Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database

This site provides access to four databases (Voyages, Estimates, Images, and African Names) with "information on almost 35,000 slaving voyages that forcibly embarked over 10 million Africans for transport to the Americas between 1514 and 1866. Records of the voyages have been found in archives and libraries throughout the Atlantic world. They provide information about vessels, enslaved peoples, slave traders and owners, and trading routes.

Access Locations: Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, All Branch Libraries, Outside the Library

Subjects: History; Genealogy; History of North America; United States History; African American Studies; Latin American Studies; Statistics

Notes: The site provides full interactive capability to analyze the data and report results in the form of statistical tables, graphs, maps, or on a timeline.

The Voyages database (where you can search for information on specific voyages or sets of voyages)
The Estimates database (which takes an “educated guess of how large the slave trade actually was,” since not all voyages were documented and some documentation has been lost)
The Images database (a collection of scanned documents, maps, and illustrations)
The African Names database (which “offers a compilation of lists of liberated Africans from slave vessels captured by British cruisers between 1819 and 1845”)

The site also contains essays on the trans-Atlantic slave trade, maps created from information culled from the database, educational materials in the form of 6th-12th grade lesson plans, and links to related sites.
 

Dates of Coverage: 1514-1866

Provider: The National Endowment for the Humanities and an Emory University Digital Library Research Initiative