Visit the “largest and best organized collection of material relating to the history, genealogy, and culture of the Eastern Shore of Virginia.” Highlights include Native American history resources, African American history, the Miles Files, and finding aids, There’s a lot more!
The Amistad Research Center is located at Tulane University in New Orleans. According to its website: “The history of slavery, race relations, African American community development, and the civil rights movement have received new and thought-provoking interpretations as the result of scholarly and community research using Amistad’s resources. The holdings include the papers of artists, educators, authors, business leaders, clergy, lawyers, factory workers, farmers, and musicians.”
Its holdings are organized in these collections: Manuscripts & Library Collections; Fine Art Collection; Digital Projects; and Audiovisual at Amistad. Click here for details about its collections. Click here for information about conducting research at Amistad.
An article in a University of Pennsylvania publication reported: “In 1896, Du Bois was appointed an assistant instructor at Penn and began his investigation of the Seventh Ward of Philadelphia — research that he would turn into his groundbreaking work, ‘The Philadelphia Negro.'”
It continued: “Du Bois’ completed tome, ‘The Philadelphia Negro,’ is intense, exhaustive, and meticulous, filled with methodically detailed facts, figures, charts, graphs, lists, diagrams, and maps, including a large, color-coded map—that was pull-out and printed in color in early editions—showing the social condition and distribution of African Americans throughout the Seventh Ward.
“He corroborated his work using colonial records, manuscripts, biographies and autobiographies, legal documents, census data, newspaper articles, correspondence, meeting minutes, publications, obituaries, private libraries, annuls, and in-person interviews and observations.”
This exhibit at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution, ends soon but the 32-page full-color exhibition guide is online. It’s free. Download it while you can.
“It is estimated that more than half of all enslaved people held in the Upper South were separated from a parent or child through sale, and a third of all slave marriages were destroyed by forced migration.” This quote from Slavery in America: The Montgomery Slave Trade (page 28) refers to Robert H. Gudmestad’s A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade published by Louisiana State University Press in 2003).
“Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery is recovering stories of families separated in the domestic slave trade. Formerly enslaved people placed these ads hoping to reconnect with family and loved ones for decades following emancipation. The ads serve as testaments to their enduring hope and determination to regain what was taken from them.”
Its mission is to “identify, digitize, transcribe, and publish ads placed in newspapers across the United States (and beyond) by formerly enslaved people searching for family members and loved ones after emancipation. These newspaper ads began appearing in the 1830s (our earliest ad appeared in The Liberator in 1832) and greatly increased in frequency in the years immediately following emancipation (1865) and continued well into the 20th century. (The collection includes an ad that appeared in The Richmond Planet in 1922.)” Note: The paragraph above is excerpted from “About the Project.”
While researching the lives of my great-great-grandfather Edward R. Pitt and his brother William Thomas Pitt of Norfolk County, Virginia, I found fascinating (and sometimes disturbing) details about the civilian and military experiences of those who served in the 1st U.S. Colored Cavalry.
The regiment included free men, freedom seekers and white officers from the United States and abroad. It was organized at Camp Hamilton, Virginia in 1863, attached to Fortress Monroe, Virginia in 1864, and mustered out at Brazos Santiago, Texas in 1866.