Database of newspaper articles from the Atlanta Daily World

Citations and many full-text articles from religion and theology journals.

Trigger Warning

As a trigger warning for descendants of enslaved people, the archival sources of the history of enslavement of the African Diaspora tend to be framed by the gaze of the slaveholder and to silence the intellectual production of the enslaved. These manuscripts systematically evidence imperial sexual violence, painful exploitation and torture of enslaved persons, the influence of scientific racism in the Atlantic World, and the use of hateful language as violence, including racial slurs. Examining the silencing of public memory about racialized slavery is in itself triggering, since many archival sources that affirmed the intellectual production of the enslaved were destroyed or appropriated with the intentions of depersonalizing the enslaved and keeping Black resistance movements in the margins of History. The reimagining of archives is urgent because the legacies of the history of racially-premised slavery propel contemporary structural racism and the policing and exploitation of communities of the African Diaspora around the world. The primary sources in the archives might be misgendering people, and Firestone Library of Princeton University stands in Lenape territory and within an institution with historical ties to racialized slavery.

Description

If you search the word “slavery” in the Princeton University Library Catalog and refine the search for “manuscripts” in Rare Books and Special Collections at Firestone Library, you will find files that were historically meant to commemorate slaveholding families. If you read the Catalog descriptions of the files, you will find dehumanizing language, such as “stealing slaves” and even “competing rival slave” when referring to the leaders of the Haitian Revolution. The current status of the archive poses immeasurable barriers for scholars of African American Studies. It alienates and perpetrates harm on Black researchers, who in turn are underrepresented in academia. It disregards the public memory of the enslaved and poses burdens on the scholarly production about structurally marginalized groups. It maintains the historical empathetic gaze on the slaveholder, silencing the stories and lived experiences of the enslaved.

The Archival Justice for the Enslaved Project aims to support decolonizing the archives of Rare Books and Special Collections at Firestone Library, creating a counter-narrative dataset that shifts the narrative from the slaveholder to the enslaved. This public-facing dataset contributes to the ongoing ethical conversations about humanities data and the history of slavery and institutional racism. This alternative searchable dataset not only modifies the current dehumanizing language of the archive, but also generates new descriptions that are centered on the stories and experiences of the enslaved, while also dismantling the current “miscellaneous” conceptualization of the archives on slavery. This is therefore an invaluable resource for graduate and undergraduate students pursuing a concentration or certificate in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton, in addition to scholars who would like to pursue ethical research about slavery in Rare Books and Special Collections. In light of Princeton University’s historical ties to racialized slavery, the approach of this project is guided by scholarly activism for reparations and restorative justice within academia. The Director, Associate Director, and Research Associates collaborated on designing the goals and the framework for this project. All entries were limited to digital research due to the COVID-19 pandemic and written by students affiliated to the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. Each entry grants merit to its author, and some entries include a list of suggested readings to encourage engagement with the history of racialized slavery outside of the limitations of the archive. The Project created entirely new or revised descriptions for a selection of files, boxes, and manuscripts that have been labeled by Firestone Library as related to the history of slavery, but acknowledges that there are many files that have not been designated as related to the history of racialized enslavement, particularly because many files were historically acquired to commemorate slaveholders. Therefore, this Project cannot do much more than to spark conversations about contemporary archival anti-Blackness and the possibilities of reparative archival justice.

Research Team

Director

Dannelle Gutarra Cordero

Associate Director

Turquoise Brewington

Research Associates

KiKi Gilbert

Sydney Maple

Asia Matthews

Contributors

Moses Awofolaju

Persis Baah

Josh Babu

Zizi Coleman

Parker Jones

Lazlo Nziga

Priya Vulchi

Thank You

Department of African American Studies

Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

April Peters

Grants

Addressing Racism Funding Initiative Grant, Office of the Dean of the Faculty, Princeton University

Dataset Curation Grant, Center for Digital Humanities, Princeton University

Research Assistance Grant, Anonymous, Undergraduate Research Assistants in Humanities and Social Sciences Fund, University Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Princeton University

Comprehensive review of the literature in sociology. Identifies major tends in the field as well as find general overviews of research in specific subject areas of sociology.

Comprehensive review of the literature in political science. Can help students identify major tends in the field as well as find general overviews of research in specific subject areas of politics.

Indexes books and journal articles on the history of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present.

1954+

Digital collection of Alternative and Underground Press publications focused on Vietnam, women's rights, sexual liberation and civil rights in Britain and America.

Full text of more than 12,000 printed works, including lesser known imprints published from the early 16th to the early 20th century.

Full-text collection of African American newspapers printed across the U.S. during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Contains nearly 3,000 poems by African-American poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Online collection of academic and political journals, commercial magazines, institutional newsletters, organizations' bulletins, annual reports and other diverse periodicals.

Complete text of the major African-American newspapers published in the United States during the 19th century.

1827-1882

Brings together text reference, biographies, chronologies, sheet music, images, lyrics, liner notes, and discographies which chronicle the history and culture of the African American experience through music. The database will expand to include coverage of blues, jazz, spirituals, civil rights songs, slave songs, minstrelsy, rhythm and blues, gospel, and other forms of black American musical expression.

Includes newspapers, magazines, reports, and annuals from various African-American organizations including churches and educational and service institutions.

Primary sources devoted specifically to African American family history, including U.S Federal Census (African Americans only), Freedman's Bank Records, World War I Draft Cards, African American family history books, U.S. Colored Troops Records, vital records, church records, legal records, and more.

Full-text digital resource exploring African American life and culture. Targeted and thematic search options are featured to find articles, documents, images, and more.

Focusing predominantly on Atlanta, Chicago, St. Louis, New York, and towns and cities in North Carolina this resource presents multiple aspects of the African American community through pamphlets, newspapers and periodicals, correspondence, official records, reports and in-depth oral histories, revealing the prevalent challenges of racism, discrimination and integration, and a unique African American culture and identity.

Biographical profiles & extended narratives of African-Americans from all walks of life. Many profiles include photographs & illustrations, and there is a rich collection of full-text African-American reference works.

Guide to works in African studies published under the auspices of the International African Institute.

Full-text books in humanities, social sciences, gender studies, African American Studies, Latino Studies, and Native American Studies. Also contains the electronic version of The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, a fully searchable collection of over 4,000 interviews with former slaves.