This image from a French source portrays the wrenching experience for Africans of capture, sale, and separation from their land and kinsmen. Designed to promote anti-slavery sentiment, it highlights the...
Civil rights leader Martin Luther King is shown here giving his “I have a dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, surrounded by other leaders of the civil...
In this document, Thomas Jefferson recalls how the Continental Congress decided to declare independence and discusses why certain passages were deleted from his draft of the document. Some delegates demanded...
In this powerful July 5, 1852 speech given in Rochester, NY, African-American abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass compares the freedoms being celebrated by white citizens on July 4 to...
This portrait of Phillis Wheatley was included in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, published in London in 1773. Considered America’s first black poet, Wheatley wrote poems as a...
This print shows the 1791 slave insurrection in the French colony of Saint-Domingue which sparked the Haitian Revolution. By 1804, Haiti was an independent republic–a black republic–in which slavery was...
In this diary entry, John Quincy Adams questioned the wisdom of the Missouri Compromise, which allowed Missouri to enter the Union as a slave state. Adams had supported the compromise...
This influential broadside introduced white Americans to the horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The print shows how the traders loaded human cargo on the slave ships. The text describes...
This influential broadside introduced white Americans to the horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The print shows how the traders loaded human cargo on the slave ships. The text describes...
In this report, Jefferson and his fellow commissioners planned the new University of Virginia. Jefferson founded a public university, but in his time “public” meant that the state would help...