From the site:
The Digital Library on American Slavery (DLAS) is an expanding resource compiling independent collections focused upon race and slavery in the American South, made searchable through a single, simple interface. DLAS houses tens of thousands of records relating to all 15 slave states and Washington, D.C. as well as a number of northern states. DLAS contains detailed personal information about over 100 thousand individuals, including enslaved people, enslavers, free people of color, and more.
The goal of the Digital Library on American Slavery is to bring together and make freely accessible public records related to enslavement, with an emphasis upon the names and stories of the enslaved. DLAS strives to be a documentation project, not an interpretive effort. The team works with researchers to make data sets available for personal research.
Each project housed within DLAS includes a data dictionary and user guide tailored to that data set or type of record. A detailed history of each project is also available.
Here are the sublinks available on the site:
- Court petitions (The Race and Slavery Petitions Project)
The Race and Slavery Petitions Project is based upon the research data of Dr. Loren Schweninger and offers data extracted from eighteenth and nineteenth-century documents and processed over a period of eighteen years. The project contains detailed information on about 150,000 individuals extracted from 2,975 legislative petitions and 14,512 county court petitions, as well as from a wide range of related documents, including wills, inventories, deeds, bills of sale, depositions, court proceedings, and amended petitions among others. Buried in these documents are the names and other data on roughly 80,000 enslaved people, 8,000 free people of color, and 62,000 whites, both enslavers and not. - Runaway slave notices (The N.C. Runaway Slave Advertisements Project)
This project provides online access to all known runaway slave advertisements (more than 5000 items) published in North Carolina newspapers from 1751 to 1865. These brief ads provide a glimpse into the social, economic, and cultural world of the American slave system and the specific experience within North Carolina. The project includes digital images, full-text transcripts, and descriptive metadata, as well as contextual essays and an annotated bibliography. - Slave deeds (People Not Property)
People Not Property is a unique, centralized database of bills of sales from across over 20 North Carolina counties, Washington DC, and other states. The project indexes the names of enslaved people from across the state, and includes robust metadata, images, and searchable indexes. This is an ongoing effort, and the project will continue to expand to other counties across North Carolina as well as into other states and districts.
To access the main site, go to Digital Library on American Slavery
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