs of Clarkson and his family.
Look for bibliographic information
Publication date, edition statement, number of volumes, parts and plates
Look for markings or annotations
Printer’s mark, previous owner notes or bookplates
Evaluate the author!
Look for biographical information in the front and back matter
Author’s statement, biography. What biases do they have?
Evaluate content.
How is the content organized?
Introduction, Dedication, Contents, Author Biography
Are there illustrations? What do they depict?
How are text and illustrations formatted/what relationships do they have?
Evaluate textual and visual rhetoric
Evaluate context
Typically, an archival collection is the papers or documents (or broadly, the 'records') of a person or an organization. The archive of a person or organization documents the functions and activities of that person or organization.
Archival collections are typically described at the collection-level in a 'finding aid.' The finding aid outlines the scope of the collection, including size, subjects, media; organization and arrangement; and an inventory of the series and the folders.
Evaluate the creator.
Evaluate audience and purpose.
Consider cultural context and collection context.
Archival Silences
What evidence is missing from this document, collection, or story?