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Women's Anti-Slavery Activism Resources: May 2024
Session One: Written By Herself
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: Documenting the American South
Versions of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
- Edited by Yellin (great for teachers to read)
- Edited by Mitchell (great for the broad-based primary sources; great for students)
- Free Doc South version (see link above)
Primary Sources related to Harriet Jacob’s Life, Digitized
- Yale Gilder Lehrman Center, Selected Correspondence Related to Harriet Jacobs
- Digital Public Library, Harriet Jacobs Sources Set
Writing and Videos about Jacobs by Scholars
- Biography of Jacobs by Yellin
- N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources: Interview with Yellin
- History Cambridge: Tiya Miles and Cambridge (Mass) History of Anti-Slavery
- Frances Smith Foster on African American Women’s Writing
- Yellin interviewed on NPR
Session Two: Black Women and Girls in Slavery and Freedom
*See Session One information for some digitized primary sources on Jacob's life.
Monticello, Enslaved Labor
- Nailery and children
WPA interview with Mary Reynolds
- Before using WPA sources read this!
- Lots of great info on this page so explore, but also beware and read this note on language.
- Mary Reynolds interview
- Mary Reynolds photograph
Elizabeth Keckley sources
- The White House Historical Association article and WHHA video
- Smithsonian Magazine Q & A
- Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum
- Biography available on UNC DocSouth
- NEH lesson plan (grades 6-8) on Keckley, H. Jacobs and childhood & slavery
Reading as Resistance
- Shana Keller, Bread for Words; Picture book, historical fiction, uses primary sources to build story
Last Seen/ Information Wanted
- Informationwanted.org website for Lost & Found family advertisements
- Site has lesson plans for teachers
- Do a search for Michigan
- Battle Creek, Michigan, Sisters Julia Lyon and Emeline Skipworth Reunited after 40 years
- Shana Keller, Do You Know Them? Picture book, historical fiction
- Book TV with Professor Heather A. Williams, author of Help Me to Find My People
Ellen and William Craft
Session Three: Anti-Slavery Activism
*See Session One Info for some digitized primary sources on Jacob’s life.
Captain Jonathan Walker
- Massachusetts Historical Society
- “The Branded Hand” by John G Whittier poem (1845)
- A Brief View of American Chattelized Humanity by Jonathan Walker (1846)
- National Parks Service: Jonathan Walker
- Muskegon website
- The Man with the Branded Hand originally published in Muskegon Chronicle
Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Sewing Society
Refugee/Contraband Camps
- National Archives
- “Life Among the Contrabands” by Harriet Jacobs
- The White House Historical Association, D.C. Contraband Camps article
- City of Alexandria website for Contrabands and Freedman Cemetery and Memorial
- Includes video, link to google tour, and primary source documents (at bottom of page)