This extensive companion to the PBS documentary of the same name provides interpretive and primary material on the history of African-Americans during slavery and Reconstruction, including essays, personal narratives, original documents, historical readings, and lesson plans. The "Time and Place" chronology of slavery and Reconstruction places the main events of U.S. history relating to African Americans between 1619 and 1881 in their historical context. "Slave Memories" allows visitors to hear the voices of African Americans recorded by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) on their experiences in slavery and Reconstruction. "Resources" includes 17 print resources, 23 books for children, and 30 websites related to slavery. "Slave Experience" allows users to explore slave life through the themes of legal rights and government; family; men, women, and gender; living conditions; education, arts, and culture; religion; responses to enslavement; and freedom and emancipation. Each features essays, historical overviews, original documents, and personal narratives.

A K-12 learning section features historical readings of narratives, slave stories and letters, student plays, links to 19 sites with primary sources, and six lesson plans for middle and high school. This website is a valuable resource for teachers as well as an excellent introduction and overview for those with an interest in the history of slavery and slave life in America.

A collection of 104 sound recordings from annual folk festivals held at Fort Valley State College (now Fort Valley State University), an African-American teaching college in central Georgia. Also provides 63 items of written documentation about the festival and the recording project, including recording logs, program notes, a student newsletter about the festival, and correspondence between the festival's co-founders, educators John Wesley Work III, Lewis Wade Jones, and Willis Laurence James, and noted folklorists Benjamin A. Bodkin and Alan Lomax, who represented the Library of Congress's Archive of American Folk Song. Includes biographies of approximately 500 words each on Work, Jones, and James; a 6,000-word "Special Presentation" entitled "Noncommercial Recordings" by Bruce Bastin, excerpted from his book Red River Blues; and a 30-title bibliography. The collection is searchable by performer, title, and keyword, but lyrics are not available, which makes this collection difficult to use, since the performers speak and sing in thick dialects, made even more opaque by Web delivery. The collection is an extraordinary record of non-commercial American music and musical styles, of particular use to music specialists, but also of interest to those studying broader cultural trends. For example, 16 recordings reflect wartime opinions and concerns.

This site consists of nearly 300 images of Afro-Virginians dating from the 1880s to the early 20th century. Images are scanned from prints taken by father and son, George S. Cook and Huestes P. Cook, principally in the Richmond and Central Virginia area. Users can search the digital collection by keyword or browse images, including agriculture, education, recreation, religion, tobacco, and urban life. Documentation of labor is the most extensive, while the images of children ad education are fascinating. This site is valuable to those studying African-American life at the turn of the century or Virginia history.

Unadorned and easy to navigate, this comprehensive website contains 46 first-person accounts of slavery and African life dating from 1682 to 1937. Each document is introduced with an illustrative sentence or short paragraph that describes the historical context.

There are both recognizable and unknown actors in this website. Former slaves such as Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman, as well as white abolitionists such as John Brown express forceful, if familiar, condemnations of slavery.

In addition, there are unheralded historical voices that not only speak poignantly, but also reflect different (African-centered) perspectives. For example, a ship doctor's searing report of the Middle Passage; a slave husband's anguished letter to his wife after she was sold; and black social reformers' protests against the cruel punishments of slave owners.

When taken together, the assembled testimonies, including those by women, present slavery as a deeply entrenched institution that provoked a wide range of compelling commentary.