Guides: Transatlantic Slave Trade @ Pitt : Primary Sources

Primary Sources

What is a primary source?

A primary source is a document or physical object which was written or created during the time under study. These sources were present during an experience or time period and offer an inside view of a particular event. Some types of primary sources include:

ORIGINAL DOCUMENTS (excerpts or translations acceptable): Diaries, speeches, manuscripts, letters, interviews, news film footage, autobiographies, official records
CREATIVE WORKS: Poetry, drama, novels, music, art
RELICS OR ARTIFACTS: Pottery, furniture, clothing, buildings

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Primary Sources

Latin American & Caribbean Digital Primary Sources
This site provides links to open access digitized collections of primary sources that relate to Latin America and the Caribbean. The materials listed are freely available to the public and were created or are hosted at an academic institution associated with SALALM (Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials), either through institutional membership or through the personal membership of a staff member. The sources linked below range from collections of Mexican incunabula (1559-1600), to Latin American posters. The site is organized by format “Historical Texts by Country“, “Historical Texts General“, “Statistics“, “Visual Material by Country“, “Visual Material General“, and “Miscellaneous.”
FIRST BLACKS IN THE AMERICAS The African Presence in The Dominican Republic
First Blacks in the Americas is a fully bilingual (English and Spanish) digital educational platform devoted to disseminating sound historical information about the early presence of people of black African ancestry in the first colonial society of the Americas of modern times, the society of the colony named La Española (‘The Spanish One’) by the Spanish colonizers when they arrived in 1492 and throughout the sixteenth-century. This is the same society that, over a process of roughly three hundred and fifty years of settlement and creolization, would evolve into the Dominican ethnicity and Dominican nation, and which we know today as the Dominican people and the Dominican Republic, respectively.

Primary Sources on the Web

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Documents & Files

The Slave Trade by James Walvin
Call Number: HT985 .W355 Hillman Library - General Collection
History Files: This new paperback series presents the people, events, and ideas that shaped our past and made our present. Drawing upon the latest research, the books are abundantly illustrated with telling images from out-of-the-way sources, and offer the tangible fragments of vanished times in the form of loose-leaf facsimile documents that are included in the books.
Documents illustrative of the history of the slave trade to America by Elizabeth Donnan
Call Number: E441 D68
The traffic to the thirteen colonies, to the West Indies, and to Spanish America was so closely interwoven that to a certain extent it seemed necessary to treat it as a whole ... Both printed and manuscript sources have been utilized.
Letters on the slave trade by Henry Palmer
Call Number: Available Online
Adventures of an African slaver by Conneau, Theóphile.
Call Number: HT1322 .M468
Being a true account of the life of Captain Theodore Canot, trader in gold, ivory & slaves on the coast of Guinea: his own story as told in the year 1854 to Brantz Mayer & now edited by Malcolm Cowley. Illustrated by Miguel Covarrubias.
Slavery: letters and speeches by Horace Mann
Call Number: E449 .M283 1851b
Reprint. Originally published: Boston: B.B. Mussey & Co., 1851.
Union and anti-slavery speeches: delivered during the rebellion
Call Number: Available Online

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Transatlantic Slave Trade @ Pitt

Primary Sources

Primary Sources

Primary Sources on the Web

Documents & Files