African American Studies

The Library of Congress provides free and open access through the Internet to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience. The massive African American collection includes audio slave narratives, pamphlets, manuscripts, photographs and more.

Contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) of the Works Progress Administration, later renamed Work Projects Administration (WPA).

Documenting the American South (DocSouth), a digital publishing initiative sponsored by the University Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, provides access to digitized primary materials that offer Southern perspectives on American history and culture. Collections include the church in the Southern black community, Civil War day-by-day, colonial records, and maps.

The Freedman's Bureau was established in the War Department by an act of March 3, 1865. The Bureau supervised all relief and educational activities relating to refugees and freedmen, including issuing rations, clothing and medicine. Online records are searchable by state or other key words and include "Murders and Outrages," "Labor Records," and "Marriage Records.'

The National Museum of African American History and Culture, opened in September 2016, is the only national museum devoted exclusively to the documentation of African American life, history, and culture. To date, the Museum has collected more than 36,000 artifacts. The collection is searchable online and exhibit topics include music, communities, American West, segregation, slavery, among others.

The North Carolina Runaway Slave Advertisements project provides online access to all known runaway slave advertisements (more than 2300 items) published in North Carolina newspapers from 1751 to 1840. These brief ads provide a glimpse into the social, economic, and cultural world of the American slave system and the specific experience within North Carolina.

Access to over 700,000 images, including maps, posters, photographs.

Information on nearly 35,000 slaving voyages that forcibly embarked over 10 million Africans between the 16th and 19th centuries.

The Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture collects, preserves, and promotes the unique history and culture of the African diaspora, with emphasis on Charleston and the South Carolina Lowcountry. Archival records are searchable online. Online exhibitions are hosted thru Lowcountry Digital Library and Lowcountry Digital History Initiative.

Collection of online articles on Gullah, sweetgrass baskets, famous people, and Charleston as a port of entry.

LDHI is an online platform for partner institutions and collaborative scholars to translate multi-institutional archival materials, historic landscape features and structures, and scholarly research into digital public history exhibition projects. Exhibitions include the work of Philip Simmons, Septima B. Clark, and a tribute to the Mother Emanuel Church.

Online digital library, searchable by institution, collections, keywords, and media type for archival materials relating to the history and culture of the South Carolina Lowcountry.

This website is intended to tell the largely unknown and unfamiliar story of slavery at South Carolina College, the institutional predecessor of the University of South Carolina.

Online repository of information about Black South Carolinians, Black history timeline, and historic African American places.

Lowcountry Africana, sponsored by the Magnolia Plantation Foundation of Charleston, South Carolina, is a free website dedicated to African American genealogy and history in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida, home to the rich Gullah-Geechee cultural heritage.