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Image of Robertsons Statement re Aboirigines to Alfred Stephen, 1833. It is Document 32A under Original Documents on Aborigines and Law, 1797-1840

Decisions of the Superior Courts of New South Wales, 1788-1899

Review
Legal records are a key resource in gaining access to the voices of the non-elite, providing a rich repository of the details of life in the period. The subject index is particularly useful in drawing themes together for teaching.

Declaration of Independence, 1776

Source

The author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), was deeply influenced by the European Enlightenment. He spent many years in Paris and was just as much at home among European intellectuals as he was on his plantation in Virginia. Although a slaveholder, Jefferson wrote eloquently about freedom for the colonists. Even though it was not an official part of the U.S.... Read More »

Declaration of the Independence of the Blacks of St. Domingo

Source

This important and revealing document evokes both the contemporary situation in the colonies and the political developments taking place in Paris. It comes from Marcus Rainsford’s supportive account of the Haitian Revolution.

Decree of the National Convention of 4 February 1794, Abolishing Slavery in all the Colonies

Source

News traveled slowly from the colonies back to France, and the first word of the emancipations in Saint Domingue aroused suspicion if not outright hostility in the National Convention. Many of the original members of the Society of the Friends of Blacks, such as Lafayette, Brissot, and Condorcet, had either fled the country or gone to their deaths at the guillotine for opposing the faction now... Read More »
Art from the Penn Museum collection called "Ram in the Thicket"

Digital Collections - Penn Museum

Review
The digital collections of the Penn Museum are extensive and easily accessible through their online portal. Its written, visual, and audio sources invite many groups to explore world history by browsing its pieces.

Digital Innovation South Africa

Review
Bringing together primary source material from archives, libraries, and universities from across South Africa, DISA provides researchers, teachers, students, and the public with valuable access to a period of history that reshaped not only South Africa but the world as well.
A 1909 map of India

Digital South Asia Library

Review
The information and source materials presented on this site are extremely wide ranging, rare, and occasionally quite specific. Given the amount of content, this specificity should be seen as an asset rather than a drawback.

Discontent Spreads from An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti

Source

Rainsford wrote one of the first favorable accounts of the Haitian Revolution. He blamed the colonists for refusing to alter the slave system. Our excerpts begin with reactions to the revolution in mainland France in 1789 and continue through the death in prison in France of Toussaint L’Ouverture in 1803.
Detail of The Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay, 1770 depicted in a 1930s travel poster

Documenting a Democracy: Australia's Story

Review
This site has particular strengths in presenting legal and constitutional materials on the emergence of a democratic nation in a colonial context.

Dona Marina in Florentine Codex

Source

This image was created by an indigenous painter in central Mexico and accompanies a written description of the conquest of Tenochtitlan, penned in both Spanish and Nahuatl in the Florentine Codex. The Florentine Codex is one of the fullest Nahuatl descriptions of the conquest. The scene shows Malintzin in the act of translating. She sits upon a palace roof with Cortés. Her... Read More »

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