Digital Collections

Digital Collection

Documenting 19th-century African American Communities

Over the past several years, Princeton University Library has collected several ledger books and related materials that document free African-American communities in the early 19th century and post-emancipation African-American communities from the Reconstruction period and into the late 19th century. New items will be digitized and added to this collection as they are acquired.

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Many of the ledgers also document Native Americans, women, and poor whites. They provide a window into the economic life of these hard-to-document communities and complement PUL’s focus on collecting documentation of African American economic life and entrepreneurship more widely. Scholars of social history often use such ledgers to trace individuals as well as to understand the social and economic connections within and between communities.
This emerging field of “subaltern prosopography” is exemplified by works such as Seth Rockman’sScraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore and Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan’s Vagrants and Vagabands: Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic. Both use these types of materials to uncover the social and economic lives of the working poor and the history of wage labor in the early Republic.

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Copyright

Princeton University Library claims no copyright governing this digital resource. It is provided for free, on a non-commercial, open-access basis, for fair-use academic and research purposes only. Anyone who claims copyright over any part of these resources and feels that they should not be presented in this manner is invited to contact Princeton University Library, who will in turn consider such concerns and make reasonable efforts to respond to such concerns.

Preferred Citation

[Identification of item], [Sub-collection name (if applicable)], Documenting 19th-century African American Communities Collection, Princeton University Library.

Romanization

Please refer to the Library of Congress Romanization tables when searching the collection.