History of Africa and the African Diaspora

Early Modern Sub-Saharan Africa

This is a guide to sources available through Boston College on African history.

What's on This Page

This page has a lot on it. You can use the following anchors (links down the page) to jump straight to a relevant box.

Broad Digital Collections

ARTstor This link opens in a new window
Including thousands of paintings, illustrations, maps, photographs, carve material, and more. Includes more than 3,000 works of art from SubSaharan Africa between 1500 and 1800.
HathiTrust This link opens in a new window
A digital repository for the nation's research libraries, HathiTrust brings together the digitized book and serial collections of major universities and other partner institutions, a significant portion of which is in the public domain and available full text. Boston College's status as a partner makes it possible for members of the Boston College community to download any of the out-of-copyright items as PDFs.

Smithsonian Open Access
Includes thousands of digital facsimiles of ephemera from across Africa pre-1800. Particularly strong with bronze and other objects as well as textiles.

World Digital Library This link opens in a new window
The World Digital Library is a Library of Congress project sponsored by UNESCO. Items in this digital library, including books, manuscripts, photographs, maps and sound recordings, are individually described and searchable in seven languages. Most countries and regions around the world are represented.

Document Collections and Readers

Corpus of Early African Sources for West African History by N. Levtzion (Editor); J. F. P. Hopkins (Edited and Translated by)
Call Number: O'Neill Stacks DT476 .C67
Publication Date: 1981-01-29
The Ghana Reader by Kwasi Konadu (Editor); Clifford C. Campbell (Editor)
Call Number: Ebook Central
Publication Date: 2016
Covering 500 years of Ghana's history, The Ghana Reader provides a multitude of historical, political, and cultural perspectives on this iconic African nation.
Gold Coast and Asianti Reader by Emmanuel Joseph Peter Brown (ed)
Call Number: Burns Reading Room Use Only PE1127 .F3 B7 WILLIAMS
Publication Date: 1929
Major Problems in Atlantic History by Alison Games; Adam Rothman (eds)
Call Number: O'Neill Stacks D210 .M26 2008b
Publication Date: 2007
Covers the history and evolution of this area, with special attention to such topics as the origins of the Atlantic world, migrations throughout the Atlantic world, European interactions, Atlantic economies, slavery, and independence.

Slavery and the Middle Passage

Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora
This free website is currently down (Dec 2023). These images were selected from a wide range of sources, most of them dating from the period of slavery. The growing collection currently has over 1,200 images. Includes facsimiles of illustrations, paintings, maps, architecture/technology, as well as some 3D site images.
Slave Voyages
This digital memorial raises questions about the largest slave trades in history and offers access to the documentation available to answer them. European colonizers turned to Africa for enslaved laborers to build the cities and extract the resources of the Americas. They forced millions of mostly unnamed Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas, and from one part of the Americas to another. Analyze these slave trades and view interactive maps, timelines, and animations to see the dispersal in action. [Emory Libraries]

More Data & Mapping Resources

The databases listed here are just the beginning of our statistical and spatial data collections. See the Data/Statistics/GIS Portal for a more complete list.

Europe in Africa

Empire Online This link opens in a new window
Digitized manuscript and print documents on colonial history, politics, culture.
Global Commodities This link opens in a new window
Focused on 15 significant commodities: Chocolate, Coffee, Cotton, Fur, Oil, Opium, Porcelain, Silver & Gold, Spices, Sugar, Tea, Timber, Tobacco, Wheat, and Wine & Spirits. Each commodity is documented through manuscript materials, maps, posters, paintings, photographs, and rare books, allowing students to explore the origins of the commodity, their first uses, the trade that developed and the ways in which these items were marketed and consumed.

O'Neill Library

Bapst Library

Burns Library

Educational Resource Center

Law Library

Social Work Library

Theology & Ministry Library

O'Connor Library

Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies

History of Africa and the African Diaspora

Early Modern Sub-Saharan Africa

What's on This Page

Broad Digital Collections

Document Collections and Readers

Slavery and the Middle Passage

More Data & Mapping Resources

Europe in Africa