Many of our trips to research institutions involved digitizing documents that were deemed useful to our topic. One particularly useful repository was the Massachusetts State House Library’s Special Collections. It was here that we found the legislature reports from 1822 to 1851 (see link to the right). These reports discussed issues ranging from slavery (and its history), miscegenation laws, petitions from abolitionists, and railroad accomodations for “colored” citizens.
The Massachusetts Historical Society was extremely helpful in providing the records of various voluntary associations, some of which are now available on this website (see link to the right). These records provided a close-up look at the proceedings of groups such as the Boston Vigilance Committee and various literary societies.
We also digitized selected articles from The Emancipator and Free American, another abolitionist newspaper from this time period. Secondary sources in the form of articles from The New England Quarterly are also linked from the selected bibliography (see link to right).
These documents, along with the digitized articles from The Liberator our sources of demographic data offer a unique view of the lives of African-Americans living in antebellum Boston, and proved to be useful to student research.
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