Labor and Trade in Colonial America

Virginia Center for Digital History, University of Virginia. Virtual Jamestown. Virtual Jamestown offers a treasure trove of documents related to the early settlement of Virginia. Browse court records, labor contracts, and firsthand accounts of settlement, as well as images that offer evidence of life for Native communities before and after contact with Europeans. You'll also find interviews with archaeologists and historians who are working to expand our understanding of Jamestown and surrounding regions.

Massachusetts Historical Society. Adams Family Papers: An Electronic Archive. The letters exchanged by John and Abigail Adams over the course of their courtship and marriage are a rich source of information for life in colonial America. There is a great deal of information about matters of state in this correspondence—John was deeply involved in plans for independence, and the execution of the Revolutionary War—but equally, they are a boundless source of information about women's lives, responsibilities, and patterns of work. Abigail relays familial information to John, giving us a glimpse of what it was to be a child in colonial New England, and there is much information about disease, financial struggle, and spiritual belief.

Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and University of Virginia. The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record. This website offers an incredible range of images relating to slavery in the Atlantic world. You can find images of life in pre-colonial Africa, illustrations related to the capture of slaves and life at slave ports, information about the middle passage, and countless images that depict the work slaves did once they reached the Americas. An invaluable resource.