Electronic Web Sources for Early American Literature

African American

The Antislavery Literature Project
"Antislavery literature represents the origins of multicultural literature in the United States. The goal of the Antislavery Literature Project is to increase public access to a body of literature crucial to understanding African American experience, US and hemispheric histories of slavery, and early human rights philosophies. These multilingual collections contribute to an educational consciousness of the role of many antislavery writers in creating contemporary concepts of freedom."
-- Professor Joe Lockard, Arizona State University

"About the Antislavery Literature Project: The Antislavery Literature Project was established in 2002 as a collaborative electronic publishing venture in a major but under-studied area of American literature. The Project is based in the Arizona State University’s English department and works in cooperation with the EServer, located at Iowa State University."
-- Professor Geoffrey Sauer, Iowa State University

Documenting the American South
"Documenting the American South (DocSouth) is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes ten thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs.
The University Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill sponsors Documenting the American South, and the texts and materials come primarily from its southern holdings."

Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library
"Founded in 1992, the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia Library fostered innovation through technology and set an early precedent for the creation and use of digital materials by scholars in the humanities. Throughout its fifteen-year existence, the Electronic Text Center (known locally as "Etext") pursued a simple, forward-looking goal: to build and maintain an Internet- accessible collection of documents central to teaching and research in the humanities, and to nurture a user community adept at the creation and scholarly use of these materials."

Poems Phillis Wheatley
Renascence Editions

A Voice of Her Own, Phillis Wheatley
Library of Congress

Slavery and the Making of America (PBS)
"SLAVERY AND THE MAKING OF AMERICA is a four-part series documenting the history of American slavery from its beginnings in the British colonies to its end in the Southern states and the years of post-Civil War Reconstruction. Drawing on a wealth of recent scholarship, it looks at slavery as an integral part of a developing nation, challenging the long held notion that slavery was exclusively a Southern enterprise. At the same time, by focusing on the remarkable stories of individual slaves, it offers new perspectives on the slave experience and testifies to the active role that Africans and African Americans took in surviving their bondage and shaping their own lives."

Thomas Jefferson's Monticello

The Monticello Plantation Database
The Monticello Plantation Database contains information on over six hundred people who lived in slavery on Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia plantations between 1774 and 1826. It provides details of life span, family structure, occupation, and the transactions of bondage (sale, purchase, gift, and hiring). There are also short biographies of individuals and accounts of various aspects of slavery at Monticello."-- Lucia Stanton, Shannon Senior Historian, Monticello

The Getting Word
The Getting Word website contains information on a project begun in 1993 to interview the descendants of Monticello’s African-American families. The seventy-odd pages of the website include biographical information on dozens of enslaved men and women (and their descendants) as well as plentiful photographs and the results of research in historical records and interviews with over 170 people."--Lucia Stanton, Shannon Senior Historian, Monticello

The Monticello Classroom
"The Monticello Classroom is a teacher-student website for elementary and secondary classroom use, a compilation of resources about Thomas Jefferson and life at Monticello."-- Lucia Stanton, Shannon Senior Historian, Monticello