Juneteenth & Emancipation

The complete Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress consists of approximately 20,000 documents. The collection is organized into three "General Correspondence" series which include incoming and outgoing correspondence and enclosures, drafts of speeches, and notes and printed material. Most of the 20,000 items are from the 1850s through Lincoln's presidential years, 1860-65. Treasures include Lincoln's draft of the Emancipation Proclamation, his March 4, 1865, draft of his second Inaugural Address, and his August 23, 1864, memorandum expressing his expectation of being defeated for re-election in the upcoming presidential contest. The Lincoln Papers are characterized by a large number of correspondents, including friends and associates from Lincoln's Springfield days, well-known political figures and reformers, and local people and organizations writing to their president. In its online presentation, the Abraham Lincoln Papers comprises approximately 61,000 images and 10,000 transcriptions. This project is being supported by a generous gift from Donald G. Jones, Terri L. Jones, and the Jones Family Foundation.

This exhibit uses archival records to illuminate the courage and resilience of black pioneers who built lives for themselves and their families in Oregon despite the many barriers they faced. The exhibit puts their experiences in context with chronologies and related resources before telling their stories augmented by photos and original documents.

Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938 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).

"Crossroads to Freedom connects a digital archive of materials [oral histories, images and text files] from the Civil Rights era in Memphis, TN, to community education and engagement. The purpose of the archive is to promote and support discussions of the impact of this historical period on our community today." -- Home page.

Images, runaway slave advertisements, trade maps, slave deeds, and legislative and county court petitions from the University of North Carolina Greensboro Digital Library on American Slavery.

The first release of the Frederick Douglass Papers at the Library of Congress contains approximately 2,000 items relating to Douglass's life as an escaped slave, abolitionist, editor, orator, and public servant. The papers span the years 1841-1964, with the bulk of the material from 1862-1895. The collection also contains the writings of some of Douglass's contemporaries such as Henry Ward Beecher, Ida B. Wells, Gerrit Smith, and Horace Greeley. Subjects covered in the collection include politics, emancipation, racial prejudice, women's suffrage, and prison reform.

Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands. Includes murder records, labor records, marriage records and more. Fully searchable or browse by state.

"North American Slave Narratives" collects books and articles that document the individual and collective story of African Americans struggling for freedom and human rights in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. 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.

The SlaveVoyages website is a collaborative digital initiative that compiles and makes publicly accessible records of the largest slave trades in history. Search these records to learn about the broad origins and forced relocations of more than 12 million African people who were sent across the Atlantic in slave ships, and hundreds of thousands more who were trafficked within the Americas.

The recordings of former slaves in Voices Remembering Slavery: Freed People Tell Their Stories took place between 1932 and 1975 in nine states. Twenty-two interviewees discuss how they felt about slavery, slaveholders, coercion of slaves, their families, and freedom. Several individuals sing songs, many of which were learned during the time of their enslavement. It is important to note that all of the interviewees spoke sixty or more years after the end of their enslavement, and it is their full lives that are reflected in these recordings. The individuals documented in this presentation have much to say about living as African Americans from the 1870s to the 1930s, and beyond.