| | Unadorned and easy to navigate, this comprehensive website based at the University of Houston contains 46 first-person accounts of slavery and African life dating from 1682 to 1937. The majority of these statements were written in the 18th and 19th centuries. Although there is no general essay explaining why these primary sources were chosen, the website’s editor, American historian Steven Mintz, introduces each document with an illustrative sentence or short paragraph that describes the historical context; these prefaces provide additional information that make the narratives more accessible to a general audience. Mintz groups the documents under the following themes: “enslavement,” “Middle Passage,” “arrival,” “childhood,” “family,” “religion,” “punishment,” “resistance,” “flight,” and “emancipation.”
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